Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kushner, Tony - David Savran (essay date May 1995)
Kushner, Tony - David Savran (essay date May 1995)
David Savran (essay date May 1995)
SOURCE: Savran, David. “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation.” Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 207-27.
[In the following essay, Savran examines the ideological underpinnings of Angels in America in terms of the cultural, historical, and political context in which it was produced.]
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...
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Criticism
- Edward Norden (essay date January 1995)
- David Savran (essay date May 1995)
- Jyl Lynn Felman (essay date May/June 1995)
- James Fisher (essay date winter 1995-96)
- John R. Quinn (essay date March 1996)
- Charles McNulty (essay date spring 1996)
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- James Reston Jr. (review date March 2002)
- Robert Brustein (review date 18 March 2002)
- Richard Coles (review date 7 June 2002)
- Richard Hornby (review date summer 2002)
- James Fisher (essay date 2002)
- Peggy Phelan (review date March 2003)
- Natalie Meisner (essay date spring 2003)
- Stephen Aiello (essay date October 2003)
- Publishers Weekly (review date 3 November 2003)
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