Politics Through Art

A Pulitzer and Tony winner, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America:A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is regarded as a milestone in American theater, or even in American literature. A play featuring the lives of five gay male characters, Angels in America goes far beyond homosexual issues. It presents to the audience a vivid historical picture of the late-twentieth-century American society under the reign of the conservative forces represented by the Reagan administration. This greatly honored play garnered a lot of attention from both the popular media and the academic field. Scholars have explored the play mainly from the following angles:queer theory, religion, AIDS epidemic, morality, the versions of the plays’ production and its dramaturgy.Throughout the play, the influence of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht is prominent. Kushner himself has also talked about his inseparable connection with Brecht many times when he was interviewed on different occasions. Although critics have mentioned Brecht’s influence on Kushner’s Angels in America, papers that center on this topic and deeply research into it are relatively few. This thesis tries to do a systematic study of the Brechtian aspects in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America by focusing on how Tony Kushner applies and develops Brechtian techniques in the play and what effect these techniques achieve.In Angels in America, Incidents such as the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, the desperate plight of homosexuals and the corruption of the judicial system are depicted as transitory ones inseparable from the particular historical period of Reagan era and thus alterable through the adoption of the Brechtian technical device of historicization. Characters such as Roy Cohn, Joseph Pitt and Louis Ironson in Angels in America are modeled as emblematic and ideologized since all of them have their own clear political stance and are representatives of the political spectrums they are in. Audiences see from their stories that the personal is the political, which echoes Brecht’s notion of political theatre. As to the structure of the play, it is prominent in its use of split scenes, the juxtaposition of realistic scenes and fantasies and the arrangement of a promising ending, all of which adopts or adapts Brecht’s dramaturgy and helps Kushner convey his notion of connection and a hopeful future.Finally the thesis reaches the conclusion that Tony Kushner, by creatively using Brechtian dramatic techniques in Angels in America, conveys his criticism of the conservative American politics during the Reagan Era and expresses his own political stance as a left-wing liberal.