SUSAN BENNETT
"Only in Alberta? Angels in America and Canada" provides a Canadian theatre history for Kushner's Pulitzer prize-winning epic. In the context of Angels' critical reception, the paper examines the entry of the play into such a history as both a gay play and a history play. The discussion elaborates the critical discourses which would subsume gay identity under a broader politic of liberal pluralism, an effect of which, it is suggested, is to render the homosexual intolerable. Angels in America, however, is seen as a resistant text which calls into question the very operations of that politic. Following from Alan Sinfield's recent discussion of gay identity claimed by an ethnicity-and-rights model, the essay considers the potentialities of Angels in laying bare the assumptions that make such identifications crucial to the play's reception.
"Only in America? Angels in America and Canada" fournit une histoire du théâtre canadien pour cette pièce épique qui a remporté le prix Pulitzer. Dans le cadre de la réception critique d'Angels, cet article examine l'entrée dans une telle histoire de cette pièce à la fois gaie et historique. La discussion élabore les discours critiques dont la catégorisation de l'identité gaie sous une politique plus large de pluralisme libéral rend, suggérons-nous, l'homosexuel intolérable. Angels in America, cependant, est vu comme un texte de résistance qui met en question les opérations même de cette politique. Suite à la discussion récente d'Alan Sinfield sur l'identité gaie revendiquée par un modèle d'éthnicité et de droits, cet essai considère les potentialités d'Angels en dévoilant les suppositions qui rendent de telles identifications essentielles à la réception de la pièce.
Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.
Does this sound like me, Henry? (Roy, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches 45)
Is homosexuality intolerable? - that is the ultimate question. (Sinfield 276)
1. "America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations" (Joe, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches 26)
Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the 1993 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, enters theatre history as certainly the most successful play of the decade and it is not surprising, then, that there has been in Canada almost a stampede to get production of the two-part epic onto our stages. Not since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) has any play been so widely regarded as a barometer of the times (especially in North America but elsewhere in the world, as well) and, in this context, the production and reception histories of Angels in America merit particularly close attention. From Kushner's sub-title for his text, "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the play is marked as imbricated in two of the most freighted and controversial identifications in a positionality-saturated world; it asks explicitly: "what does it mean to "be" gay" and "how does that mean in a 'theme' that is 'America' "? Whatever its geographic specificity, these are the questions that a production of Angels in America brings to its audiences' attention and there is, apparently, a fluctuating, variable relation between these two critical components: gay and/in America. More generally, performances of Angels in America interrogate the very "notion of gay ethnicity" (Sinfield 290) and its operations in contemporary cultural experience. What I want to address is the play's critical reception in a Canadian context as one response to Alan Sinfield's provocative inquiry that opens this paper.
First, then, it is useful to mark the expeditious and literally far-reaching production history of Kushner's landmark play. Millennium Approaches (the first part of Angels) was originally workshopped by the Center Theater Group at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in May of 1990. Several full professional productions (involving some very prestigious venues and directors) followed over the next three years (The Eureka Theatre Company of San Francisco in May 1991; the Royal National Theatre in London under the direction of Cheek by Jowl's Declan Donellan, January 1992; at the Mark Taper Forum in November 1992; the Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf Theatre under the direction of playwright Michael Gow in February 1993; and at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York in April 1993, under the direction of George C. Wolfe).1 With so many early, significant productions, it is no wonder that Robert Brustein noted that Millennium Approaches "may very well be the most highly publicized play in American theater history" (29)2 and even Frank Rich, who admits he "reached voting age just after the heyday of Miller and Williams and Albee," calls Angels in America "the most thrilling new American play of my adult lifetime" (6 June 1993). Almost all the major reviewers of the London and New York productions of Kushner's drama gush in their enthusiasm for the epic, including overtly conservative critics more or less conceding the play's brilliance, so that by the time Angels reached New York in 1993, Rich could comment: "This play has already been talked about so much that you may feel you have already seen it, but believe me, you haven't, even if you actually have" (5 May 1993).
