September 7, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, will hold an on stage conversation with actor Jeff Bridges at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Tony Kushner
• In a Conversation with Jeff Bridges
• Tony Kushner is the playwright of Angels in America
• Kushner is considered one of the major dramatists of our day
• Friday, October 15
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $25 / UCSB students $15
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Profound playwright Tony Kushner, author of the acclaimed Angels in America, will take part in a fascinating on stage conversation on faith, life, death and art with actor Jeff Bridges on Friday, October 15 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall.

Tony Kushner intends his plays to be part of a greater political movement; his work is concerned with moral responsibility during politically repressive times. Kushner has a way of bringing the lofty into the sphere of the approachable by creating everyday characters who collide both comically and tragically on stage. A gay, Jewish socialist raised in Louisiana and educated at Columbia and New York University, Kushner frequently addresses audiences about weighty philosophical and political topics.

Kushner’s seven-hour, two-part, Broadway production of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a masterful epic that has received a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, two Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Drama. In 1998, London’s National Theatre selected Angels in America as one of the ten best plays of the 20th century. About Angels in America, Newsweek magazine wrote, “The entire work is the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time.” The 2003 HBO television version of this play was directed by Mike Nichols and featured actors Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson. It is nominated for 21 Emmy Awards with winners announced on September 19.

Kushner’s most recent plays are Caroline, or Change and Homebody/Kabul. Kushner co-created the musical Caroline, or Change with composer Jeanine Tesori. Set in Louisiana in 1963, the play explores ideas of family and examines the Civil Rights movement. The San Francisco Chronicle called the play “tender and transporting,” noting it “is both a lament for what we’ve lost—in ourselves, our families and a country twisted by race and class—and a plea to find grace and some way forward in our fallen state.” Homebody/Kabul is an oddly prescient work because Kushner began work on it several years before 9/11 brought Afghanistan into the headlines. The play follows the story of a lonely British housewife falling under the spell of an out-of-date travel guide for Afghanistan. Variety wrote, “Tony Kushner’s playwriting strengths are on display: a fearless flair for language; the courage to confront painful emotions head-on; and a willingness to bend traditional playwriting form.”

Tony Kushner’s other plays include Hydrotaphia, A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, and adaptations of Goethe’s Stella, Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, Ansky’s The Dybbuk, and Corneille’s The Illusion. In late 2003, Kushner published a picture book entitled Brundibar, based on the American version of the opera of the same name which he crafted with author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. He also wrote the text for a new survey book of Sendak’s illustrations and stage designs entitled The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present. Addressing current political topics in recent works, Tony Kushner edited Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and wrote Save Your Democratic Soul!: Rants, Screeds, and Other Public Utterances.

Jeff Bridges’ most recent film is The Door in the Floor. Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Jeff Bridges has long been one of the greats of American film acting. But because his greatness comes under the deep cover of his characters and with an absence of self-aggrandizement, and because he makes relatively few movies these days, the actor’s screen appearances can sometimes take on the weight of a major rediscovery. Such is the case with The Door in the Floor, in which Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that’s brought it to life.” A four-time Academy Award nominee (for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Starman and The Contender), Bridges has had a multi-faceted career that has cut a wide swath across genres. In addition to acting, he has formed a successful company, Asis Productions, exhibited his photography in galleries and published the popular book Pictures: Photographs by Jeff Bridges and has released the CD Be Here Soon.

In UCSB Arts & Lectures’ on-going effort to make events accessible to all who wish to enjoy them, this conversation will be signed. American Sign Language interpretation is made possible by the California Arts Council in collaboration with the National Arts and Disability Center and by the Santa Barbara Foundation’s Access Theatre Endowment Fund.

Courtesy of Borders, signed books by Tony Kushner will be available for purchase at the event.

Tony Kushner is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures with support from the Michael Douglas Foundation Visiting Artist Fund in Dramatic Art. Tickets for the event are $25 for the general public and $15 for UCSB students. They are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.