Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History

Abstract

AIDS plays have come to be thought of as a phenomenon of the 1980S, as Happenings were of the 1960s. Though the epidemic still rages, the bravely furious genre that began with William Hoffman's As Is and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart has for the most part receded into the paragraphs of theater history textbooks. Nicholas de Jongh identifies the central mission of these plays as the fight against "an orthodoxy that regards AIDS as a mere local difficulty, principally affecting a reviled minority." It is not entirely surprising, then, that the category has been said to have drawn to a close. The disease, after all, has been acknowledged, albeit belatedly, to be a widespread calamity; only the morally deaf, dumb, and blind have resisted this assessment, and they most certainly remain beyond the pale of agitprop, no matter how artfully conceived. To make things official, an obituary of the genre appeared in American Theatre in October of 1989.

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