SOURCE: "Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 84-96.

In the following, McNulty analyzes Angels in America in terms of Walter Benjamin's theories of history, finding that Perestroika abandons Benjamin's view of history as continuous catastrophe for an unwarranted view of history as a record of progress.

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 as a mere local difficulty, principally, principally affecting a reviled minority."¹ It is not entirely...