Tony Kushner

In this article I consider musical and other sonic constructions of queer identity in the television film, Angels in America (HBO, 2003).  I outline various queer strategies in the music and sound of the film, demonstrating how music and sound contribute to unfixed and unstable identities. The readings of the selected scenes in the film reveal the ways in which queer strategies operate, and how film music symbolises identity in flux.

Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening “Afghanistan” has become a conduit for understanding our shared post-9/11 condition. “Afghanistan” serves as a lens through which contemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of 21st century humanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of the U.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impact of war on both human and nonhuman ecologies.

The book argues that post-9/11 global Afghanistan literary production remains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncritical investment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and in anti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book’s first half exposes how persisting anti-socialist biases (including anti-statist bias) not only shaped recent literary and visual texts on Afghanistan (resulting in a distorted portrayal of its tragic history) but also informed these texts’ reception by critics. In the book’s second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge this limited horizon, and in doing so, forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories. Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, and war as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring us a sophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affected in dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.

This thesis provides an intersectional, feminist analysis of Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991, 1992), a tragicomic drama set in the midst of America’s 1980s with its AIDS crisis and Reagan’s conservative politics. I focus on the presented power relations and on the protagonists’ identity as well as the country’s national identity in its specific political context. More specifically, I look at how these elements are constructed and evaluated by the playwright. My main argument is that Kushner creates hybrid and fluid notions of identity, in which the – overall marginalized – characters gain meaning through their intersecting, disidentified identity markers. Furthermore, I argue is that hybridity and plurality are omnipresent in the play: in its content – including the play’s ethical, ideological message of solidarity – but also in its formal dramatic strategies, i.e. on both the micro and the macro-level of the play.

This chapter argues that it is through their parallel engagement with the global that American and Canadian literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have opened up bilateral conversations and avenues of cultural exchange. While a continental or hemispheric identity has shaped transnational North American Studies, it is worthwhile to take an even broader perspective and consider the global networks that have brought American and Canadian writing into closer proximity in mutually illuminating ways. The chapter is organized around two related arguments. Firstly, a sustained comparative inquiry into the global remapping of North American literature must begin with an analysis of how transnational reading paradigms in the two countries seem to proceed in somewhat inexplicable ignorance of one another. While Canadian studies of literature and globalization tend to remain under the radar of U.S.-based scholars, Canadian scholars also appear largely unaware of key works in comparative and transnational American Studies that have transformed the field. Secondly, to redress this mutual misrecognition, the chapter circumscribes the question about the global dimensions of U.S. and Canadian literatures to a scrutiny of how they imagine wars on proxy territories in which both countries have become entangled. American and Canadian literatures have been influenced by international conflict to a greater extent than we may have been aware. To make sense of this influence is to redraw the map of globalized North American Studies in ways that take seriously and do justice to the violent tensions from which such synthesis inevitably grows. Specifically, the chapter examines texts that are uncongenial to the dichotomies of nationality and postnationality often proffered in defense of a global reading of literature, suggesting instead triangular modes of thinking by which the laws of contemporary warfare complicate the one-to-one comparison of one North American national literature to another. In triangular texts of different literary genres, such as Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Jane Urquhart's poetic novel Sanctuary Line (2010), we can trace the fraught terrain of global North American Studies not as a field that imposes a choice between the national and the transnational, or a reconciliation of both, but as an opportunity to compare two distinct visions of the global, visions that have been forged by conflicts in an international arena.

This course will examine aspects of gender in the Jewish tradition. Students are expected to develop a sense of the historical evolution of Judaism, and hence an understanding of its plurality. The first half of the course will focus on the canonical sources of ancient Judaism, namely the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. Themes will include the constructions of gender through narrative, metaphor, and law, as well as the problem of the gender of God. The second half of the course will explore topics i Jewish mysticism and asceticism, and finally the challenges of modernity, especially as they relate to egalitarian worship, feminist theologies, and Judaism as it is constructed as part of an ethno-national identity, in Israel and the United States.

In addition to developing an historical understanding of Judaism (in contrast to an essentialist dogmatic understanding of it), students will also reflect on the construction of gender identities as a social-political product. The diversity of readings will suggest that both Judaism and gender are not stable unified essences, found in a person by virtue of their birth, but rather a complex set of performative choices, resulting in the identity including what a person chooses to make of it. Students will be invited to question the validity of any specific example or claim found in a text, and to consider its relevance to present-day discourse in their own lives.

