Books, Arts & Manners: Winged Defeat

IF, LIKE Tony Kushner, you plan to write a second play wringing another three and a half hours of drama out of the same small set of characters, it is perhaps tempting fate to let one of your players in Part I toss off a quip about “the limitations of the imagination. It’s something you learn after your first theme party—it’s all been done before.”

But Angels in America, reviewers seem to agree, is no ordinary stage work subject to ordinary rules. It is an event: a theatrical event, of course, playing to full houses, with a sackful of Tony and Drama Desk prizes, as well as a Pulitzer; but also a literary, artistic, and moral event: a “masterpiece” (The Neu Yorker), “the broad-est, deepest, most searching American play of our time” (Newsweek). Here, one might hope, is a long-awaited revival of the theater of ideas. As a “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” that crossed over to charm many straight suburbanites, it might also be expected to contribute to mutual understanding on that vexed current issue.

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About the Author

Walter Olson

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of several books.

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IF, LIKE Tony Kushner, you plan to write a second play wringing another three and a half hours of drama out of the same small set of characters, it is perhaps tempting fate to let one of your players in Part I toss off a quip about “the limitations of the imagination. It’s something you learn after your first theme party—it’s all been done before.”

But Angels in America, reviewers seem to agree, is no ordinary stage work subject to ordinary rules. It is an event: a theatrical event, of course, playing to full houses, with a sackful of Tony and Drama Desk prizes, as well as a Pulitzer; but also a literary, artistic, and moral event: a “masterpiece” (The Neu Yorker), “the broad-est, deepest, most searching American play of our time” (Newsweek). Here, one might hope, is a long-awaited revival of the theater of ideas. As a “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” that crossed over to charm many straight suburbanites, it might also be expected to contribute to mutual understanding on that vexed current issue.