Tony Kushner, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky in 2006 and in 2014.

Tony Kushner is one of America’s greatest playwrights, and Angels in America is certainly one of the greatest American plays of the 20th Century. Tony Kushner is also the author of several other plays, including a Bright Room for Day, Slavs, Homebody/Kabul, and the musical Caroline or Change.Among his work as screenwriter was an adaptation of August Wilson’s play, Fences, plus original screenplays for both Munich and Lincoln, both of which earned him Oscar nominations, the HBO adaptation of Angels in America, and coming up, the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story due at the end of 2020,, and after that, another Spielberg film, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

This podcast contains an interview recorded on March 17, 2006, while he was in San Francisco promoting the Library of America edition of the Collected Plays of Arthur Miller, for which he'd written an introduction. The recording was made in his hotel room. The second interview, dated June 11, 2014, for the Open Book program, came about because Berkeley Rep was presenting his newest play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (known as IHo), and was recorded live on the air, by phone.  (Photos: Wikipedia Commons)