It is difficult keeping up with Tony Kushner. A quick-witted and fast-paced speaker, Kushner is widely acknowledged as one of the most prestigious contemporary American playwrights, known best for his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film Munich.The University's decision to present Kushner with an honorary degree this year generated widespread media attention and criticism from Zionist student groups and outside organizations, who say Kushner called Israel's founding "a mistake." They say former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the University's namesake and a major American Zionist figure, would not have approved.

Kushner spoke at the Spingold Theater Sunday afternoon, entertaining graduates and their guests at the creative arts graduation ceremony and frequently throwing them into fits of hysterics.

"If you've been reading the papers, you know I was not invited here because of my political opinions, but my art," he said, to applause. "I always make art about my opinions, which is not to say that my art merely conveys my opinions. . It conveys my opinions, and also my qualms about my opinions, and also my opinions about my qualms."

He warned that those who "are here today hoping or praying I'm going to address specifically the issues that have engendered the controversy that has trailed me over the past several months and long last has taught me to be cranky as a wet cat on your doorstep," would be disappointed not to hear him share his political views.

Instead, Kushner talked about jobs.

"Employment possibilities for creative arts majors are always a good subject to generate calamity," he said. "You're all young, so you don't really need nice, clean apartments or food."

A self-described "lazy, shy loudmouth with manners," Kushner said he loves graduation ceremonies, because they celebrate summer, freedom and intelligence. "Graduations are about the conclusion of work, and I, who hate doing work . never feel more like celebrating than when work is done."

Art, Kushner said, makes people uncomfortable, because of the truth it reveals. "The truths we tell as artists can cause controversy," he said. "I stand here a controversial artist, and is that a good thing or a bad thing? Something you want to be, or something you try to avoid in coming?"

People are afraid of art, "even of works by Palestinian children," he said, referring to the exhibit of drawings by Palestinian children the University removed from the Goldfarb Library last month.

Kushner encouraged graduates to "make trouble," be courageous in their work and embrace controversy as an inextricable component of art.

He said artists must scandalize and shock the audience with controversy. In his own work, Kushner is known for continually challenging America's notions of religion, sex, politics and disease.

Genuine shock strips individuals bare and makes them tingle, Kushner said.

"The artist should aspire to be what Emerson aspired to be: a remaker of what man had made, a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good," he said.

He warned the graduates not to allow fierce ambition or desire for fame-the "I'm-gonna-live-forever" type of fame-to consume them.

"You don't need to live forever, which is a good thing, because you aren't going to," he said

Ambition must humble itself enough in order for the artist to contribute, he said. If not, "then who are you?" he asked. "Hollow, an apparition, George W. Bush."

Kushner ended with a quote from one of his favorite poets, Stanley Kunitz, a poet in residence at Brandeis in 1958, who passed away last week at the age of 100 (see obituary, page 2), to illustrate his point: "Immortality is not anything I lose sleep over."

Kushner said his art depends on "an astonishing faith in my audience's attention span." Audience members agreed that his talk required tremendous focus on their part.

"He speaks 100 miles a minute. I'm exhausted," one parent joked following the address.