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chapter four Angels in America americans, tony kushner once said, are “allergic to politics in the theater.”1 Many intrepid souls have cultivated political theater in the United States, but historically the genre has been more often thought of as an irritating weed than a crop that might nourish the public as part of a regular diet. Overtly political American dramatists have usually paid for their passion with obscurity. Which is no doubt one reason why the politics in most of our canonized “Great American Plays” (GAPs)—Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Our Town, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Buried Child, and American Buffalo, for example —lie deeply tucked away beneath psychological narratives about family and personal relationships. Interestingly enough, in the mid-1990s, during the brief Clintonian ›irtation with public self-examination, a group of overtly political American playwrights—including Kushner, Robert Schenkkan, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks—rose to national eminence, and even won commercial exposure on Broadway, without making apologies for raising unpleasant questions about power, identity, community , and enfranchisement. No play in that curious commercial-political blip, however, received anything like the public attention of Kushner’s Angels in America—which was exalted by our most prominent critics and prestigious prize committees as the newest legitimate GAP despite being a seven-hour, Brecht-inspired epic that used gay New Yorkers as emblematic Americans and queerness as a trope for the examined life. Angels in America was a real revelation for me. By 1993, when the work arrived in New York, I had more or less given up on Brechtian epic theater, the form that all my revered teachers and critical heroes had said was supposed to solve the problem of fusing explicit politics with the popular bour71 geois dramatic tradition. During more than a decade of indefatigable theatergoing then, including two years living in Germany, I had never seen a Brecht play truly outshine the preachy demands of its conventional parable, and had certainly never seen staged political discourse by Brecht’s followers or anyone else that generated the kind of mass excitement and energy Kushner ’s play did. This drama seemed to me something new in the American theater landscape—a bold announcement by an exciting, fresh voice that not quite everything had yet been tried to counteract the historical amnesia and complacency of our mainstream repertory. Kushner’s modest claim is that much of the rapturous reception of Angels in America at its New York premiere was due to lucky timing, and he is unquestionably right.2 The two halves of the work opened on Broadway, directed by George C. Wolfe, six months apart in 1993 (Part One: Millennium Approaches in May and Part Two: Perestroika in November), and their topicality and politics were perfectly aligned with the surging emotions of that cultural-political moment. The action was set in 1985 and 1986 (except for an epilogue in 1990), telling the stories of ‹ve gay men, two straight women, and some two dozen subsidiary characters struggling with AIDS, couple problems, the policies and politics of the Reagan administration, and an elaborate scheme by angels to lure an absconded God back to heaven. How cheeky, whip-smart, and devastatingly perceptive this play was about all the public and private moral slippages that had allowed the Reagan revolution to occur. Both the play and its eight superb actors crackled with wit and impudence, employing the self-conscious hilarity of gay camp to name and thereby unmask the mechanisms of self-serving power and authority that crossed their paths.“God almighty . . . Very Steven Spielberg,” said Kushner’s un›appable, AIDS-ravaged hero about an angel who crashed through his ceiling—an unforgettable would-be deus ex machina from the ‹nale of Part One.3 And that cheekiness was only part of the effect. The work also trembled with earnest hunger for some ecstatic millenarian experience not de‹led by the cynicism and know-nothing intolerance of the American religious Right. Seven years before the activist preacher Reverend Billy began attracting crowds of hip young nonbelievers with his hilarious anticonsumerist sermons around New York, Angels tapped a leftist longing for spiritual cleansing and communal reinvention—rising above its materialist worldview in the course of insisting on it. Angels in America thundered into New York like a jolting aftershock from the 1992 presidential election, winning the Pulitzer Prize and four 72 great lengths [3.145.12.242...

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