SOURCE: Meisner, Natalie. “Messing with the Idyllic: The Performance of Femininity in Kushner's Angels in America.” Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 1 (spring 2003): 177-89.

In the following essay, Meisner examines Kushner's representations of women and femininity in Angels in America.

We pay a high price for the maintenance of the myth of the individual.

—Tony Kushner¹

It may seem an odd project to focus on the female characters in Tony Kushner's two-part modern epic Angels in America since the plays' action revolves around Prior, Louis, Joe, and the other male characters. Kushner himself notes his plays' specificity by lightheartedly calling them “Jewish fag plays.”² This is not the whole story, however, as the plays do rely upon complex representations of femininity, femaleness, and biologically female-coded bodies for their coherence. The extent to which these plays have been used as source texts for queer theory throughout the 1990s makes them...