Arts & Entertainment

The Man Behind The Pen

PBS screens documentary portrait of an unflinching artist and political activist.

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Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

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11 it took was a minute for
Tony Kushner to make a last-
ing impression on Freida Lee

Mock.
The award-winning documentary film-
maker was in the audience celebrating
her daughter's graduation from Wesleyan
when the acclaimed playwright stepped
to the microphone to address the Class
of 1999.
Kushner was allotted exactly 60 sec-
onds, and his rapid-fire speech was both
funny and inspiring. "I was drawn to his
ideas, his ideas as beautifully expressed
in words:' Mock recalls from her Los
Angeles office. And his facility to take
those ideas and engage his audience."
Mock always has a long list of projects
in various stages of production, and the
idea of a movie about Kushner didn't
occur to her immediately. A few years
went by, in fact, before she wrote him a
letter proposing a film.
"Things stick in the back of your
mind," Mock explains. "There was some-
thing in that speech that stayed with me.
He's very charismatic and very engaging."
Mock is alluding to one of the little
secrets that audiences don't know:
Casting is as important to documentary
filmmakers as it is to Hollywood produc-
ers.
Kushner effortlessly commands the
screen with wit and charm in Mock's
Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony
Kushner. The 2006 film is scheduled to
air nationwide Wednesday, Dec. 12, on
the PBS documentary series P.O. V

Tony Kushner: Engaging in the moral and political issues of our time.

Commanding Career

Kushner, 51, burst into the zeitgeist in
the early 1990s with his operatic Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National
Themes, a two-evening exploration of
rage, hope and irony in the era of AIDS
and Reagan Republicanism, securing the
author a Pulitzer Prize at the age of 36.
Kushner's eerily prescient Homebody/
Kabul — completed months before
9-11 — spotlights tension between
Afghanistan and the West; his transla-
tion and adaptation of Brecht's Mother
Courage and Her Children highlights the

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock with

documentary subject Tony Kushner

"terrible price" paid by those who live
off of war, and his musical, Caroline,
or Change, was inspired by his own
upbringing in small-town Louisiana on

the eve of the civil rights movement.
Kushner's debut feature film screen-
play, Steven Spielberg's Munich, portrayed
conflicted Mossad agents on a mission
to assassinate the terrorists of the 1972
Munich Olympics, prompting critics to
call him anti-Israel and a self-hating Jew.
"I absolutely support Israel's right to
exist and to promote its security, but I
also support a two-state solution and
peace talks — which should be con-
ducted even with Hamas and continued
even when there are suicide bomb-
ers," Kushner said in a recent interview
with the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.
"Israel is a tiny sliver of land; we've gone
through the Holocaust, and before that
2,000 years of brutality and hatred, and I
believe that anti-Semitism is very alive in
the modern world.
"This long history makes us legiti-
mately afraid; we're only about 6 million
people on the whole planet, and it would
not be all that hard to get rid of us if
someone really wanted to. But I don't
believe that nationalism is a solution, and
... I don't believe that the survival of Jews

as a people is any more guaranteed by
the existence of the State of Israel than by
pluralist democracy, which is ultimately
the only hope for minority groups."
Kushner is now writing the script for
a Spielberg-helmed Abraham Lincoln
biopic, slated for a 2009 release.

Inside Look

Mock's Wrestling with Angels is intimate
and admiring without fully succumbing
to hagiography.
It follows the playwright in the months
after 9-11 through the 2004 election
— from his Jewish wedding to longtime
partner Mark Harris through rehearsals
for Caroline, or Change to his work with
Maurice Sendak on Brundibar, which
recalls a play staged by the Nazis at the
infamous Theresienstadt concentration
camp, to volunteer duty outside a Florida
polling place.
The film contains no mention of the
furor over Kushner's screenplay for
Munich for good reason. "Munich was not

The Man on page C12

December 6 2007

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