Tony Kushner still my hero

"When you circle around endlessly patrolling a border, your footsteps dig you into a deeper and deeper ditch."

This was my favorite one-liner from last night. Calm down. He wasn't talking about Israel exactly, he was talking about all sorts of borders, the borders we draw around various parts of ourselves and our communities. It was a beautiful image.

I finally got to shake Tony Kushner's hand last night. He spoke at the JCC - I bought the tickets about 6 months ago. The talk was EXCELLENT. I was nervous on several counts - would Peter Stein be a good moderator (he's a film guy, not a theater guy), would Kushner talk about theater or just about Israeli politics, and finally, would the obnoxious Bay Area Jewish community *let* him say anything politically sensitive without a shouting match across Kanbar Hall?

I was relieved on all counts. Thankfully the JCC has adopted question cards instead of an open mic (I think this was my idea at a Taube center meeting a year ago) and this really solved a lot of problems. Granted, I was still literally on the edge of my seat the whole time Kushner talked about Israel/Palestine - waiting for some bozo in the room to start yelling - but not only did it go alright, but Kushner also said some beautiful things that gave me new ways to look at the conflict around the conflict.

He compared the rage that discussing the conflict evokes in some hard-liners to that which is evoked when discussing the Confederacy with some Southerners. Rage coming from an attack on an indefensible fantasy, which in the case of the Confederacy is all that remains - a dead fantasy. I can relate to this as a Southerner who spent a lot of time in my teenage years arguing with people who still refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression. (Note that Kushner was incredibly careful not to call Israel an indefensible fantasy, but rather the situation with the Palestinians.)

Then there was a lot of talk about various theater he's worked on, of course about Munich, and a nice chunk of time devoted to Caroline, or Change, my favorite play of his. His new project is a Lincoln film with Steven Spielberg based on the Doris Kearns Goodwin history, Team of Rivals.