The following syllabus was used for an advanced course on Gender and Body in Jewish Literature, taught jointly with my spouse. We wanted to combine our interests in Jewish literature throughout the ages, as well as to question the definition of “Jewish texts.” For that purpose, we included Second Temple Jewish authors whose work was not canonized as part of the Jewish tradition, such as the writings of Philo, or the apocryphal Book of Judith. The most notable example in this context is probably the inclusion of selections from the epistles of Paul of Tarsus. Despite the inclusion of his epistles in the New Testament, he remains a Jew who lived before the destruction of the Second Temple. Similarly, our study of Jewish mysticism was not confined to the semi-canonized texts of the Zohar and related literature, but also the more esoteric Shiur Komah, part of the Hekhalot literature. Secular modern Hebrew literature and literature written by or dealing with Jews have long been recognized as Jewish literature, broadening the definition from the religious tradition to the ethnic group. In relation to that we also chose to include the film A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers and a song by Paul Simon, to further broaden the definition of “text.”
The course was intentionally designed to avoid a chronological order or any bias of “canonic” vs. “non-canonic” or “religious” vs. “ethnic” definitions of Judaism. A chronological order might have given the wrong impression of an essentialized development, as well as become a repetition of the Introduction to Judaism course, designed by an historical paradigm. Instead, we organized the course according to three themes:  Body, Gender, and Sexuality. While these topics overlapped throughout the entirety of the course, there is an appropriate sense of progression. We began with the ungendered body, dealing more abstractly with the tension between matter and spirit, then proceeded to various aspects of gender constructions, Jewish patriarchy, misogyny, and the thwarted masculinity of the Jewish body. We concluded with several issues pertaining to sex, some of which mirrored topics from the earlier selections, as in the issue of the relationship between sex and worship that evoked once more questions raised in the second class on God’s body.
In addition to the syllabus, I attach here the timeline and three bibliographies we gave to the students. The timeline is intended to provide the historical framework that the course’s plan refuses to follow. The List of Sources for the syllabus provides full details of all materials used, for those who wish to seek them. Finally, the two bibliographies on the topic, provide further reading, as well as remind us all that the course barely scratched the surface of this fascinating issue.

The epilogue of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America models a queer, interracial, multireligious community, one in which disagreement is possible among those committed to each other and to a common ideal of a just society. Prior’s address includes the audience in the performance space and implicitly charges them to carry this left-leaning, postmodern communitarian vision out into the world.

Audiences, critics, and scholars, however, have frequently criticized this ending as a blemish on an otherwise great work of art. The epilogue has been condemned for being unrealistically optimistic and/or embarrassingly sentimental; for failing to adequately confront its primarily white, heterosexual audience; for falling short of a true vision of radical inclusivity by including the Mormon Hannah but excluding her gay Republican son, or for failing to include any heterosexuals at all; for betraying an insensitivity to economic class issues, and more.

Angels is, despite Kushner’s occasional claims to the contrary, a play with a theological agenda: it speaks of sexual (and especially queer) liberation not purely as a political project, but as a religious one. In the playwright’s hands, issues of sexuality become not merely a matter of the basic human rights of citizens, but a struggle to acknowledge the sacredness of ordinary human pleasures. The play ends with a vision of religious tolerance and a call to action, and yet this appears to be the only aspect of the play that has been roundly criticized by those who have otherwise hailed its importance.

Novelist John Fowles once claimed that any writer who writes as if he means what he says is likely to be accused of aesthetic failure. What is it about activist works of art that tends to get them relegated to the second tier of literary greatness? In this essay I will both evaluate the narrative effectiveness of Kushner’s choice of endings and the play’s success at presenting a vision of religious and political tolerance. Using Angels in America as a case study, I will problematize the issue of whether art can be deliberately created for the end of encouraging religious tolerance and still be taken seriously as art. Suggesting that activist works of art are frequently perceived to be of lesser aesthetic value due to their willingness to uncomfortably challenge the status quo, I will evaluate critical responses to Kushner’s epilogue. Finally, I will examine whether Kushner backed away from a *more* radical political and religious vision for fear of alienating his target audience.

