SOURCE: Aiello, Stephen. “Aristotle and Angels: Tragedy in the Age of Anomie.” Florida English (October 2003): 6-16.

In the following essay, Aiello compares Angels in America with Aristotle's Poetics, claiming that Kushner's play vitiates the form of tragedy.

It seems to be a contentious position throughout drama criticism that although there may be a tragic sense felt collectively in contemporary life that somehow such an experience when dramatized must be weighed against the classical tradition of tragedy. Thus, any reading of a modern drama as a tragedy dares to confront the same essentialist views as Arthur Miller did when he claimed a tragic dimension for his protagonist, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman. The playwright responded to critics who viewed Death of a Salesman in Aristotelian terms as a “pseudo-tragedy,” (108) by distancing his play and a sense of modern tragedy from Aristotle and his Poetics and reminding these...