Tony Kushner

"A wave of despondency fell on artists" after the events of Sept. 11, said Felix Pire, a writer, actor and director. "A lot of them just wanted to vent their pent-up emotions. It created a reason to create art instantly." Art can't be as instant as TV coverage, of course. But now, after more than three months, plays in direct response to Sept. 11 are beginning to emerge. An evening of readings at Beyond Baroque in Venice on Thursday, directed by Pire, was devoted to that subject.

Am I sorry I missed the Playwrights Forum at the Taper ("Three Playwrights, No Actors, One Memorable Night," Calendar, April 11); I was working on theater business that afternoon and evening and was unable to attend. Sounded like a pretty memorable event. Relying on Don Shirley's account of the highlights of the evening, I have a few observations to make.

When last we saw our friends from "Angels in America"--and they do feel like intimate friends by now--a big fluffy angel had crashed through the bedroom ceiling of the man dying of AIDS. "Greetings, prophet!" she declared to the horrified, wasted figure on the bed. "The great work begins!"

Given that Steven Spielberg's historical drama "Lincoln" combines one of Hollywood's biggest directors and one of America's greatest heroes, it's not hard to imagine the result being an epic, reverential portrait of the 16th president. Instead, however, Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner and star Daniel Day-Lewis have treated Lincoln as more man than myth and focused on the political wrangling he orchestrated to end the Civil War and pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. The decision seems to have been a shrewd one, as critics are nearly unanimous in praising the film.

Twenty years after Tony Kushner's epic "Angels in America" was staged in full for the first time, we asked several people who had been in the audience at the Mark Taper Forum or who had been involved behind the scenes to recall their experience. GRAPHIC: Memories of 'Angels in America' "At the curtain call I remember having to hold onto the seat in front of me because my legs were so weak from the experience of having been taken to a place that I didn't know existed, the larger sense of what the theater could achieve.

Minutes before the curtain rose on "Angels in America" on Broadway Tuesday night, playwright Tony Kushner was trying to explain the meaning of the Yiddish word kinnehora . He had just used it to describe how he felt as swarms of excited well-wishers greeted him as he stood in front of the mobbed Walter Kerr Theater, a blue Tiffany box in his hand.

When Chanice Duson sings Friday night in L.A. Opera Camp's production of "Brundibar," a Czech opera first performed by children in a Nazi concentration camp, she will be invoking the plight of "people like us." But none of Chanice's relatives was among the nearly 15,000 Jewish children interned at Terezin in Czechoslovakia who later died at Auschwitz. None perished in the Holocaust at all. The 10-year-old fifth-grader from Burbank Elementary School is African American.

I had a happyish childhood. I grew up in a small Southern town, Lake Charles, La., in an old house filled with books and music, situated on a lot surrounded by semitropical forest. The woods were beautiful, mysterious and exciting.

So here I am, deep in Oregon's Willamette forest, darkness falling, the rain getting heavier, my unsuitable shoes leaking copiously and the map provided by Cascadia Forest Defenders turning to papier-mache in my hands. I am searching for a group of tree-sitters reputedly guarded by a razor-wire barricade hung with totemistic emblems and, as I stumble farther and farther into the sodden gloom, I am reduced to shouting pathetically, "Is there anybody there?" Answer comes there none, and as I squelch back toward the road, I'm faced with the bigger question: What the hell am I doing here?