This talk was excerpted from my dissertation. Full chapter here: https://www.academia.edu/558950/The_Erotic_Fringe_Sexual_Minorities_and_Religion_in_Contemporary_American_Literature_and_Film

Widely considered to be one of the most important theatrical pieces accomplished by an American playwright, Tony Kushner’s 1992 work Angels in America simultaneously evokes the images of pollution associated with AIDS victims in the 1980s and brings forward the anti-toxics environmental discourse of that decade. Using Di Chiro’s theorization of “queer ecology” (2010), this paper identifes a relationship in Angels between the heteronormative stigma around queer bodies and the concurrent public anxiety around toxic environmental pollution. First, I demonstrate how Angels produces and critiques the binary which sets "natural" bodies apart from "diseased" or "toxic" bodies, as well as the binary which divides a natural environment from a polluted environment. Kushner draws attention to these binaries with a suite of rhetorical methods and symbols that evoke the “heterosexist” panic surrounding queer or “polluted" bodies during the AIDS crisis. Next, I consider how Angels embodies a queer ecology by imagining an alternative environmental order that disrupts the normative urban/pastoral binary. Finally, this paper points towards a new defnition of a queer, full-blooded ecology, and how that ecology could survive and thrive despite (or perhaps because of) its dirt, trash, and toxins that oppose heteronormative ideals.

This paper will focus on the importance of science in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. When considering this play, much of the conversation with regard to the role science occupies has centered on medicine and biology. This attention is, of course, understandable given the nature and content of the work. I propose, however, to examine an equally important, though rarely discussed, scientific aspect of Kushner’s opus: that of the environment. Global climate change and destruction of the environment in the pursuit of industrial development and corporate profit is central to a full understanding of the drama. For instance, the character of Harper Pitt, while in the throes of Valium-induced hallucinations, believes she can see the ozone layer breaking open. Meanwhile, after discovering the role his second lover Joe has in protecting polluters from class action lawsuits, Louis Ironson experiences an epiphany that marks a turn in the character’s development. Kushner here is drawing parallels between the destruction AIDS causes the human body and the destruction pollution and other environmental hazards cause the global body. The lens of science and literature will be extremely valuable in further discussion of this important play.

In adapting Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America" for television, Mike Nichols accurately respected the political agenda of the author (democratic, hebrew and homosexual), who also wrote the screenplay. The choice of Hadrian’s Villa (instead of a San Francisco devastated by the earthquake of 1906) as a background for the scenes which take place in the Paradise can be understood as coherent with Kushner’s ideological perspective, as well as with his peculiar camp aesthetics.

As well as having been stamped as the hallmark of queer drama in the literature of North America, Angels in America contributed in great extent to raise awareness for the queer and AIDS activism which was having its heyday at the beginning of the 1990s. Angels in America, published in 1991, conveys the story of the 1980s detached and isolated communities of HIV positive people, Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals as the AIDS epidemic striking at its most destructive period in North America. I will attempt to analyse the ways in which the AIDS crisis and queer awareness are intertwined into the long-lasting discussion of identity politics in Angels in America, and I will both argue the effects of the underrepresentation of different minority communities on different characters, and how the play criticizes the misconceptions about these minorities.

The article examines the philosophy of history underlying Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America" and "Slavs!". Among other things, it seeks to outline the dialectics of individual pain, its recognition, and (subaltern) solidarity as one set of preconditions to social change.

The paper takes several texts (Berkoff’s Greek, Bond’s trilogy, The War Plays, Rosenthal’s L.O.W. in Gaia, Kushner’s Angels in America, Butterworth’s The Night Heron, Ridley’s Mercury Fur and Eclipse, Washburn’s Mr. Burns, and Churchill’s Escaped Alone), written for Anglo-American theatre between 1980 and 2020 to analyse how the rhetoric of decadence and renovation changes with the turn of the millennium.

Phenomenology of the body, Self and Identity, Contemporary Art, Political Fiction, Tony Kushner, and 3 more Homosexuality, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, LGBTQ, sexual identity, history, politics, public policy, narrative, script, discourse, critical psychology, HIV/AIDS, ...

