Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America
Keywords:
Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Bertolt Brecht, Verfremdung, epic theatre, subversion, angelAbstract
Employing a montage of scenes, styles, and personal stories and plots, Tony Kushner’s monumental theatrical undertaking Angels in America offers a dialectical examination of end-of-themillennium America. This paper attempts to explore how Kushner’s dramatic approach makes use of the dialectics inherent in the figure of the angel – with all of the implicit contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Kushner’s aesthetic functions on the basis of recurrent defamiliarization and re-familiarization which, though Brechtian in essence, technically provides the author and, in turn, also the audience with a space where elements of the epic theatre mix with traditional Aristotelian structure to offer a paradoxical unity between Verfremdung and catharsis. The intentional subversion of traditional forms and concepts (such as the character of the divine messenger) allows the dramatic presentation of a whole variety of ideas, implications and perceptions.
References
Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. London: Verso Books, 2003.
Borreca, Art. “Dramaturging the Dialectic: Brecht, Benjamin and Declan Donnellan’s Production of Angels in America.” In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, 245-260. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1996.
Fisher, James. Living Past Hope. The Theater of Tony Kushner. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
Koepnick, Lutz. Walter Benjamin And the Aesthetics of Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches. Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.
Kushner, Tony. “Notes About Political Theatre.” Kenyon Review, XIX/3-4 (1997): 19-34.
Nielsen, Ken. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
Reinelt, Janelle. “Notes on Angels in America as American Epic Theater.” In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, 234-244. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
