[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 and thereby implicitly supports the Reaganite agenda that it would otherwise subvert.² More positively, however, Savran also notes that “the play deliberately evokes the long history of Western dramatic literature and positions itself as heir to the traditions of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, and others.”³ Among these others, I suspect that an important tradition to which Kushner is also the heir is that of the medieval mystery cycles. To read Angels in America in the light of this tradition may help dispel Savran's suspicion that Kushner is as much the victim of Enlightenment categories as are his political enemies.

It should first be noted that although Kushner was a student of medieval culture (he graduated from Columbia with a degree in medieval studies),⁴ he has little interest in the specific Christian contents of the cycles. Indeed, in an early interview with Savran, Kushner makes his ambivalence about the Middle Ages clear. On the one hand, he dismisses them as “of no relevance to anything” only to praise them later on for the “great richness [that] can come from societies that aren't individuated.”⁵ Kushner's use of the Corpus Christi plays in Angels in America is consistent with this ambivalence. While he is interested in the cycle plays because of their dramatic structure and internal form, his own agenda demands that he distance himself from their theological contents in favor of what appears to be a highly secularized humanism. To use Thomas M. Greene's language, Kushner “force[s] us to recognize the poetic distance traversed”⁶ between the hierarchic world of the cycles and our own postmodern experience.

If, as Savran suggests, Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (an essay written in 1940 in an attempt to account for the emergence of Hitler's new order) is “the primary generative fiction for Angels in America,”⁷ we have an important instance of Kushner's abiding interest in the question of redemptive history, an interest first apparent in his A Bright Room Called Day (1985). Kushner himself admits that his protagonist, Prior Walter, is named for Benjamin and that his angel is modeled on Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, discussed in Benjamin's essay. Significantly, however, the medieval mystery cycles are also attempts to come to terms with questions similar to those raised by Benjamin and of interest to Kushner. Developed in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during what Martin Stevens calls “some of the most disruptive upheavals of the social order,” including economic depression and plague, the mystery cycles developed when, not unlike Benjamin four hundred years later, medieval Christians were re-examining the nature and meaning of redemptive history in an effort to redefine their own newly emerging social order. The plays helped, as Stevens suggests, to create “a reinvigorated sense of morality.”⁸ As such, the cycles would seem to be particularly hospitable to Kushner's postmodern didactic project, written at the end of the millennium and during the age of AIDS.

Moreover, Benjamin's theory of redemptive history is similar to that expressed in the medieval cycles. A student of Jewish mysticism, Benjamin felt that “the moral duty of criticism was to ‘redeem’ the past, to save it from oblivion by revealing its concealed truth.”⁹ Once revealed, the truth of the past, particularly as it is embodied in the “oppressed,” might then provide some hope for the future. “The past,” Benjamin says, “carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” He notes that “for the Jews … every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” In his scheme, the contemplation of the whole of tradition “teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”¹⁰ No doubt selected in a way that would distress Benjamin, the events of the mystery plays show, nonetheless, the world in a similarly constant state of “emergency.” These “emergencies” (the fall, a fratricide, the flood, the murder of children, etc.) are, moreover, presented in a way that links past “emergencies” to present realities. In the mysteries, each past event conceals some sign of Christ's redemptive action: an action made necessary by the initial cosmic “emergency,” the fall of men and angels, with which the cycles begin; made possible by the death of Jesus, the central and ubiquitous emergency of the cycles; and, for those who have heeded the prefigurements, fulfilled in the ultimate emergency of “Doomsday.”