Gibt es einen Roman des Neoliberalismus, einen Roman der Krise? Der am 24. Juni 1962 in Duisburg geborene Enno Stahl versucht sich daran. In seinem ersten großen Roman »Diese Seelen« von 2008 erzählte er »Geschichten aus dem Neoliberalismus«, mit »Winkler, Werber« hat er ein »Psychogramm der Krise« vorgelegt.

Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys modern drama across several national traditions from the 1890s to the 1990s. The main objective is to gain understanding of the ways in which these plays both shape and are shaped by the changing conditions under which they were produced, though we also pay particular attention to the evolution of drama as a distinct form of cultural production with its own history and unique aesthetic considerations. Students develop critical thinking and writing skills through discussion, exams, and an essay. Key topics to which we'll return over the course of the semester include class, gender, race, social mobility, tradition, performance, the American Dream, modernism, and postmodernism, among others. Written work must be submitted on time to receive full credit. Students sign up to lead discussion three times during the semester. Discussion leaders guide in-class discussion through a series of questions related to the reading assigned. Policies Attendance: Students may be excused for four absences over the course of the semester. Five or more absences will result in substantial deductions from the final grade for the course. Lateness to class will result in deductions from the final grade for the course. Assignments: All written workmust be submitted in order to receive a grade of C or above. Plagiarism: Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty will result in failing the course.

Introduction by Frank Barron

Part I: The Uncovered Heart
1. Henry Miller / Why Don't You Try to Write?
2. Federico Fellini / Miscellany
3. Pamela Travers / The Interviewer
4. Anna Halprin / The Process Is the Purpose
5. A. E. Housman / The Name and Nature of Poetry
6. Rainer Maria Rilke / Letters to Merline

Part II: The Opened Mind
7. Cathy Johnson / Lost in the Woods
8. Richard Feynman / The Dignified Professor
9. Kary Mullis / The Screwdriver
10. J. G. Bennett / Living in the Medium
11. William Butler Yeats / The Symbolism of Poetry
12. Annie Dillard / Heaven and Earth in Jest

Part III: The Web Of Imagination
13. Mary Shelley / The Genesis of Frankenstein
14. Carl G. Jung / First Years
15. Italo Calvino / Visibility
16. Michel Foucault / The Order of Things
17. Marion Milner / The Plunge into Colour
18. Virginia Woolf / Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
19. Mabel Dodge Luhan / Edge of Taos Desert

Part IV: The Creative Ecology
20. Maurice Sendak / The Shape of Music
21. Maya Angelou / A Life in the Day of Maya Angelou
22. Ingmar Bergman / The Magic Lantern
23. Sidney Bechet / The Second Line
24. Tony Kushner / Is It a Fiction That Playwrights Create Alone?
25. Irving Oyle / Odyssey
26. N. Scott Momaday / The Magic of Words
27. Brian Eno / Why World Music?

Part V: The Dedication to Mastery
28. David Ogilvy / How to Manage an Advertising Agency
29. Leonardo da Vinci / Anatomy
30. Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky / Composing a Symphony
31. Muriel Rukeyser / The Genesis of Orpheus
32. Igor Stravinsky / Poetics of Music
33. Frank Zappa / All About Music
34. Eugen Herrigel / Zen in the Art of Archery

Part IV: The Courage to Go Naked
35. Isadora Duncan / The Mother Cry of Creation
36. Karen Finley / License for Madness
37. Laurence Olivier / Lessons from the Past
38. Mat Callahan / Creation Myth
39. Ursula K. Le Guin / The Fisherwoman's Daughter

Editor's Note
Suggested Readings
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Contributors

Este texto contrasta la manera en que Hannah Arendt y Tony Kushner recuperan cada uno por su parte una comprensión de la identidad judía relacionada con la tradición, para hacernos conscientes de que una manera adecuada de abordar esta identidad es desde una perspectiva política y no psicológica o trágica.

