Tony Kushner Q&A: Angels approaching | Upstaged | Time Out New York

Tony Kushner Q&A: Angels approaching | Upstaged | Time Out New York:

To you, what’s the most appealing thing about the theater, as opposed to movies or television?

I think the fact that it’s not a commodity form and that it’s living and alive, that it isn’t an object. It isn’t a finished thing. It’s a process. I certainly expect to do some rewriting on Perestroika when Angels opens, but even if the play is more or less done, the theatrical event, the live event is not. It asks people to engage collectively in a relationship with an event, with an action, with a field of meaning and not with a thing, not with an object—and to engage in an event that will respond and be transformed by the degree of your engagement with it. So it has a fluidity in that sense, and a completely human quality, that I think no recorded event can have—which isn’t to say that theater is superior, but it’s a different kind of experience, and the difficulties and awkwardnesses and inconveniences and imperfections of theater are all part of the power of theatricality.