Angels in America, Part One by Tony Kushner

Author(s):  
Joseph R. D’Ambrosi
2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-722
Author(s):  
Virginia Anderson

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-179
Author(s):  
Isabella Santos Mundim

Resumo: Este artigo visa analisar Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes, do dramaturgo norte-americano Tony Kushner. Kushner, neste que é seu trabalho de maior impacto, retoma eventos e figuras da história recente de seu país, com foco na crise que a epidemia de AIDS desencadeia, o descaso do governo Reagan em relação às minorias que a epidemia vitima e a consequente devastação que acomete a comunidade gay da época. Nessa perspectiva, o trabalho de Kushner supera o mero registro e aponta para acontecimentos e pessoas ausentes do relato dominante. Para além da versão oficial, emerge aí uma contranarrativa da nação, comprometida com a construção de uma memória dos Estados Unidos a partir do viés da margem e da exclusão.Palavras-chave: Tony Kushner; dramaturgia norte-americana contemporânea; contranarrativa da nação.Abstract: This article analyses Angels in America, a gay fantasia on national themes, by the American dramatist Tony Kushner. In what many believe to be his major work, Kushner weaves the lives of fictional and historical characters into a web of social, political, and sexual revelations, focusing on the discovery of AIDS, the disregard with which politicians marginalized its early spread and the impact of the disease on the gay community. As it is, Kushner’s work rethinks the recent past and portrays alternatives absent from the dominant reports. Moving beyond the official version of events, Angels in America is thus a counter-narrative, one where the master narrative implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out of the ashes of that explosion.Keywords: Tony Kushner; contemporary American theater; national narrative and counter-narrative.


1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Jyl Felman

Jewish library collection policies as they relate to Jewish gay and lesbian issues are discussed. Questions considered are whether a book about gay Jews or a book written by a Jewish gay author should be included in Judaica collections. The issue is placed within a historical Jewish literary tradition which includes authors such as Grade, Ozick, Miller, Roth and Rukeyser-who write about such transgressive themes as sexuality, assimilation, self-loathing, agnostic rabbis, etc. Through personal examples drawn from her collection of Jewish short stories, Hot Chicken Wings, the author makes a case for including books with Jewish lesbian content. Also considered are the consequences of excluding such works and the ultimate arbitrariness of banning works with gay content from the Jewish library shelf. The author also comments on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, written by a gay Jewish man, Tony Kushner. Even though Angels is being touted as an AIDS play, it is replete with Jewish characters, questions about assimilation, and Jewish self-loathing as exhibited by the lead character Roy Cohn. The play derives from a long tradition of Jewish avant-garde writing dealing with the nature of Jewish identity. For this reason, the author uses Angels to make a case against censoring gay themes in Judaica collections. Jewish literature throughout the ages has had a transgressive bent, and gay themes must be read in this context and viewed by Jews as legitimate literary material worthy of reading by Jewish communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Sanaa’ Lazim Hassan Al Ghareeb

Contemporary Theater is greatly influenced by the changes happening politically and socially all over the world. Man no longer looks for being part of a society or defining himself according to certain standards of tradition; he/she no longer search for their identity or feel suffocated by the new technology, his main concern in contemporary age is to redefine the identity away from politics and the judgmental eye of the society he is living in. Man is calling for resurrections of the god he admitted killing during the past millennium. A new perception of that god has been defined and this seems to be interesting in a world ruled by fighting sectors of extremists who are classified into two categories those who are against the rule of that god and those who are with. This paper examines the perception of that god in two different societies by two authors through studying their plays to explain how this theme is pictured by the two. The first is the American controversial playwright Tony Kushner who’s Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Perestroika raised epic questions in this matter, the other playwright is the Iraqi dramatist Ali Abdul Nabi Azzaidi who’s play Ya Rab/Oh!God introduced a new trend in the Iraqi theater. The paper adopts a socio-political school of criticism to achieve its goals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-503
Author(s):  
Laura Michiels

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-149
Author(s):  
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson

A philosophical reflection on Signature Theater Company's 2010 New York revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America considers the nature of hope in Kushner's play along side the political valences animated by this force in Signature's production.


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