Tony Kushner Is Working on a Donald Trump Play, West Side Story Film Remake & More

As Angels in America plays London's National Theatre and eyes a Broadway bow, scribe Tony Kushner is keeping busy. In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Kushner revealed that he anticipates to tackle the subject of President Donald Trump in his next play. In addition, he is rewriting the screenplay for a forthcoming film remake of West Side Story for Steven Spielberg.

“It feels very soon,” he said of the Trump-centric play. “The nightmare is in high gear. It certainly feels like folly that I or anyone else has a definitive understanding or comprehensive understanding of what [is] going on. I have my guesses like everyone else has, but it will take some time and a lot will depend on how it is resolved.”

The play will be set approximately two years before the 2016 election, and Trump will take the shape of a character as opposed to an abstract theme. As of now, there is no timeline for the project.

"I find writing difficult. I’m trying to become a faster writer, but I don’t feel like I have to get something done while he’s still in office," Kushner told The 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.”

As for other projects that stand the test of time, Kushner does not plan to change the score of the quintessential musical West Side Story for the big screen.

“I am not touching in any way the greatest score of a musical ever written," he said. "I love the [1961] film [directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, starring Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno]. Who doesn’t? I am not changing the story, the setting, the period. It is still the Upper West Side in the late 1950s, but I'm exploring the story."

On top of a Trump play and West Side Story silver screen remake, Kushner's penning films for names like Viola Davis, Mark Rylance and Hamlet headliner Oscar Isaac. He is also collaborating with his Caroline or Change collaborator Jeanine Tesori on a musical about scribe Eugene O’Neill's death.

“And I have three other big play ideas, so I have to get busy,” he told The Beast.

Kushner's HIV crisis-set two-parter Angels in America received the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, he was Tony-nominated for penning Caroline or Change's book and score.