“Angels in America” playwright Tony Kushner has revealed he is working on a new play about President Donald Trump.
Speaking with The Daily Beast, Kushner says the play would focus on two characters, one being Trump, set two years before the 2016 election. He compared the play to “Angels in America,” the Pulitzer-winning play about the AIDS crisis in the Reagan era, and says the two time periods feel similar.
“I don’t feel like I have to get something done while [Trump’s] still in office,” Kushner told The Daily Beast. “I gambled with ‘Angels,’ which is set in the Reagan era but which I felt would be historically significant 30, 40, 50 years later, because something really fundamental had shifted under Reagan. The same thing is true with Trump.”
Kushner continued that he typically doesn’t like to write characters like Trump because they’re “borderline psychotic.” He also believes Trump is “seriously mentally ill.”
“He’s the kind of person, as a writer, I tend to avoid as I think he is borderline psychotic,” Kushner says. “I definitely think that incoherence lends itself well to drama, but he really is very boring. It’s terrifying because he has all the power, but without the mental faculties, he ought to have. I think he is seriously mentally ill, and the fact that he is in the White House is very frightening.”
The Trump-inspired play is still in the early writing stages and no release date has been set. In the mean time, Kushner revealed he is working with Steven Speilberg on a remake of the classic musical, “West Side Story.” He says he is working on the screenplay and the musical’s setting, 1950s Upper West Side Manhattan, and original score by Leonard Bernstein, would stay the same.