Rad se bavi analizom drame Anđeli u Americi (Milenijum se približava i Perestrojka) američkog dramskog pisca Tonija Kušnera. Analiza se zasniva na Kušnerovoj tezi da preispitivanje ega predstavlja jedan od načina da se preispita individualizam u američkom društvu. S obzirom
na to da se Kušner, kako bi ilustrovao ovu tezu, poziva na Brehtove takozvane „poučne komade”, preispitivanje ega možemo shvatiti kao proces individuacije. Uzimajući u obzir Jungov pojam individiuacije i Kembelov monomit, rad ima za cilj da opiše putovanje likova i na osnovu toga predstavi Kušnerovo viđenje američkog društva na pragu novog milenijuma.
Ključne reči: Anđeli u Americi, ego, individuacija, senka, monomit, fantazija
The paper deals with the analysis of Angels in America (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) by Tony Kushner. The analysis is based on Kushner’s thesis that painful dismantling of the individual ego, that is the process of individuation and self-realization, is one of the ways to question the American myth of the Individual. The paper draws on Jung’s concept of individuation and Campbell’s monomyth to describe the journey of Roy Cohn, Joe Pitt, and Prior Walter and through their journey to present Kushner’s vision of the American society on the threshold of the third millennium.
Key words: Angels in America, ego, individuation, shadow, monomyth, fantasy

"Portraits of the Artist" is a Fall 2018 Swarthmore College English Literature seminar of mine for first-year undergraduate students introducing them to literary and cultural studies—and analytical writing skills—at the college level.  For potential majors in all fields, including humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.

Arguably the most infamous queer utterance regarding California is Gertrude Stein’s oft-repeated phrase, “there is no there there.” Returning to Oakland after decades abroad, Stein found that her pastoral childhood home had disappeared, swallowed by the rapid urbanization of the early 20th century. While specific to her own 19th century expatriate experience, Stein’s memorialization of California as a paradise found and lost still echoes in the writing of queer Americans one century later. This essay connects the literary image of California to the queer history and politics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, considering the symbolic role California continues to play in the queer longing for spaces of possibility--for homelands lost, found, or yet to arrive--during and after the impact of AIDS. The late 20th century queer literary archive represents California as a utopian space that is desired, anticipated, and grieved by authors who continue to struggle with the bloody and romantic legacies of national expansion. For writers such as Cherrie Moraga, Chrystos, and Jewell Gomez, this utopian urge mourns the predatory decimation of California’s lands and Native cultures; for others such as Tony Kushner, Michelle Tea, and Armistead Maupin, it is a celebration of queer subcultural belonging as a model for the national future. Whether as a conquered territory, a revolution, or a heaven on earth, the queer utopian imaginary represents modern California as a place that is paradoxically here and yet not quite--always approaching on the horizon, always receding under our feet.

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play "Homebody/Kabul" and the Old English "Ruin" poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just outside of the artwork--as criticism--but also within it, in the relationship between the artist and his medium, and even within the medium itself). This essay also ruminates, with reference to an extremely topical contemporary play and a densely opaque remnant of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the ethical dimensions of the use of the imagination to stage encounters between the present and the past, between being and history. According to Levinas, being cannot be explained in its total reality without “the perspective of the relation with the other” (“Reality and its shadow”); therefore, following the ethical thought of Levinas, and also the historiographical thought of Michel de Certeau, this essay looks as well at the expression of heterology (or, a discourse on the Other) in both works--an expression, moreover, that, in Certeau’s words, “causes the production of an exchange among living souls” that “fashions out of language the forever-remnant trace of a beginning that is as impossible to recover as to forget.”

This article draws upon the recent work of Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič to explore the relationship between theatrical comedy and the sublime. These Slovenian theorists’ Lacan-inspired approach encourages us to complicate traditional conceptions of comedy, which often tend to regard the comic as contrasting with sublimity and transcendence, emphasizing our finitude and physical-material limitations. If comedy often invites us to accept (and indeed to celebrate) the fact that we are “only human,” a close examination of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion (a free adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique) will accentuate a contrary thrust in comedy, stressing the latter’s  insistence on problematizing the finite. If much comedy delights in human flaws, celebrating those endearing foibles correlative to our finitude, I argue that the true object of Kushner’s comedy is the “flaw” afflicting finitude itself. Central to my exploration of The Illusion is the question of how theatrical experience can address and respond to this paradoxical “failed finitude” which Žižek and Zupančič identify at the heart of the human subject. I argue that the play ultimately stages a “traversal of the fantasy” which, in its very comedy, gestures toward new modes of configuring our relation to the sublime and confronting what Lacan calls the Real.

