Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism

How "Angels in America" Reconstructs the Nation

Bibliographic Data

ID4947704
AuthorsDavid Savran (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume47
Issue2
Pages207
Publication date1995-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheatre Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3208484
OpenAlexW2313699631
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited1

Critics, pundits, and producers have placed Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in the unenviable position of having to rescue the American theatre. The latter, by all accounts, is in a sorry state. It has attempted to maintain its elite cultural status despite the fact that the differences between high and low have become precarious. On Broadway, increasingly expensive productions survive more and more by mimicking mass culture, either in the form of mindnumbing spectacles featuring singing cats, falling chandeliers, and dancing dinnerware or plays, like The Heidi Chronicles or Prelude to a Kiss, whose style and themes aspire to quality television. In regional theatres, meanwhile, subscriptions continue to decline, and with them the adventurousness of artistic directors. Given this dismal situation, Angels in America has almost singlehandedly resuscitated a category of play that has become almost extinct: the serious Broadway drama that is neither a British import nor a revival

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Materialism · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · sort · Utopia · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies

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