An important clue to the work of Tony Kushner can be found in the title of his best-known play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Here, the provocative conjunction of the words gay and national suggests an attempt to bring together sub-cultural concerns and wider political issues, indeed to see those wider issues from a gay perspective. It thus highlights Kushner's preoccupation with marginalised communities and their relationship to mainstream society. But it reminds us, too, that we cannot fully understand Kushner's play (or his work as a whole) if we ignore his socialist politics. The tendency to think of Kushner as solely a gay dramatist is misleading: it would be more accurate to describe him as a …
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Citation: Brookes, Les. "Tony Kushner". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5776, accessed 22 November 2024.]
