Dec 19, 2009

Angels in America | The Fusion of Entertainment with Important Social Issues

In this review of a production encompassing both parts of Kushner's play, critic Gelb praises the playwright's ability to fuse entertainment with important social issues while maintaining an epic scope.

In Angels in America (most recently at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles), a two-part, seven-hour workup of the nation's end-of-millennium health, Tony Kushner has written an enormously entertaining play while at the same time treating important matters seriously. Kushner de-ghettoizes the AIDS play, placing the disease, like the destruction of the ozone layer or Americans' flight from mutual responsibility in the Reagan era, at the heart of a national and planetary collapse. Mixing realism, fevered hallucination and otherworldly theatrical effects, he pulls back from the tight...