“The messenger has arrived”: the Angel of America as a prophet of intra-action on stage

ABSTRACT

This article analyses representations of the Angel in the staged productions of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America across a span of 25 years, from the 1993 Walter Kerr Theatre premiere on Broadway to the 2017 staging at the Royal National Theatre in London. Using Karen Barad’s theoretical framework of intra-action, I argue that the Angel in the play stands for the dynamism of competing forces of Heaven and Earth, which Barad both represents and challenges. In particular, I emphasise the phenomenology of transcendence, depending on the affordances of the theatrical medium. Barad’s definition of apparatus and her agential realist ontology offer a valuable framework for understanding the complexity and significance of stage design elements, such as the flying gear for the Angel. By recognizing the dynamic, interconnected, and performative nature of such apparatuses, we can gain deeper insights into how theatrical effects are created and how the boundaries between the physical and conceptual realms are navigated in the realm of live performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Angels in America
• The Angel
• intra-action
• transcendence
• American drama

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All references to both parts of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) are taken from: Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. 5^th edition. Theatre Communications Group, 2006.

2. The facts about the history of Angels in America and its subsequent theatrical productions come from the collection of interviews with the play’s creators and production teams carried out by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, published in 2018 in the book The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. The book appears to be a detailed compilation of accounts and anecdotes, capturing the making of Angels in America from its early beginnings to its latest productions. The authors conducted around 200 interviews to expand on their original magazine piece, resulting in a 400-page volume. The review of the Butler and Kois book by Alisa Solomon in American Theatre (2018) suggests that the book serves as an archival testimony to several decades of Angels in America productions. However, the review also points out a significant limitation of the book – the lack of critical engagement on the part of the authors. The reviewer posits that, as a result, the book may be viewed as a comprehensive archival resource rather than a fully fleshed-out critical examination of the iconic theatrical work, and as such it is treated in this article.

3. The fragments of the interviews quoted in this section come from Butler and Kois’ The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, section: Interlude on Angel from Chapter 1 in Act 4, pp. 114–119, thus they will not be individually referenced with page numbers in the text.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Bendrat

Anna Bendrat is an Americanist and a specialist in the fields of rhetoric and communication. She is an assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. As a member of the research team focused on cognitive poetics, her scholarly interests center around the metaphors of body, memory, and emotions in contemporary American literature and media. Her current research focuses on the rhetoric of marginalized identities in contemporary American drama.

She is a board member of the Polish Rhetoric Society and the editor of two open access and peer-reviewed journals: Res Rhetorica and New Horizons in English Studies. In 2016, she published a book in Polish entitled Speech is Golden: The American President and Rhetoric as part of a grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

She is currently conducting research on the works of contemporary American playwrights. In 2020, she received funding from NAWA to stay at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. In 2022, the German Society for Contemporary Drama in English (CDE) awarded her a scholarship to present her research at the 30th CDE conference ‘Theatre & the City’ in Paris, and since 2023 she has been working on a project funded by the National Science Center in Poland (Miniature 6) entitled ‘Rhetorical Deconstruction of the Category of “Out-Side” in Contemporary American Drama by Martyna Majok and Alesha Harris.’