Hillbrow is an inner-city residential neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa, that used to be a whites-only zone during Apartheid in the 1970s. Post-Apartheid, it became a melting pot for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds and became home to one of the first prominent LBGT communities in South Africa. The neighborhood, however, slowly decayed into an […]
Read More →Archive for October, 2016
Fantasia V.S Real-Life Events
As we look at the title of Kushner’s masterpiece: Angels in America: A Gay “Fantasia” on National Themes, the idea of “this is just another fiction” probably flashes through all of our minds. As a matter of fact, the fantasia is based on several real-life events that makes this play look more related to our […]
Read More →There is a little bit of devil in her angel eyes
Kushner’s Angels in America is a thought-provoking play,that encourages the reader to confront the challenges of living in a broken society. Throughout the play, we are introduced to several Angels with various intent and personas. The Angels of Heaven are meant to be guardians of those on earth. They possess powers that are superior to those […]
Read More →Kushner resources
Consider this an augmenter’s post of my own: I wanted to organize some links to material I’ve used and written over many years of teaching Kushner’s play. For a decade before we both moved to Abu Dhabi, Cyrus Patell and I taught a course on the Square called Writing New York, for which we amassed […]
Read More →In the Words of Kushner
Hey everyone, In order to gain more insight into the creation of the play and Tony Kushner’s personal experiences that influenced it, I’ve included different sections from multiple interviews with him over the years. The Seattle Times sat down with Kushner and asked about where the image of the angel came from (2014). “There was […]
Read More →“The world only spins forward”
The second part of Angels in America, titled Perestroika, deals with the aftereffects of the occurrences in Millennium Approaches and the conclusion of the play as a whole. In this part we gain insight into the Angels, Heaven, and God. Kushner describes them in a human way, very unlike the way they are normally discussed […]
Read More →Romney vs. Obama… Now Trump vs. Clinton
For all who skipped the introduction, here’s the most interesting thing: when Kushner wrote the introduction to his new edition of Angels in America, it was just the day before the Mitt Romney vs. Barrack Obama elections. I’m curious: if at the time Kushner thought, “today the edge is sharper than it’s ever been, and the […]
Read More →“I’m not in your hallucination. You’re in my dream.”
Set during the AIDS crisis in the U.S. in 1985, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches conveys two paralleled stories of a gay couple, Louis Ironson and his lover Prior Walter, and a married couple, Joe Pitt and his wife Harper, as they all go through a troubling period to deal with issues surrounding homosexuality and […]
Read More →Camus the Existentialist
The fact that Camus was a real deal existentialist may shed light on Dr. Rieux’s deattached, abstracted manner of narrating the devastating nature of plague. Careful! The guy in the video isn’t Camus! But he could perfectly be. Enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qzGEend32LM
Read More →Priests in every Plague
I once commented in one of the classes about how priests are always present in every novel we have read about plagues so far. So I recall a Kuwaiti series called “Alhadama,” (video linked) which talks about Smallpox that impacted Kuwait city in 1932. More than four thousand victims died because of it in just the first 10 days. […]
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