Review of Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Directed and adapted by Tom Dewispelaere and Stijn Van Opstal. Olympique Dramatique. Toneelhuis, Bourlaschouwburg, Antwerp, 31 January 2020. Originally published in Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 4, 2020, pp. 501-503.

Tony Kushner is best-known as a political playwright whose texts expose the ravages of AIDS, the discontents of Reagan America, the destructive impact of Western imperialism on Afghanistan and, more recently, the death of labour radicalism. The serious nature of these issues may seem to preclude the presence of comical elements. Yet this is not at all the case. The six-hour behemoth Angels in America would probably have become plain unbearable if it were not for its many light notes: the play’s principle AIDS victim dressing up like Morticia Addams, a stuck tape recorder in the Diorama Room of the Mormon Visitor’s Centre, finding out thanks to Republican despot Roy Cohn that Cats deals in fact with cats etc. Before he embarked on the tremendous venture which was Angels in America, Kushner tried his hand at a comedy genre when he wrote Hydriotaphia or The Death of Dr. Browne: An Epic Farce about Death and Primitive Capital Accumulation. The author himself called the play “a crash course in learning how to write jokes” but feared the baffled audiences of its first two performances failed to assess it as such. Perhaps Hydriotaphia confuses because its generic designation as a farce clashes with the gravity of its political subject matter, an issue I would like to explore in my paper. Farce tends to be light, is meant to induce laughter and interspersed with scatological elements. Whereas all of this applies to Kushner’s play, its title at the same time refers to a concept of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – not exactly known for their jocularity – and its dying main character is based on a seventeenth-century writer/scientist who devoted works to serious subjects such as religion and medicine.

Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul soon gained notoriety after its December 2001 New York production as a play predicting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The hubbub centred mostly on the lines “You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York! Well, don’t worry, they’re coming to New York! Americans!” spoken by an angry Afghani woman, disenchanted in equal measure with the West as well as her own country. Critics of the production divided along the lines of those against and those in favour of President George W. Bush’s budding war on terror. But in essence Kushner’s play tells the story of a trip gone very bad. The first scene consists entirely of a monologue by a rambling and wildly unhappy British housewife who decides to escape her dreary family life after she meets an Afghani shopkeeper. She leaves for Kabul and the remainder of the play finds her daughter and husband in that very city trying to figure out what exactly has happened to her. While describing these characters’ journey, Kushner rewrites a number of familiar travel narratives including the pilgrimage and the imperialist exploit. The Middle East has long been a prime destination for devout travellers, interested in visiting places associated with Christ’s life. Kushner’s voyagers, by contrast, pay a visit to the grave of Cain, a famed biblical murderer who would not seem capable of bestowing the kind of blessing pilgrims tend to seek. Yet the character in question does leave spiritually enriched regardless of the unconventional choice of location. In my paper, I would like to trace the different travel narratives Kushner draws upon and explore how he rewrites them. Also, I want to assess whether he always manages to move far enough away from the original narratives, since Kushner has been accused of Orientalism in the context of this play.

The conflict between truth and deceit, reality and appearance, being and seeming is a theme to which theater is perfectly suited, because theater is deception in service of truth. Drama is densely populated by duplicitous schemers, by power figures whose lies maintain the sociopolitical status quo, and by characters in search of themselves, who mirror to us our confusions and self-deceptions about self. Theater provides a template for understanding identity and insight into several existentially and socially necessary forms of deceit. Excerpts from Hamlet, King Lear, Peer Gynt, Angels in America, and several other plays.

If the American gay community establishes the beginning of their sexual liberation movement in 1969 (Stonewall), their most important setback can be placed at the beginning of the 1980s, with the advent of AIDS. Such an event could not be just avoided since it turned to be determinant, literally, for the lives of many. Inevitably, it soon became a key theme in gay literature. The aim of this paper is to analyse the consequences of AIDS regarding the representation of the marked body and its social implications. For this purpose, I will analyse the representations of the body and the discourses concerning it that appear in The Normal Heart (1985)  and The Destiny of Me (1992), by Larry Kramer, and the two parts of Angels in America (1990-1991), by Tony Kushner. Both authors are well-known AIDS activists from New York, from Jewish origin and addressing their plays to a mainstream audience. However, as Cohen notices, they have not been placed together very often (1998: 197).