Slavs! [Paperback]

Tony Kushner (Author), Tony Kushner (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Tony Kushner bears the curse of all artists unlucky enough to have captured the zeitgeist. They are expected to continue on their visionary path, explicating the world's mysteries in each new play. Or they are tempted to use the stage as a bully pulpit, indicting the cause of our malaise and dolling out prescriptions to sooth the pain. It is a mark of Kushner's sophistication that in his newest play he refuses to rest on his well-earned moral authority. A lesser writer would have followed ANGELS IN AMERICA with something smug and sweeping. As though Kushner feared such a fate, he instead has returned to where he started a place of healthy confusion. A taut play results: Kushner's humor buoys his political anguish, his lyricism draws dry ideas into rhapsodies and elegies, his interest in character won't let even the most vaudevillian individual conform to type. --Marc Robinson, The Village Voice

The heaven that Tony Kushner envisions in the epilogue of SLAVS!, his bracing, rational eighty-minute fantasia is a dark, gloomy place designed to look like a city after an earthquake. ...he has created a rambunctiously funny, seriously moving stage piece that is part buffoonish burlesque and part tragic satire. From beginning to end, it's also shot through with the kind of irony virtually unknown in today's theater, movies and television, where sarcasm passes as wit. There were hints of this exaggerated style in his epic MILLENIUM APPROACHES and PERESTROIKA, collectively known as ANGELS IN AMERICA.... Mr Kushner has emphasized that SLAVS is not to be taken as the work of a historian. Rather, it's a work of a brilliant and restless imagination. Mr Kushner's words dazzle, sting and prompt belly laughs. --Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Product Details

• Paperback: 68 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Play Pub (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 088145124X
• ISBN-13: 978-0881451245
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,499,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!; as well as adaptations of Corneille's The Illusion, Ansky's The Dybbuk, Brecht's The Good Person of Szecguan and Goethe's Stella. Current projects include: Henry Box Brown or The Mirror of Slavery; and two musical plays: St. Cecilia or The Power of Music and Caroline or Change. His collaboration with Maurice Sendak on an American version of the children's opera, Brundibar, appeared in book form Fall 2003. Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he lives in New York.