SOURCE: "Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, May 1995, pp. 207-27.

In the essay below, Savran attempts to answer the question of why "a play featuring five gay male characters [is being universalized as a 'turning point' in the American theatre, and minoritized as the preeminent gay male artifact of the 1990s. "]

Critics, pundits, and producers have placed Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in the unenviable position of having to rescue the American theatre. The latter, by all accounts, is in a sorry state. It has attempted to maintain its elite cultural status despite the fact that the differences between "high" and "low" have become precarious. On Broadway, increasingly expensive productions survive more and more by mimicking mass culture, either in the form of mind-numbing spectacles featuring singing cats...