To consider the list of characters in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is to envision a television skit of scattershot satirical energies: a gay couple whose lives combine the family inheritances of Jewish guilt and WASP prerogative; a young Mormon husband and wife, he closeted and career minded, a clerk to a federal appeals court judge, she agoraphobic and navigating her apartment-bound metropolitan life with Valium and hallucinatory visions; an Orthodox rabbi; a Reagan administration Department of Justice public relations flak; a doctor; a drag queen; the “World’s Oldest Bolshevik”; mannequins from the Diorama Room in the Mormon Visitors Center; Ethel Rosenberg; and, finally, a chorus of angels. The AIDs epidemic in Reagan-era America provides the context for Kushner’s surreal and emotionally evocative portrayal of the currents of desire, repression, grief, and empathy that course through both the body politic and the heart romantic. By combining magical realism with melodrama, satire, and naturalism, Kushner moves his audience across dimensions of experience—sexual, historical, biological, political, interpersonal, religious—that are usually more contiguous in life than in art. The result, both in performance and on the page, is an experience as disconcerting as it is rewarding, a play both unflinching and magnanimous.
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