Contemporary American Drama

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the Politics of Identity

1960s:
Shifts of Focus in American Theater
 From DRAMA to
PERFORMANCE
 From Broadway (500+ seats)
to off-Broadway (100-499)
and off-off-Broadway (less
than 100) productions and
alternative spaces for
performance
 From New York to regional
theaters and touring
productions (National
Endowment for the Arts,
1965)

 Photo: La MaMa ETC, NYC, personal archive.

Experimental Groups of the 1960s:
Features
 “Theater as community
and public space”
(Saddik 109)

 Breaking the fourth wall

 Collaborative work

 Intermedial theater

 Social and political

engagement
 New acting styles
The Open Theater, Viet Rock (1966)
Ethnic Theater Groups
 El Teatro Campesino (1965-): “the Chicano
experience in America in a context meaningful to all
Americans” (company manifesto)
 Free Southern Theater (1963-1980): “plays written
for a black audience, which relate to the problems
within the black himself, and within the black
community” (company manifesto)
 East West Players, L.A. (1965): Asian American
plays;
Gender/Sexual Politics in U.S. Theater:
New Beginnings

 1968: repeal of laws

forbidding the depiction
of sexuality on stage;
 1969: Stonewall riots in
NYC;
 increased representation
of non-normative
sexualities;

Photograph: History.com
"Raped: A Woman’s Look at Brecht’s Exception and the Rule," created by the Minneapolis-based feminist collective
At the Foot of the Mountain, in 1976.
(Photo by Judith A. Niemi, courtesy of the University of Minnesota Libraries)
Tony Kushner on Theater
 “[w]hen playwrights, actors, and directors are as
appalled as everyone else by the world and the
misbehaviour of our leaders, and dumbstruck,
exasperated, flabbergasted. Speechlessness is
unavoidable. But we recover, and rage is a good
engine for theater.”
 “I think that people go to art in general as a way of
addressing very deep, very intimate, very mercurial
and elusive, ineffable things in a communal setting. It
ends a certain kind of inner loneliness. Or it joins one’s
loneliness with the inner loneliness of many other
people. And I think it can be healing.” (qtd. in Fisher
111-112)
A Political Playwright

 influenced by Henrik Ibsen

and especially Bertolt Brecht;
 Brecht’s epic theater & the
lyrical realism of T. Williams;
 explores social and political
crises from various angles and
ideological positions;
 wide scope of ouevre:
American history, sexuality,
race, religion and the
conflicting camps of
conservative and liberal
politics;
Bertolt Brecht:
Dramatic (Realism) vs. Epic Theater
DRAMATIC THEATER EPIC THEATER

Involves the audience in an action Makes the audience an observer

Helps it to feel Compels it to make decisions
Communicates experiences Communicates insights
The audience is projected into an event The audience is confronted with an
event
Suggestion is used Arguments are used
Man unchangeable Man who can change and make
changes
Characters’ drives Characters’ motives
Events move in a straight line In irregular curves
The world as it is The world as it is becoming
Brecht’s Alienation Effects
(Verfremdungseffekte)

 episodic scenes – connected but not seamless –

interrupted by cards, video projections
 settings and costumes should be minimal
 actors play multiple parts
 actors address the audience – “breaking the fourth
wall”
Angels in America: Production History
 commissioned by the San
Francisco Eureka Theater
& The National
Endowment for the Arts;
first performed in 1991;
opened on Broadway in
1993;
 recipient of the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama and two
Tony Awards for Best Play;
 controversy => critique of
how the AIDS crisis was
handled during the
Reagan administration;
Angels in America as Epic Theater

 The moments of magic – the

appearance and disappearance
of Mr. Lies, the Book
hallucination, and the ending –
are to be fully realized, as bits
of wonderful theatrical illusion –
which means it’s OK if the wires
show, and maybe it’s good that
they do, but the magic should at
the same time be thoroughly
amazing.” (Kushner 13)

 Photograph, original Broadway production, 1993,

playbill.com
 historiographic meta-play: e.g., Ethel Rosenberg,
Roy Cohn;
 intertextuality: T. Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire; Allen Ginsberg;
 linguistic playfulness: “you know you’ve hit rock
bottom when even drag is a drag”;
 diversity of identity configurations: political
(Democrat and Republican; liberal and
conservative), religious (Jewish and Mormon), sexual
(normative and non-normative).
Key Dilemmas
 American identity in this “melting pot where nothing
melted” (10); the dream of inclusion?

 individuality vs. collectivism

 freedom vs. responsibility as moral imperatives:

Prior – Louis; Joe – Harper;
Walter Benjamin on
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920)
 A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus”
shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is
fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread. This is how one pictures the angel
of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his winds
with such violence that the angel can no
longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his
back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm
is what we call progress. (qtd. in Saddik
159-160)
Works Cited
 Brecht, Bertolt. “Theater for Learning.” Trans. Edith Anderson. Brecht
Sourcebook. Eds. Carol Martin and Henry Bial. NY: Routledge, 2000.
21-28. Print.
 Fisher, James. “Tony Kushner.” The Methuen Drama Guide to American
Playwrights. Ed. Martin Middeke et. al. London, NY: Bloomsbury,
2014. 111 – 130. Print.
 Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
Kindle file.
 Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print.
 Schildcrout, Jordan. “Drama and the New Sexualities.” The Oxford
Handbook of American Drama. Eds. Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather
S. Nathans. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2014. 455 – 469. Print.