While Kushner's use of multiple locations is obviously consistent with medieval practice, his arrangement of incidents in Angels in America closely imitates the structural outline of the mystery cycles. As the cycles trace an are from Genesis to Doomsday, so, too, does Kushner's play. As the cycles begin with the Creation and Fall, Kushner's play also begins with allusions to a more perfect and, significantly, Jewish past, now fallen from grace. At the funeral of Sarah Ironson, Rabbi Chemelwitz notes that her grandchildren “with the goyische names” have become so assimilated into the modern world, a world fallen from the primal Eden of “the clay of some Litvak shtetl,” that they are no longer capable of embarking on a “Great [Voyage].”¹¹ Moreover, as in the cycles, the individual incidents of Angels in America culminate in an epilogue whose apocalyptic imagery suggests the “doomsday” scenes of traditional mystery cycles. In Kushner's final scene, dominated by a statue of an angel, Hannah and Prior speak of a time “[w]hen the Millennium comes”—“[n]ot the year two thousand, but the Capital M Millennium” (II, 147). The scene focuses on another family, now newly constituted and prepared to do what the old Rabbi despaired of: to begin again, “to go out into the world” (II, 147). Sarah is replaced here by a new matriarch, Hannah, named for the Biblical prophet who praises Yahweh for defeating the powerful and raising up the poor and oppressed.¹² This newly constituted family has been gathered and redeemed not, as in the medieval cycles, because they have been chosen by Christ, but rather because its members have loved Prior Walter—the “prophet” of the new postmodern times whose wounded and dying body dominates each part of Angels in America as ubiquitously as the body of Christ dominates “every second of time” of the Corpus Christi cycles.

As in the cycles, all other action takes place within this Biblical are, an are that encompasses all time and understands it as redemptive history. In setting out the genealogy of Louis Ironson (grandson of Sarah, son of Rachel), Kushner positions one of his principal characters within the Biblical narrative of the Ur-family. In fact, Louis, full of self-loathing, later identifies himself with Cain (“now I can't see much and my forehead … it's like the Mark of Cain” [I, 99]), and he is the one character whose name and genealogy are invoked by the Rabbi at the “Fall” in scene one and who reappears throughout the play until the “Doomsday” of the final scene.

Among the other characters are, of course, angels, and also a devil, a devil whose particular traits are rooted in medieval practice. Even in George C. Wolfe's very un-medieval New York production, few critics failed to recognize the devil in Ron Liebman's out-of sync performance as Roy Cohn.¹³ While in the cycle plays Lucifer's fall generally precedes Adam and Eve's, Kushner's devil appears first in the second scene, but is very much like the Lucifer of the Chester plays. There the devil sits in God's throne exclaiming, “Here will I sitt nowe in this steade, / … / Behoulde my bodye, handes and head— / the might of God is marked in mee.”¹⁴ Similarly, Cohn sits in a throne of his own invention wishing he were a formidable monster: “an octopus, a fucking octopus. Eight loving arms and all those suckers” (I, 11). Like the Lucifer of York who gloats in a power that “es passande my peres” (is passing my peers),¹⁵ Cohn claims, like God, to “see the universe” (I, 13), curses all with “God-fucking-dammit to hell” (I, 14), blesses chaos (I, 15), and, in a temptation scene (I, 52-58), tries to lure the faithful Christian, Joe, with the promises of similar power: “Let nothing stand in your way” (I, 58). By his own admission, he's “an absolute fucking demon with Family Law” (II, 138).

To counterbalance the devil, Kushner's principal angel, who may owe some inspiration to Benjamin's “Angelus Novus,”¹⁶ also bears some additional resemblance, as Rob Baker points out, to the angels of medieval alchemy whose “Great Work” is to transform by fire base lead into pure gold.¹⁷ Kushner's text, however, also associates his angels with Biblical angels. Perhaps playing with the frequent use of “Mary” in gay parlance, Kushner writes an “Annunciation” scene in which Prior exclaims, just before a Gabriel-like angel appears, “Something's coming in here, I'm scared, I don't like this at all, something's approaching and I. … OH! […] God almighty …” (I, 118, stage directions omitted). Most frequently, though, Kushner associates his angel with Jacob's angel in Genesis 32. First, Joe, a closeted Mormon homosexual, alludes to Jacob's angel when he defends himself to his wife: “Jacob wrestles with the angel. […] The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win […]?” (I, 49-50). Despairing of spiritual victory, Joe, who, nonetheless, had desired to be “Blessed” (I, 54), then seeks the approval of the angel's opposite. On his deathbed, Roy Cohn blesses Joe:

ROY:
[…] You don't even have to trick it out of me, like what's-his-name in the Bible.
JOE:
Jacob.
ROY:
[…] A ruthless mother fucker, some bald runt, but he laid hold of his birthright with his claws […]

(II, 82-83)

Under the tutelage of Joe's Mormon mother, however, Prior, fully human and living with AIDS, literally “wrestle[s]” with the angel and wins, demanding, “bless me or whatever but I will be let go,” after which he “ascends” to heaven on a “ladder of […] light” (II, 119-20).

