Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Les Brookes (Independent Scholar - Europe)

Ed. by Aleks Sierz, Independent Scholar - Europe
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1992

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

Kushner started to write Angels in America, his best-known play, in the late 1980s, a few years after the period in which it is set. It took him five years to complete. The two parts of this seven-hour drama are usually played on separate evenings, although sometimes in matinée and evening performances on the same day. Part One is entitled “Millennium Approaches”, Part Two “Perestroika”. The full two-part play was first staged in 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, under the direction of Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone. Then, in November 1993, it took London by storm in Declan Donellan’s acclaimed production at the National Theatre of Great Britain. John Heilpern, in the New York Observer, describes …

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3929 words

Citation: Brookes, Les. "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 June 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24827, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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