Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How "Angels in America" Reconstructs the Nation

Abstract

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.