Full Description
Academy Award-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) spent more than three years capturing the public work and private life of America’s most prodigiously talented, intellectually ferocious, politically engaged, proudly homosexual and gleefully Jewish playwright, Tony Kushner. Following Kushner through a particularly fertile period in his life, beginning with the dark days in New York just after 9/11 to the eve of the 2004 election, Wrestling with Angels makes a strong case for why he should be considered a Living National Treasure, let alone the World’s Busiest Working Writer. We go behind the scenes of early rehearsals and performances of his musical Caroline, or Change and the children’s Holocaust opera Brundibar and visit with Mike Nichols on the set of HBO’s Angels in America. We even tag along on a touching hometown visit to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Kushner gives us an affectionate tour of his boyhood Hebrew school. But where an ordinary biopic would be satisfied with a backstage pass (and it is indeed a delight to eavesdrop on his hilarious commencement speeches and haimish commitment ceremony), Mock never loses sight of what makes Kushner truly worth spending time with: his extraordinary moral voice and his insistence on forging a path of hopeful activism through a theatrical language that is peerless. Meryl Streep’s delivery of his impassioned prayer for a cure for AIDS is a shattering moment, one that manages to renew faith in the power--no, the necessity--of art.
