"It Doesn't Count If It's Easy": Facing Pain, Mediating Identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America

This essay examines Tony Kushner's complex, Brechtian engagement in Angels in America with questions concerning the function of suffering in the contemporary theatre and late-twentieth-century American culture at large. Though the play unabashedly stages various forms of human suffering, it is also significantly invested in dramatizing the characters' propensity to philosophize about suffering. In Angels' apocalyptic world, the characters' personal reactions to suffering come to stand in for the political struggle between individualism and solidarity in the larger, national effort to mediate the barriers between different, abject identities. Kushner's play, then, exposes the different ideologies of suffering, and ultimately asks us to re-evaluate theatrical and political practices of identification.