SOURCE: Montgomery, Benilde. “Angels in America as Medieval Mystery.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 596-606.

In the following essay, Montgomery examines the similarities between Kushner's Angels in America and the tradition of medieval religious mystery plays.

Although highly praised in the popular press when it first appeared and officially canonized soon thereafter by Harold Bloom,¹ Tony Kushner's Angels in America has now come under the scrutiny of critics of a more suspicious gaze. Among these less than enthusiastic critics are the notorious Arlene Croce, who, if only indirectly, includes Angels as an instance of “victim art”; Leo Bersani, who finds the play “muddled and pretentious”; and David Savran, who unravels the play's ambivalences to show not only that it is seriously at odds with its own apparent intentions, but that its immense popularity can be accounted for in the way it supports the “binary oppositions” of the status quo...