In 2017 I spent the summer in New York as part of the RealAD. During this time, I got the chance to witness my first pride parade. We stood for around 6 hours, pacing fifth avenue to try to get better glimpses of the extravagant floats and the celebrities on them. Stakeholders of all forms […]
Read More →Archive for December, 2019
What’s in a Name
Angels opens with a funeral. The service for Louis’ grandmother has just passed and we see Louis and Prior sitting on a bench, their conversation starting from Louis’ acting “closeted” at family functions to the disappearance of their cat, ending with Prior’s great reveal of his sickness. As an opening scene, there seems to be […]
Read More →Angels wrap-up
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 generated a pretty substantial amount of online content about Kushner and Angels. I’ve written a little about it elsewhere too. There are a lot of things I wish we’d had time to discuss […]
Read More →Contagion and Cosmopolitanism
As I mentioned in an earlier post about Welcome to Our Hillbrow, one way to think about contagion is to view it as a potential interpersonal connection. In many ways you can think of it as materializing our interpersonal connections. Tony Sampson, in our earliest readings of the semester, pointed to a “too much connectivity” […]
Read More →Complex and Sometimes Contradictory
I think Kushner does a good job of presenting many of his characters as human, that is to say complex and sometimes contradictory. In a play that is predicated in many ways on the clash between conservatism and progressiveness, we see a lot of compromise between the characters. For example, Hannah is a devout Mormon […]
Read More →Going Back to Move Forward
The second part of Angels in America, titled “Perestroika,” refers to the economic and political changes triggered by decentralization policies incurred by Mikhail Gorbachev. As past conveners have discussed: This policy introduced free elections in the country and created warmer relationships with the US. Yet the policy brought with it a lot of unintentional effects […]
Read More →Angelus/Angel
A painting has re-emerged, from the opening pages of Johnson’s The Ghost Map into Kushner’s Angels. Klee’s “Angelus Novus”, which Walter Benjamin described in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as: A Klee painting [showing] an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are […]
Read More →The enigma that is Roy Cohn
For many, especially younger generations, Roy Cohn is famous for both appearing in Kushner’s Angels in America and being one of the mentors of who would become the current US president. However, in his time and for historians, Roy Cohn is most famous for being Senator Joseph Mccarthy’s right-hand man in the investigation of suspected […]
Read More →Behind the Scenes of Angels in America
Taking a break from the conversations of theme and politics in Angels in America, let’s talk about the complexities of the mechanics and manpower which goes into the actual execution of such a play as Angels in America. Plays need entire crews to make sure everything goes correctly, and especially in modern theater, where technical […]
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