More importantly, the correspondence Kushner establishes between Prior Walter and Joe around their relationship to the Jacob story is typical of the kind of “[i]nterconnectedness” (to use Hannah's word [II, 146]) that characterizes the internal structure of the entire play. Specifically, these correspondences might more properly be named “analogies,” and they, like the structuring are of the play, further situate Angels in America within a medieval dramatic tradition, a tradition developed when “resemblance … organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.”¹⁸ David Tracy, a modern theorist of “analogy,” defines it as “a language of ordered relationships articulating similarity-in-difference. The order among the relationships is constituted by the distinct but similar relationships of each analogue to some primary focal meaning.”¹⁹ Here, Prior and Joe are not simply opposites, as Savran's observations about “binary oppositions” would suggest. At one and the same time, they are both similar (in their homosexuality and their need of a blessing) and different (in that [a] one is closeted and the other is out and [b] one wrestles with the angel, the other spars with the devil). As analogues rather than paired opposites, each relates in a unique way to the story of Jacob's redemption. This pattern of relationships is precisely the kind that V. A. Kolve notes at work in the cycles. Like Erich Auerbach, who notes that medieval “figural interpretation changed the Old Testament from a book of laws and a history of the people of Israel into a series of figures of Christ and the Redemption,”²⁰ Kolve shows how events and characters in the “Old Testament” plays (Noah's flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, for example) prefigure events and characters of the “New Testament” plays (John the Baptist, the crucifixion of Jesus, for example). He notes further that this prefigurement occurs in such a way that “the differences between figure and fulfillment are as important as the similarities.”²¹ In other words, the ordered relationships among events and characters in the cycles preserve the principle of analogy: their similarity-in-differences is maintained, each achieving significance from a common relationship to some prime analogue. In the cycle plays, the prime analogue is Jesus Christ; in Angels in America it is, of course, Prior Walter.

Although analogy is most clearly evident in the “split scenes” placed strategically throughout the play, Kushner uses analogy most significantly as the metaphoric expression of the profound similarities-in-difference that his meditation on contemporary politics and AIDS has led him to discover abounding in all reality. Like Louis and Joe, Prior (male, gay, worldly) and Harper (female, straight, Mormon) only seem opposites. Meeting around a common table, they recognize each other at “the very threshold of revelation” (I, 33). They soon speak in parallel sentences (“I'm a Mormon”; “I'm a homosexual”; “[Mormons] don't believe in homosexuals”; “[Homosexuals] don't believe in Mormons”). They share not their partners' disembodied and “Enlightened” myth of progress but a more concrete understanding of human finitude and a conviction that imagination is limited because bound to memory. They so clearly comprehend each other that they can reveal truths about the one that the other did not suspect: Prior can tell Harper that Joe is gay; Harper can tell Prior that his “most inner part” is “entirely free of disease” (33-34). Significantly, following these specific revelations and the larger implicit revelation that characters as diverse as Harper and Prior are not simply independent and opposing characters but fully implicated in each other's lives, the angel manifests itself for the first time.

Further, Kushner's analogies create an ordered series of relationships among God, self, and world and thereby give shape to the otherwise disparate elements of the play. If in the Corpus Christi plays the prime analogue is the suffering body of Christ, in Angels in America, the prime analogue is the suffering body of Prior Walter. Both bodies dominate their plays not simply as graphic images of physical pain and suffering but primarily as interpretive paradigms. Positing the wounded body of Christ as an analogue for, among other things, the woundedness of the social body, of the body politic, and of the individual physical body, the cycles teach that the destinies of these separate bodies are in fact interconnected. As each of these bodies (social, political, individual) suffers in its own way, its suffering also participates in Christ's suffering and in that participation achieves a significance inaccessible to the same suffering considered in isolation: as Christ must die to rise again, so too must all else that is. As the analogical design of the medieval plays redefined their own emerging new social order, so the similar design of Angels in America helps to redefine whatever sense of order Kushner sees emerging not only from the AIDS pandemic but also from the collapse of modernism itself. Rather than only exploring AIDS and its metaphors, as Susan Sontag does,²² Kushner offers AIDS as the primary analogue by means of which he seeks to recover meaning not only in the wake of AIDS but also out of the ruins of the entire postmodern collapse.

