“Seek for Something New”: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change

Abstract

Despite striking differences in subject matter and dramatic form, each of these works probes the connections between mothers and children; each arguably is a kind of meditation on the meaning of the death of Kushner’s own mother, Sylvia Deutscher Kushner. Angels, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change, however, do not sentimentalize the mother–child relationship nor do they identify mother figures with some unalterable biological ground of being. Instead, “mothers” in these dramas perform actions that disrupt the status quo and the fixity of identity: they shift location, stir up change, and even multiply into doubles and triples, whose personalities and ideas sometimes mirror, sometimes contradict, each other. Thus mothers and their relationships to the next generation of children serve as important loci for dramatizing the operation of the dialectic.

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