Kushner, who has been hailed as one of America's most important artists, firstearned widespread acclaim in the early 1990s for his production of Angels inAmerica: a Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
Angels in America is a seven-hour, two-part work which Newsweekmagazine called "the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of ourtime." The Broadway production of Angels earned Kushner a PulitzerPrize and two Tony Awards.
Kushner has since gone on to earn himself a reputation as one of the mostoutspoken literary figures in the United States. He insists on theplaywright's role as political provocateur and says that "his plays areconcerned with the moral responsibilities of people in politically repressivetimes and are intended to be part of a greater political movement."
Kushner also is the author of Slavs! Thinking About the LongstandingProblems of Virtue and Happiness, an exploration of the collapse of theSoviet Union and adaptations of Goethe's Stella and Brecht's The GoodPerson of Setzuan.
Kushner's most recent work, Henry Box Brown, is a play based on thetrue story of a black man who had himself crated and mailed out of the AmericanSouth and slavery to England where he preached abolition and the evils ofworking with cotton picked by slave labor to workers in the textile mills.
Kushner's visit to Hamilton is sponsored by the department of Theatre andDance.