When Roy Cohn's doctor says that in the “presence” of the HIV virus, “[t]he body's immune system ceases to function” (I, 42), he is describing for a single human body the woundedness that, by analogy, is typical of all the defenseless bodies in what Kushner's Angel calls a “Universe of Wounds” (II, 54). As Prior's body can no longer defend itself against death, Harper notices from the outset that all around her

beautiful systems [are] dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart …

[…] everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way. …

(I, 16-17)

During the wrestling match with Prior at the end of the play, the angel remarks on the same events:

The slow dissolving of the Great Design,
The spiraling apart of the Work of Eternity,
The World and its beautiful particle logic
All collapsed

(II, 134)

The separate elements in Kushner's design of a “Universe of Wounds” are the individual, the nuclear family, the American justice system, international diplomacy, the physical integrity of the planet, and the Judeo-Christian tradition itself.

In Kushner's design, these separate wounds form an ever-widening series of concentric circles radiating from a single wounded center, Prior Walter. In a vision of his own family history (I, 85-89), for example, the prior Priors teach him that “[i]n a family as long-descended as the Walters there are bound to be a few carried off by plague.” While Prior's AIDS remains unique, suffering from plague, pestilence, “[t]he spotty monster,” he learns, has an analogue in the common suffering of all that is human (86-87). Prior understands himself not only as an isolated, purely psychological entity, but as a member of the human family. On the other hand, Roy Cohn, unlike Prior, remains trapped in a thoroughly modern and “monological consciousness.”²³ His disease, like Joe's homosexuality, must remain a secret, private, “closeted” business. Like Dante's Satan, he is the ultimate isolationist and last appears “standing waistdeep in a smoldering pit, facing a volcanic, pulsating red light (II, 138). Moreover, the body of the traditional family is also wounded: Sarah Ironson's grandchildren have become assimilated; Joe's father could not love him (I, 76); Joe abandons Harper; Roy's “fathers” are “Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover. Joe McCarthy most of all” (I, 56); even the Reagans are “not really a family […] there aren't any connections there, no love, they don't ever even speak to each other except through their agents” (I, 71). In addition, like Prior, the body politic is wounded: justice is confused with power; “ipso facto secular humanism” has given way to “a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan” (I, 63); Washington is a “cemetery” (I, 23); “The whole Hall of Justice,” Joe fears “it's empty, it's deserted, it's gone out of business. Forever. The people that make it run have up and abandoned it” (I, 72). After “Perestroika” and the fall of the Berlin Wall, “the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik” decries the present as a “Sour Little Age” and regrets the loss of any “Grand” and “comprehensive [Theory]” to guide a new revolution (II, 13-14). Further, the planet is also wounded: “the Chernobyl Power Plant in Belarus is already by leagues the greatest nuclear catastrophe” (II, 129); Libby fears the radon escaping in Hannah's basement (I, 82); and Harper learns early on about “holes in the ozone layer. Over Antarctica. Skin burns, birds go blind, icebergs melt. The world's coming to an end” (I, 28).

