The feathers and the smoke

I read the comics. I got liberated from reading the New York Times and addicted to reading Newsday because it has comics, and the New York Times doesn’t. I get very cranky if I don’t have my comics every day…Theater is as much a part of trash culture as it is high art. It always is that. And it’s incredibly important for people who are working in theater to always remember that it’s show biz and it’s sort of sleazy, and a lot of the traditions that you’ve inherited and a lot of the ways that you have at your disposal for telling a story are ways that were developed by, incredibly, sort of lowbrow, popular entertainment. The theater always has to function as popular entertainment. Or at least the theater that I do, because I don’t have the talent for doing anything else…It has to have the jokes and it has to have the feathers and the mirrors and the smoke.

—Tony Kushner, in an interview reprinted in Tony Kushner in Conversation