The Royal Road2015

Tony Kushner:
Everything new is better than everything old. 'The bad new things instead of the good old things,' wrote that great dialectical playwright, poet and theorist Bertolt Brecht. I love the rigor of that challenge. To be able to risk the Satanic temptation and a retreat backwards towards what's easy, familiar and safe - the remembered past which is always misremembered. To always be on guard against nostalgia. To be able to see the future in the bad new things.

Jenni Olson:
Aside from introducing the burden of Tony Kushner's disapproval into my life, this speech has prompted me to reflect at length and somewhat obsessively, on my aversion to the bad new things and my affection for the old. To this day, I suffer from a compulsion to defend my overly intense attachment to the past.