Tony Kushner's Angels In America

Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America is a production that deals with the AIDS crisis in New York and how the lives of the characters are impacted directly and indirectly by the disease. The playwright subtitled his play “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. A “fantasia” is a musical work in which the writer has allowed his or her imagination free play, with one musical idea flowing from another with little regard for “set” or “strict” forms (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Thus, Kushner makes some scenes overlap with each other in the play. He has characters move in and out of coinciding dialogues with each other and rapidly changes settings from offices to houses, from a hospital room to an imagined Antarctica.
The play gives insight into what

At the end of the funeral, Louis does not introduce Prior to his family. This is an indication that he is hiding his sexuality from his own family, who are traditional and conservative. When they go to a bus stop, Prior reveals that he is suffering from AIDS and after the revelation he impersonates a character from the play, Come Back, Little Sheba by William Inge, a play about a closeted homosexual himself. It seems that Prior distances himself from his own sadness by impersonating a character as a kind of defense mechanism in times of misery. There’s nothing inherently “visible” about AIDS, but it targets the immune system so that it weakens it that’s why bruising and bleeding is common, often “marking” its victims as somehow “contaminated.” This may be why some religions propagate beliefs that those who suffer from AIDS are disgusting, impure, and evil.
The scene rapidly changes settings from Louis grandmother’s funeral to Roy Cohn’s office, and he opens with a line addressed to Joe, wishing for him to turn into an octopus. The octopus connected to Roy, seems to be a symbol of corruption and control. He is on the phone with a client and suggests a Broadway production entitled, La Cage. This scene adds an allusion to homosexuality, La Cage is a famous play about gay people pretending to be straight. It is a appropriate work to bring up in Angels in America, which tackles the topic on hiding

The “traditional moral values” that Reagan, Roy Cohn, and other conservatives promote were partly based on the traditional heterosexual family views. Gay people simply weren’t welcome in conservative culture this is why their homosexuality was regarded as perverted or evil. As Kushner’s play suggests, there will always be a conflict between what people believe and what they experience interacting with other people. The world is simply too complicated to be summed up with just one belief system. As the play ends with an epilogue in Bethesda fountain, Kushner establishes a tone of uncertainty and yet optimism. The characters embrace a politically minded worldview, rooted in the idea that man’s most basic quality is the potential to travel, grow, progress, and change. The notion of “curing the sick” has obvious connotation to the AIDS victims in the play — and in this sense, the characters’ prayer that the Bethesda Fountain will one day flow again symbolizes their hope that there will be an end to the AIDS crisis, and homosexuals won’t have to live in fear of death and discrimination. Angels are among the most resonant symbol in Kushner’s play. The Angels symbolizes the ambiguity of all sexual identities. Angels in America is still very timely, it reminds us that the great work must start now; if we don’t take the right steps as a