Altman, Kushner, and Schultz Honored with Sundance Risk-Takers Award

Playwright Tony Kushner, filmmaker Robert Altman, and Starbucks Coffee Company CEO Howard Schultz were honored at the fourth annual Sundance Institute Celebrates Risktakers gala benefit on April 21, 2005 in New York City. In an impassioned speech, Kushner shared his thoughts about risk, and how he sees it in relation to his own work. A full transcript of his speech follows:

I’m flattered, honored and grateful to be given this award by Sundance, an organization that does lion-hearted service promoting honest, honorable film-making and theater. I wrote the first two acts of Part Two of Angels in America up at Sundance in the summer of 1990. One day with perfect timing a group of Mormon supporters of Sundance dropped by to see what we were up to, just as we were working on a scene – eventually cut from the play – in which a gay man uses his Mormon lover’s temple garment to mop up vomit. That was an early example of risk taking in the arts, though I think the only thing at risk was Latter Day Saints’ funding for Sundance, and there can’t ever have been too much of that.

It’s hard work, getting an award, because what else is an award for other than to force the person receiving it to look at themselves in the mirror while trying to come up with a way of saying “thank you” and confronting, along with the face in the mirror, the suspicion that you have in fact betrayed or in some secret way incarnated the precise opposite of whatever it is, whatever supposed merit or virtue in yourself or your work, upon which a group of kind people have chosen to bestow a trophy, and you hope you can get off the dais before the audience gets wise?

Because I knew I would have to make this speech I’ve been thinking a lot about risk, and what it means, and who really risks things. George W. Bush going to open the Lincoln Library and inviting comparison between his use of the English language and Lincoln’s – that’s risky, but he shouldn’t get a trophy.

I’ve never really considered myself a risk taker as an artist. For one thing, risk-taking implies courage, and I’m nervous about excessively valorizing the making of art by overemphasizing the amount of courage actually needed to do it. What ten consecutive seconds of life does anyone face that doesn’t require courage? With everything from the ecosystem to geopolitical sanity to secular pluralist constitutional democracy, the balance of powers and the rule of law crashing in sharp pointy splinters down around our ears, not to mention the economy and well basically the entire moral spiritual philosophical and political legacy of the Enlightenment, if not in fact of the Renaissance and post-dark-ages humanism, all engulfed by and fighting against drowning in a huge roaring tsunami of militarist, nationalist, fundamentalist madness, meanness and pinheadedness, it’s hard to talk seriously about taking risks as an artist when no risk any artist faces making art remotely compares to the risk any artist, any person faces just getting out of bed, taking a shower and walking out his or her front door in the morning. Making the decision to read the newspaper these days is scarier than any decision one faces as an artist, and riskier too. Reading the newspaper these days risks a kind of toxic disequilibrium, jeopardizing one’s ability to believe that there’s much of a point to trying to make sense of things in a world in which things more and more firmly decline to make any appetizing sense, any sense compelling to people who aren’t terminally nihilistic, misanthropic or just plain nuts; reading the newspaper in these terrible terrible times so affronts a belief in the probity or even the possibility of truth-telling that any activity predicated on truth-telling – and that’s what art and pretty much anything else useful that people choose to do with their lives seems to me predicated upon – any truth-seeking fact-based indebted-to-causality-history-and-narrative-based activity is at real risk of fatal discouragement. The courage you need to make art is dwarfed by the courage you need to continue to have faith in human progress. And these two types of courage, I think, have a lot in common.

I’ve never felt I was especially courageous; I know that I lack the moral fiber to be complimented on my courage without profound damage being done to my wobbly attachment to reality. If I have done risky things with my art, it’s only because like most artists, I want to entertain. I want people to love me. Outside my immediate family, who more or less have to love me, my grasp of reality isn’t so wobbly that I believe that I can manage to get more than a few people to love me purely on the basis of personal charm or hours spent in the gym and the orthodontist or the number of dinner tabs I pick up. I believe if I want a lot of people to love me – and I do, I have no idea why, it can’t save me from dying and I’ve also learned that the more people you convince to love you, or at least like you, the more theater critics you get, just to balance things out, and yet I still want to be loved, or at least liked, it’s sort of sinister and pathetic but among dishonorable pathetic impulses it’s certainly not worst – and so I have to make art that entertains. And I believe truth to be more entertaining, finally, than lies. I believe that the truth is very hard to tell. It occasions risk, truth does, in that it’s elusive and hence truth forces you to reach for things that lie beyond your comfortable grasp.

I think maybe the riskiest thing I’ve ever done as an artist is to encourage or at least not discourage the general impression that my work is, and is intended by its author to be, of the political left, from the political left, not a flat polemical articulation of any specific political project, but aspiring to be of use to people working on various progressive political projects: overturning at long long last and decisively the Reagan Counterrevolution; the enfranchisement of sexual minoritarians; sounding loud unambiguous alarms about ecocide and the death of the planet; building solidarity between groups of the disenfranchised and the oppressed; rebuilding the basis for progressive legislative, judicial and executive power and restarting the dialectic between that power and the awesome power of the people; thinking about economic justice as well as social justice; all the work of resistance, liberation, community. I have no idea how much use my plays have been to any of the people doing this work, and I think it’s better for playwrights not to think too much about how much they’ve succeeded or failed. I have never wanted my plays to be entirely and exclusively useful, because I want to write good plays and perhaps it matters more that plays are troubling, disruptive, unorthodox, contradictory, bewildering, unmanageable, badly behaved, than useful. But I have always wanted to be and wanted to be known to be working in the tradition of engaged art, as an engaged artist. I guess what I’m saying is that the specific political content of my work has not been such a risk, nor even that my work has political content, but that I’ve asked to be considered as an artist of the American political left, and yet not to be dismissed as an artist, that’s risky. Even if there is no merit in my specific request, there is merit in believing and insisting that politics is as dense and thorny and rich and full of imponderables as any other category of human behavior, and hence worthy as an epistemological arena in which to make art. Generally speaking, the request has merit, and there’s chutzpah in making it, and I take pride in that chutzpah, and so thank you for giving me a Sundance Chutzpadikl in the Arts Award.

And I have to say that I am very, very honored to be in the company of Bob Altman, an artist whose work I revere, and whose exploding and redefinition of what “epic” means changed narrative realism for not only me but I think for every artist in any medium striving for a contemporary way to imagine with a larger field of vision.

Thanks!