As all these wounded bodies are analogues to the wounded body of Prior Walter, so too is the great wound in the body of the Judeo-Christian tradition: like Louis and Joe, who abandon their lovers, and those others who have abandoned the Halls of Justice, God has also abandoned the universe. The primal covenant is broken, and heaven “has a deserted, derelict feel […] rubble is strewn everywhere” (II, 121). In a scene inspired perhaps by the “Parliament of Heaven” episode in the N-Town plays,²⁴ the angels announce that they have become mere “impotent witness[es]” longing for the return of God (II, 130-31). But while the N-Town Daughters of God prepare for the coming of Christ, Kushner's angels, like mouthpieces for the Religious Right, foresee a future filled with chaos, a chaos that can only be averted by embracing stasis. Here Kushner makes most evident that although the structure of his play is similar to that of the cycles, it is also quite obviously different. Instead of imitating the cycles in a slavish way, thereby producing only similarity, something “of no relevance to anything,” Kushner imitates them so as to announce at the same time his distance from them. Rather than create something absolutely “new,” Kushner keeps faithful to the principle of analogy: quite deliberately, and like Prior Walter, he enters into a conversation with his own usable (prior) past. Unlike his modernist monster, Roy Cohn, whose death is hastened by his uncompromising defense of utter difference (“Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys” [I, 46]), Kushner shares with Prior and Harper (and, it might be added, with most medieval descriptions of the imagination)²⁵ the belief that because imagination is always in a conversation with memory, it “can't create anything new […] It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into vision” (I, 32).

Distancing himself from the theological assumptions of the medieval cycles to comment on contemporary reality, however, does not necessarily make Kushner the unwitting heir of the Enlightenment, as Savran suggests. To see Angels in America built around “a host of binary oppositions,” as Savran does, ignores the complexity of Kushner's fully analogical imagination and fails to consider what Tracy calls “that dialectical sense within analogy itself.”²⁶ What Savran reads as an “elaboration of contradictions” (“heaven/hell … communitarianism/individualism, spirit/flesh,” etc.)²⁷ Kushner's imagination holds in balance as dialectically aligned pairs. In his last scene, his “Doomsday,” Kushner embodies the concordance of opposites, rather than their contradiction, in the Bethesda Fountain, “Prior's favorite place in the park” (II, 94), whose statuary angel dominates the scene. While Louis identifies the fountain as a monument to the “Naval dead of the Civil War” (II, 94), Belize sees it as a source of healing. Prior, the prophet of the impending age, however, sees it as both: “[it] commemorate[s] death but […] suggest[s] a world without dying. [It is] made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, [it] weigh[s] tons but [it is] winged” (II, 147). Incapable of understanding himself as independent of his body, and joined analogically to the community around him, Prior, unlike Roy Cohn and the ever-closeted Joe, is no representative of the detached, enlightened ego. Rather, more like a medieval holy man, Prior sees death not as the opposite of life, but as its complement and fulfillment. Conceived so, Prior's impending death, like the death of Christ in the mysteries, is not the occasion of despair but rather the springboard of hope.

Moreover, membership in the family which gathers around Prior at the end is dependent on a similar dialectical vision. Although Harper is absent, she is finally no more “pathologized” than is Prior Walter. She is clearly not the heir of Mary Tyrone and Blanche DuBois, as Savran suggests.²⁸ Unlike theirs, her disease and Prior's do not lead to isolation. Just as their diseases can never be understood in isolation from each other, disease itself roots them in a fragile and complex human condition that Joe and Roy, both absent from the final scenes, take great pains to deny. Moreover, for both Harper and Prior, disease can never be understood as independent of vision: her straight, Mormon, female vision always and everywhere the complement of his gay, secularist, male one. As she flies to San Francisco in a plane that also weighs tons and is winged, she has her own vision of apocalypse: “the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired” (II, 144). If Roy and Joe are ineligible for membership in the new human family, it is precisely because they have failed to transcend Savran's binary oppositions: Joe's homosexual body remains the enemy of his Mormon spirit; Roy dies cursing life, gloating in the triumph of his will over Ethel Rosenberg (II, 115). Yet those who have loved Prior and join him around the Bethesda Fountain share in his analogical vision: while each remains independent of the other, they understand that the future of Prior's body is also their own. White, black; gay, straight; Jewish, Mormon; male, female: they retain their identities but share a common fate. While this final scene is indeed “utopian,” it is not simply an image of an American utopia that “diffuse[s] or deflect[s] dissent,” as Savran suggests.²⁹ It is, rather, an image of the new Jerusalem, which preserves the principle of analogy and where similarity and difference persist in constant and open conversation.

