Oskar Eustis (co-director in Los Angeles, 1992; artistic director, Public Theater): While we were working on the play, the AIDS Quilt had its first public display at the Moscone Center. We came across a panel:
Photo: Tony Kushner
Eustis: Tony looked at it and said, “If I can write something half as dialectical as that, it’ll be a great character.”
Cleve Jones (founder, NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt): I remember when that panel was made. One of the volunteers told me, there’s someone behaving oddly here, come check it out.
I went up to him and he was super-secretive and flipped the panel over and I said, “You know, if it’s going to be in the quilt, I’m going to have to see it, so why don’t you show it to me?” and he did. My hair just stood on end. It was the first of the … eventually there would be many very harsh panels, you know, but this was kind of in a league of its own. The first thing I asked him was “Did you actually know Roy Cohn?” and he said, “I knew him very well,” and so I said, “Fine.”