SOURCE: "Notes about Political Theater," in The Kenyon Review, new series Vol. XIX, Nos. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 19-34.

In the essay below, Kushner argues the need for a committed political theater in America.

In his essay on Theodore Dreiser, E. L. Doctorow quotes Dreiser's critical description of himself as a young man: "Chronically nebulous, doubting, uncertain, I stared and stared at everything, only wondering, not solving." This is, Doctorow comments, "a perfect description of the state of readiness in a novelist."

And, I might add, in playwrights, perhaps even more so. The art of playwriting is not fundamentally a narrative art like novel writing; it is dialogic, it proceeds from contradiction, not cause and effect; not "this happens and then this and then this," but more "This happened. Oh yeah? Who says so?"

It is a cruel thing to ask playwrights to present themselves directly to audiences or...