The credibility of this brief exploration of some medieval aspects of Angels in America was, unfortunately, nowhere supported by George C. Wolfe's New York production. Several foreign directors, however, seem to have appreciated the play's relationship to its medieval past. In doing so, they mounted productions that distanced themselves from the misguided attempts at psychological realism that marred Wolfe's production and thereby obscured Kushner's vision. Such a style could hardly convey what Bent Holm suggests is the play's “allegorical nature” or support his view of the play as a “wake-up call to The Theater's ‘reality.’”³⁰ In Neil Armfield's September 1994 Australian production, on the other hand, “all ropes and pulleys were clearly visible and almost every stage object was on wheels enabling the cast members to smoothly and swiftly run them in and out.”³¹ Most tellingly, at the Avignon theater festival in summer 1994, Brigitte Jacques staged the first part of the play outdoors in the medieval Cloître des Carmes. In a manner consistent with Kushner's original stage directions that the play be “actor-driven” (I, 5), French street kids visibly moved set pieces on and off stage in a production that one critic called “not only minimalist but basic.”³² Such a basic production, it seems to me, embodied the kind of interconnectedness the play longs for.

Notes

1. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, 1994), 567.

2. Arlene Croce, “Discussing the Undiscussible,” New Yorker (26 December 1994/2 January 1995), 55; Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 69; David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” Theatre Journal, 47:2 (1995), 207-27.

3. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 209. See note 1.

4. Arthur Lubow, “Tony Kushner's Paradise Lost,” New Yorker (30 November 1992), 61.

5. Tony Kushner, “The Theatre of the Fabulous: An Interview with Tony Kushner,” interview by David Savran, in Essays on Kushner's Angels, ed. Per Brask (Winnipeg, 1995), 134-35.

6. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), 40.

7. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 211. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illumination, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1968; rpt. with omissions, New York, 1969), 253-64.

8. Martin Stevens, “Medieval Drama: Genres, Misconceptions, and Approaches,” in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard K. Emmerson (New York, 1990), 45-46.

9. David Stern, “The Man With Qualities: The Incongruous Achievement of Walter Benjamin,” The New Republic (10 April 1995), 32.

10. Benjamin, 260, 254, 264, 257. See note 7.

11. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One, Millennium Approaches (hereafter I) and Part Two, Perestroika (hereafter II) (New York, 1992, 1994), I, 10. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

12. I Sam. 2: 1-10.

13. For example, Andrea Stevens, “Finding a Devil within to Portray Roy Cohn,” interview with Ron Liebman and Ron Vawter, New York Times (18 April 1993), Arts and Leisure sec., 1. See also John R. Quinn, “Corpus Juris Tertium: Redemptive Jurisprudence in Angels in America,” Theatre Journal, 48:1 (1996), 85: “the corporeality of Cohn and of Cohn's law are also inverted representations of the new law, a sort of Satan resurrected.”

14. The Fall of Lucifer (The Tanners), Play I of The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, Early English Text Society (London, 1974), II, 186-89.

15. The Creation and the Fall of Lucifer (The Bartiers), play I of York Plays, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (1885; rpt. New York, 1963), 156.

16. Savran, introduction to “Theatre of the Fabulous,” 131. See note 5.

17. Rob Baker, The Art of AIDS (New York, 1994), 214.

18. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), 17.

19. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theory and the Culture of Pluralism (New York, 1981), 408.

20. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), 52.

21. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA, 1966), 67.

22. See Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1989).

23. Charles Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, 1991), 52.

24. See The Parliament of Heaven; The Salutation and Conception, play XI of The N-Town Plays: Cotton MS Vespasin D.8, ed. Stephen Spector, vol. I, Introduction and Text, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1991), II. 1-216.

25. See, for example, the discussion in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis, MN, 1988), 115-138.

26. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 212-13; Tracy, 413 (see note 19).

27. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 212.

28. Ibid., 215.

29. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 224, quoting Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry, 12:4 (1985-86), 644.

30. Bent Holm, “Flying in Different Directions: American Angels in Denmark,” trans. Per Brask, in Essays on Kushner's Angels, 30-31.

31. Ian Olorenshaw, “Angels in Australia,” Essays on Kushner's Angels, 73.

32. Laszlo Szekrenyi, “Angels in Avignon,” TheaterWeek (5-11 September 1994), 37.