Tony Kushner's imagination has been shaped by a number of diverse and sometimes apparently conflicting forces. A Southern Jewish homosexual with Marxist leanings, he is drawn equally to a dialectical theatre, in which the politics of the right are engaged in the context of an unfolding history, and to a theatre of fantasy, in which the imagination becomes a primary resource. Radical politics impact on gay liberation, European aesthetics meet an American artistic tradition, realism collides with fantasy, history is brought into shattering proximity with the contemporary. His is an eclectic theatre, a grand kaleidoscope in which patterns form and re-form and different styles braid together to create startling images.

His is a political theatre, rational in its logical connections; it is also a theatre in which prescriptive politics are seen as destructive and the irrational the source of true insight. Deeply Brechtian, it confronts audiences with ineluctable facts, an analysis of historical process; at the same time it stages the lives of those who inhabit the interstices of history and discover in the personal the root of true meaning. It deploys an affecting lyricism, shaping experience into contingent form, and stages the splintering of such lyricism by forces which well up not only from the corrupting nature of power and bigotry but from a self whose depths at times seem beyond investigation or even imagination. Asked to list influences Kushner is liable to offer writers who scarcely seem natural bedfellows – Rilke, O'Neill, Brecht, Williams, Guare, Foreman, Fornes, Fierstein, Bond, Churchill, Hare, Ludlam. Somewhere in the background, meanwhile, are Marx, Trotsky and Benjamin but he also expresses his commitment to American liberalism.