Tony Kushner, who won the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay
Fantasia on National Themes, has described President Donald Trump
as “seriously mentally ill.”
Kushner told The
Daily Beast that he is in the early stages of writing a new
play in which one of the main characters is Trump. He compared the
play, which is set two years before the 2016 election, to Angels
in America, a complicated play about AIDS and homosexuality in
the Reagan era.
“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.”
“He’s the kind of person, as a
writer, I tend to avoid as I think he is borderline psychotic,”
Kushner added. “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.”
Former
President Barack Obama awarded Kushner a National Medal of Arts.