SOURCE: Savran, David. “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation.” Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 207-27.

In the following essay, Savran examines the ideological underpinnings of Angels in America in terms of the cultural, historical, and political context in which it was produced.

Critics, pundits, and producers have placed Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in the unenviable position of having to rescue the American theatre. The latter, by all accounts, is in a sorry state. It has attempted to maintain its elite cultural status despite the fact that the differences between “high” and “low” have become precarious. On Broadway, increasingly expensive productions survive more and more by mimicking mass culture, either in the form of mind-numbing spectacles featuring singing cats, falling chandeliers, and dancing dinner-ware or plays, like The Heidi Chronicles or Prelude to a...