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Kushner was once invited to an event to talk with a Christian fundamentalist teacher who was adamantly against homosexuality. The organizers wanted him to discuss the idea of being gay with the teacher, with the goal for the two of them to come to an understanding.

“I didn't want to do it because I felt there was something false about it,” Kushner says. “It assumed we were both on equal footing. I wasn't particularly interested in imparting any particular knowledge about what it is like to be gay. I wasn't interested in describing what it was like to give a blowjob. I wasn't interested in telling some Baptist minister how to be gay. I don't even know what that even means.” For him, the real conversation is whether he can get married or serve in the military. He continues, “We are supposed to pretend we are on the same playing field, but we are not.”

These sorts of tensions show up repeatedly in Kushner's work. In Angels, the four people sitting together at the end are Mormon, gay, Jew, woman, man, white and black. In Caroline, the lead is a black woman who is devoutly Christian, who works as a maid for a middle-class, white, Jewish family.

In many of Kushner's plays, faith seems to be a source of hope — a theme that might be surprising given his adverse reaction to the Christian right involvement in politics. When asked to explain this apparent contradiction, Kushner says, “I am a playwright, and the works that you are citing are works for the theater. There is a great deal of ambiguity and ambivalence about faith and spirituality in those plays. The angel in Angels in America is a peculiar angel with a peculiar construct. … While I am fascinated by questions of faith when they appear in essays, plays, poetry, novels and films, and public discourse of that kind, then it's appropriate.”

It is not that there is no place for religion and theology in a democracy, Kushner argues, but its place is in theater, culture and intellectual life.

The documentary, Wrestling With Angels, predicts that gays will have the right to marry within 10 years. “It could be 10; it could be 20,” Kushner says. “We are a peculiar group of people in that we are not set aside because of gender or skin color or religious faith. It's sexuality. It's a much more amorphous and slippery thing. … I think it will happen … maybe not 10 years, but it will happen.”

Even given his strong political views, Kushner stresses that the first and foremost priority for himself is his work. “I didn't write Angels in America to have a political effect,” he says. “I don't think you should do that as a writer. You should write to make an entertaining evening of theatre.

“As I understand entertainment, entertainment is about thinking and being challenged as much as it [is about] being tickled or scintillated. The most entertaining thing is for the truth to be revealed. When you sit down to write a play, your best bet politically is to write a play not in the hopes of doing that, but to do your best job to make the dialectic that you are engaging with to stand up on its own two legs in front of an audience, and that from that all sorts of effects may follow. It's not your job to know what those are.”

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