SOURCE: McNulty, Charles. “Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (spring 1996): 84-96.

In the following essay, McNulty examines Kushner's representation of the AIDS epidemic in Angels in America in the context of American politics and history. McNulty asserts that while Millennium Approaches offers fresh insight into the workings of history, Perestroika retreats from this radical historical revisioning through the fantastical element of the angel descending from heaven.

AIDS plays have come to be thought of as a phenomenon of the 1980s, as Happenings were of the 1960s. Though the epidemic still rages, the bravely furious genre that began with William Hoffman's As Is and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart has for the most part receded into the paragraphs of theater history textbooks. Nicholas de Jongh identifies the central mission of these plays as the fight against “an orthodoxy that regards AIDS...