Queering Angels In America

Among contemporary American theater artists,Tony Kushner admittedly is the most embraced playwright by the audience and academics alike.His two-part epic Angels in America:A Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part One:Millennium Approaches(1992) and Part Two:Perestroika(1993) virtually won every theatrical award for 1993 and 1994 seasons in the U.S.and England.The two Angels plays have been placed in the "unenviable position of having to rescue the American theater" while Tony Kushner is acclaimed as "the most brilliant American playwright since Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams." The seven-hour epic play criticizes various crises in American society,including political conservatism,AIDS epidemic, religious belief crisis,racial conflict and moral crisis.In this play,as its subtitle indicates,this openly gay Jewish playwright unapologetically blends politics, theatrical aesthetics and philosophical fantasy with his unique gay sensibility.The thesis attempts to take queerness as the central measure to interpret Angels in America,the culmination of Kushnerian brand of gay political theater - The Theater of the Fabulous,and to analyze its politics,art and philosophy.Chapter One focuses on the politics of queering "national themes",discussing how queer identity works as the political arena and the basic narrative device for national themes.The first part introduces the unique queer sensibility Kushner developes from struggling with his gay identity and experiencing the AIDS epidemic.The second part analyzes the political and radical nature of queer identity,and how Kushner discovers a "state of urgency" in social crises from queer politics.The third part discus(?)es how national themes are queered in the play - to address "national themes" through representing religious,racial,governmental and legislative discrimination and oppression that queers in 1980s' AIDS crisis have suffered in the private and public lives.Chapter Two focuses on the art of queering the stage,analyzing theatrical aesthetics achieved from juxtaposing different stage techniques.The first part discusses how Angels in America blends different dramatic influences,Brechtian Epic Theatre and Alienation effect,Williams' poetic lyricism,and postmodern experiments as cinematic split scenes and juxtaposing of reality,illusion and fantasy.The second part analyzes how Kushner queers the image of the Angel of History,which Walter Benjamin envisioned in "Theses on the Philosophy of History",and adapts Benjaminian historical theology to his theatricality.The third part analyzes the overall stage effects realized through typical innovations with Kushner's personal principles of theatrical aesthetic.Chapter three analyzes the philosophy of queering change,and its limit and transcendence as a "gay fantasia".The first part interprets the eschatological image created in Part One:Millennium Approaches.Shadowed by "Bad News" in the first Act doomsday despair permeates this part-loss of history,AIDS,oppression of sexual orientation,loss of belief and abandonment.The second part analyzes how Perestroika miraculously progresses from these various crises.The third part interprets the politics and fantasy of the philosophy of change.The state of urgency and radical conflicts in reality disappear into the religious conflicts of human and the Angel,while all "bad news" are countenanced through the transforming power of angelic orgasms.In this sense,the play is reduced into a "fantasia".Angels in America has become a queer phenomenon in American theatre and society - a play of gay men marking "a turning point in the history of American drama,and of American literary culture",radical in politics but popular in acceptance. It becomes a "queer" in American theater,while "queerness" becomes the key to parse this phenomenon.From above analysis,we can find queerness not only provides the concrete founding for its politics but also demonstrates the aesthetics of the theatre of the Fabulous and the philosophy of change.Therefore Angels in America represents the culmination of Kushner's theatre of the Fabulous - a blending of radical politics, high aesthetic tension achieved through the tension between illusion and reality defined by a "gay fantasia",a philosophy of historical progress from calamity and a belief of building love and forgiveness in this "painful progress".