688 Kushner, Tony
adviser. Now their targets are not the middle-
aged suburbanites of Beckenham, but the much
more influential and financially rewarding urban
socialites. Haroon has learned by now to distin-
guish between the transformational spirituality he
attempted in Beckenham, where he tried truly to
transform his disciples’ approach to life, and the
“feel good” spiritualism he can practice in London
on jaded sophisticates who merely want someone to
listen to them, support them, and receive a reward
for doing so.
Divya Saksena
kuSHnEr, Tony Angels in America: A
Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992)
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National
Themes comprises two full-length dramas: Part One:
Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika.
Though separate works, Perestroika joined produc-
tions of Millennium Approaches already running in
London and New York in November 1993. It is a
historical drama and a work of magical realism that
follows individuals through personal struggles and
despair caused by an America teetering on the edge
of a new millennium.
As a historical drama, Angels in America illus-
trates the past and present of an American landscape
in the late 1980s for viewing by an audience through
a critical lens. The past is shown as a literal passing,
through the funeral of a Jewish woman from the
“old country.” The present is captured through a
hypocritical, fictionalized politician. And finally, it is
a small group of lonely people who navigate the dif-
ficulties of their lives, coming together to remember
the past in order to make the choices that can lead to
progress and life over stasis and death at the work’s
conclusion. Magical realism (a literary technique
that fuses the supernatural with the real), on the
other hand, is employed to show forces beyond the
material and real through characters speaking with
the dead and the interaction of Prior Walter and the
Angels.
The drama follows the characters of Prior Wal-
ter; Louis Ironson; Belize; Roy Cohn; and Joe,
Hannah, and Harper Pitt and illustrates complex
and difficult relationships that develop from the
individual struggles each faces. Through these char-
acters, Kushner explores themes such as hope, ill-
ness, and alienation.
Brian Stilesalienation in Angels in America
Tony Kushner illustrates the theme of alienation
throughout Angels in America to make a social and
political statement about the state of America in
the 1980s. In this manner, alienation is used on two
levels, through the alienation of the audience and
the alienation of the characters within and among
themselves.
The form of the play is envisioned as Epic The-
ater, or Theater of Alienation, in which the audience
engages with the play, aware that the work is making
a social and political statement and that theatergo-
ers should examine it critically. It accomplishes this
by staging the play in such a way as to make the
audience aware of the issues the work addresses.
It pointedly avoids presenting the story as escapist
entertainment.
Angels in America strives to demonstrate the
social, political, and economic isolation of marginal-
ized communities, particularly the gay community.
The characters of Prior, Louis, and Belize are denied
a substantive voice in society because of their sexual
orientation. The community they represent is fur-
ther ostracized because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Economic and political alienation is best illustrated
through the availability of azidothymidine (AZT)
and the fictionalized Roy Cohn. In the play, he is a
powerful voice for a socially conservative movement
who hides his homosexual desires and activities.
Ultimately contracting AIDS, he is in a position to
acquire the medication for treatment because of his
position of power and influence. As Cohn is in the
hospital dying, Belize, a nurse, takes some of Cohn’s
large supply of the rare AZT. This is the only real-
istic way to get the drug to those who need it but
are unable to get it, like Prior Walter, an openly gay
man with AIDS.
For many of the characters, such as Prior, Louis
Ironson, and Belize, being gay places them outside
of mainstream society. Other characters, Joe, Harper,
and Hannah Pitt, are Mormons who are not fully
prepared for “modern” American life as they travel