conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'Angels in America'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Angels in America
  I received generous support during the writing of this play in the form of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gerbode Foundation, and the Fund for New American Plays/American Express. Further financial and abundant emotional support came from my parents, Bill and Sylvia Kushner, Martha Deutscher, and Dot and Jerry Edelstien. Joyce Ketay the Wonder-Agent, and her associate Carl Mulert have been awesomely protective and farsighted; and from Jim Nicola of New York Theatre Workshop I have gotten wonderfully smart advice.
  Richard Eyre and the staff of the National Theatre made a timorous and occasionally querulous visitor to British theater feel at home. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod made the play dance.
  Bill Anderson, Andy Holland, Ian Kramer, Peter Minthorn, Sam Sommer and John Ryan (of blessed memory) are everywhere in this play.
  Abundant emotional support was provided by my aunt, Martha Deutscher. Dot and Jerry Edelstien, and Marcia, Tony and Alex Cunha made homes away from home for me. My assistant, Michael Petshaft, helped keep me sane.
  Jim Nicola of New York Theatre Workshop has encouraged and advised me all the way, and so has Rosemarie Tichler of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Together they shed blood for the play, literally; they have won my purple heart.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Kimberly T. Flynn taught me much of what I now believe to be true about life: theory and practice. Her words and ideas are woven through the work, and our friendship formed its bedrock. This is her play as much as it's mine.
  The plays benefit from a pared-down style of presentation, with scenery kept to an evocative and informative minimum. There are a lot of scenes and a lot of locations; an informative minimum means providing what's needed to enable the audience to know, as quickly as possible, where a scene is set. Actors need to help by playing the reality of these locations: How loud can you get, really, in a fancy restaurant?
  I recommend rapid scene shifts (no blackouts!), employing the cast as well as stagehands in shifting the scene. This must be an actor-driven event.
  The temptation to take only one intermission in each of the two parts should, in my opinion, be resisted. Although one intermission shortens the running time, the demands it puts on the audience's attention and the pressures it puts on the scenes immediately before the single intermission or near the end of the play are unnecessary, detrimental and counterproductive—the running time may be shorter, but it will feel much longer.
  When a character chooses to stop talking, to be still and quiet, for reasons having to do with the conflict he or she is in during a scene, an active choice is being made, and hence the character stays alive onstage—as opposed to being put in suspended animation by the director. Finding concurrent, complementary vitality in the two events of a split scene gives them their particular dynamism; they'll be much more fun to play, and to watch.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From the beginning Kimberly was my teacher. Though largely self-taught, she was more widely read and she helped me understand both Freud and Marx. She introduced me to the writers of the Frankfurt School and their early attempts at synthesizing psychoanalysis and Marxism; and to the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, whose importance for me rests primarily in his introduction into these "scientific" disciplines a Kabbalist-inflected mysticism and a dark, apocalyptic spirituality.
  As both writer and talker Kimberly employs a rich variety of rhetorical strategies and effects, even while expressing deep emotion. She identifies this as an Irish trait; it's evident in O'Neill, Yeats, Beckett. This relationship to language, blended with Jewish and gay versions of the same strategies, is evident in my plays, in the ways my characters speak.
  More pessimistic than I, Kimberly is much less afraid to look at the ugliness of the world. She tries to protect herself far less than I do, and consequently she sees more. She feels safest, she says, knowing the worst, while most people I know, myself included, would rather be spared and feel safer encircled by a measure of obliviousness. She's capable of pulling things apart, teasing out fundamental concerns from their camouflage; at the same time she uses her analysis, her learning, her emotions, her lived experience, to make imaginative leaps, to see the deeper connections between ideas and historical developments. Through her example I learned to trust that such leaps can be made; I learned to admire them, in literature, in theory, in the utterances people make in newspapers. And certainly it was in part her example that made the labor of synthesizing disparate, seemingly unconnected things become for me the process of writing a play.
  Guilt plays a part in this confessional account; and I want the people who helped me make this play to be identified, because their labor was consequential. I have been blessed with remarkable comrades and collaborators: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery and help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace and places whence hope may be plausibly expected. Marx was right: The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs. And also plays.
  Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.