Kushner Speaks "Fiction That's True"

“Angels in America” author Tony Kushner opened the Tanner Lectures on Human Values last night with a rapid-fire monologue by a character named Tony Kushner—a neurotic writer completely unprepared to give a speech “at—you should pardon the expression—Harvard.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s apologies drew laughter at every line from a Lowell Lecture Hall audience of more than 250, including University President Drew G. Faust.

It was a slyly appropriate opening to a speech entitled “Fiction that’s True: Historical Fiction and Anxiety.”

Kushner performing Kushner confessed guilt at being an artist—“fooling around in a world of trouble.”

But in a wide-ranging discussion on the relationship between art and history, Kushner made his passionate political commitments clear.

Art, for Kushner, should always be engaged with “a world of trouble”—and, jokes aside, he’s rarely fooling around.

Wearing a shimmering burgundy tie, Kushner quipped that he wanted to title his lecture “History Ate My Homework.”

“Plays are really more about arguing than storytelling, more about combat than plot, more about dialectics than narrative,” he said.

Kushner’s work has engaged with gay life and AIDS in the 1980s (“Angels in America”), the political situation in Afghanistan (“Homebody/Kabul”), race and class during the Civil Rights movement (the autobiographical musical “Caroline, or Change”), and, most recently, the broad swathe of Middle Eastern politics (the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich”).

Charles Dickens, who used fiction to chronicle the suffering and injustice produced by Britain’s Industrial Revolution, is one of his central inspirations, Kushner said.

“He’s saying this is the way the world is, that there is such a thing as injustice, and these qualities are offered up without any veiling or disguise,” he said.

Kushner criticized the playwright Tom Stoppard for the implicit message of his popular play sequence, “The Coast of Utopia,” and his recent play “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

In Stoppard’s plays, he said, there is “a politics of anti-politics—a great rejection of the political and the possibility of transformation.”

“It’s not about the excitement of ideas or the unreality of words,” Kushner said. “He is a wonderful writer. You don’t hear what it is he’s trying to say.”

The former medieval studies major praised the HBO police drama “The Wire,” which he called “the greatest television ever,” for melding Finnegans Wake-like sophistication with social engagement.

“When is television ever that difficult?” he asked.

English professor and director Robert Scanlan called Kushner’s lecture a brilliant play “crafted from beginning to end.”

Kushner’s central theme, Scanlan said, was “that reality is sitting there and we as artists have to respond to it.”

The Tanner Lectures, meant to advance “scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values” are “one of the greatest intellectual traditions at Harvard,” Faust said in her introduction to Kushner’s speech.

Kushner’s second lecture, focusing on film, anxiety and his new screenplay about Abraham Lincoln, is today at 4:30 in Lowell Lecture Hall.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.