Tony Kushner wins Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award

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Money can’t buy you a Pulitzer, but it can certainly loan you the time to try to win one. Or a second if you’re Tony Kushner, who has just been given $200,000 worth of time, courtesy of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.

The author of ‘Angels in America’ and ‘Caroline, or Change’ is the first recipient of this prize, which will be awarded every other year to a major-league dramatist -- sort of like the Pritzker for architecture, only twice as lucrative. (Those architects don’t need it as much.) In the alternating years, two $50,000 awards will be bestowed to emerging playwrights, which is quite a nice chunk of change for struggling scribes, many of whom would consider minimum wage a step up.

The whole idea is to support talented writers who are, in the face of intense cultural and fiscal temptations from HBO and ‘Law & Order,’ choosing to concentrate on theater.

Clearly, Steinberg isn’t jealously demanding an exclusive theatrical commitment. Kushner, who’s been scribbling screenplays for Steven Spielberg while dabbling with adaptations and opera, is overdue for a new drama. Nor is financial neediness a prerequisite (‘Angels’ might be more than a decade old, but those royalties are still rolling in with his moonlighting movie lucre.) Yet only a playwright struggling to pay the rent while Amtraking around the regional theater wastelands would argue that Kushner isn’t worthy of Steinberg’s unprecedented generosity.

So let’s see: How much time can $200K buy? Well, if you never, ever leave the country, tell your kid he’s on his own for college and cut off your elderly parents whose pension fund has dwindled to nothing, you should have at least enough time of sacrosanct musing to finally finish that second act.

-- Charles McNulty