So what of Angels in America in Canada, its performance venues and its critical impact? The Manitoba Theatre Company (MTC) staged a coup in securing its first production in this country. As Kevin Prokosh reports in the Winnipeg Free Press, MTC's prescience in getting the rights for Kushner's play translated, seemingly, into very good box-office: "The inclusion of Angels on the Warehouse playbills credited with sending season subscriptions shooting up 38 per cent this year to 2,903" (D1). Equally enthusiastic was Linda Rosborough's review of the production for the Winnipeg newspaper. Granting Angels four and a half out of five possible stars, Rosborough starts her review:
When a play is touted as the best of the last 50 years, that's a heap of hype. But with the vast, passionate and witty Angels in America, the gush of praise is well-earned. The capacity crowd was on its feet Wednesday night at the MTC Warehouse, following the Canadian premiere of the intensely funny and sad play. (D4)
Rosborough's review dwells on the humanity of Kushner's text, calling the writing "the real star of the show" and the cast "exceptional." Only as a penultimate paragraph does she issue any kind of warning to potential spectators and then rather factually and as a springboard for her final praise:
Angels in America contains strong language and frank discussions about sexuality, but nudity is minimal. Far more naked are the characters, who, despite their failings and weaknesses, are hopeful in their quests for love and acceptance. For all the sadness, sickness and greed in his story, Kushner still believes in angels. (D4)
In both Prokosh's preview piece (based on a one-hour phone interview with the playwright, as well as conversations with MTC's artistic director Steven Schipper and University of Winnipeg theatre professor Per Brask who had recently edited a volume of critical essays on the play) and Rosborough's review, there is a low key but confident endorsement of Angels in America as both a timely and relevant play. While both writers mark this as a gay play, both contextualize this constituency in the larger scheme of apparently shared cultural experience: "The play covers all the bases: life, death, love, hate, religion and politics" (Prokosh D1).
Much more critical of MTC's premiere production is Kate Taylor, reviewing the play for the The Globe and Mail.3 Content to award a more measly two and a half stars, Taylor concludes: "MTC is the first Canadian theatre with the courage to mount Angels in America, and there are courageous moments in this production, but generally it is one that exposes Kushner's few weaknesses without glorifying his many strengths" ("Angels Needs"). Taylor's consideration of the MTC production dwells on characterization; it is evident that she believes that it is the characters who are at the heart of Kushner's text (though how Taylor ever manages to see Joe and Harper as a "straight" couple I cannot quite imagine) and that MTC does not fulfill her expectations in this area.
Since Canada's premiere production of Angels in Winnipeg, there have been several others: Edmonton's Phoenix Theatre (Part I, October 1996) and Citadel Theatre (Part II, October 1996), Toronto's Canadian Stage (Part I, September 1996; Part II, November 1996), Calgary's Alberta Theatre Projects (Part I, September 1996; Parts I and II, May/June 1997) and Halifax's Neptune Theatre (February 1997). The Centaur Theatre production in Montreal opened in May 1997. Critical reception of these various productions is, generally, benign: Vit Wagner for The Toronto Star concludes that Canadian Stage's production "does what every production of a great play should do. It leaves little doubt that the play is indeed great"; Liz Nicholls in The Edmonton Journal gives perhaps the most rounded and sensible of any of the Canadian critics drawing positive attention to the play's political emphasis and seeing the representation of gay lives within that overtly drawn politics;(4) Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail's reviewer for the Winnipeg production, returns to preview ("On") and review the Toronto version. Persuaded on this occasion to raise her approval rating to four stars, she has, moreover, revised her account of Joe and Harper as a couple who are "nominally straight' ("Angels Mixes"). Most recently, Elissa Barnard in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald describes the play as the theatrical event of the 1990s, a bold exploration of "issues of politics, spirituality and sexuality". (B4) But, alongside all this Canadian critical acclaim, there is, as Barnard notes, the controversy of the Calgary production: "When the play was staged at Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary, a few MLAs tried to pull government funding from Alberta Theatre Projects because of their production of a 'gay' play, something that was spoofed on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The play was sold out every night". (B4)
Calgary, then, seems the logical site on which to stage an interrogation of Alan Sinfield's question of tolerance and homosexual identity.
2. "What's it like to be the child of the Zeitgeist?" (Louis, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, 71)
Perhaps the best indicator of the depth and duration of the media attention given to the Alberta Theatre Projects production of Angels might be given in a citation from an encomium to Calgary published in Maclean's some five months after the play's opening. The cover of Maclean's February 24, 1997 issue proclaims "Calgary: On Top of the World. The nation's centre of gravity is shifting to the 'new' West," but within the piece's opening paragraph, such splashy claims are modified: "And yet when a local theatre company stages a play with gay themes and nudity--even a Pulitzer Prize-winning one--it sets off something of a tempest" (13). Even--or perhaps especially--measured against the attack on Angels delivered by a fundamentalist minister in Charlotte, North Carolina (where the production also went ahead successfully), Calgary alone in its response to Kushner's play seems to stand as evidence within Canada of an intolerance for homosexuality, or even its on-stage representation.5
The reaction of staunch conservatives within the Alberta Legislature was, of course, not unprecedented. Similar outrage and threat had been expressed in response to an Alberta College of Art show "Bound to be Tongue Tied--Gagging on Gender," the New Gallery's installation "Fantasmagoria: Sexing the Lesbian Imaginary," and, most notoriously, Maenad Theatre's presentation of American performance artist, Holly Hughes.6 At the time of the protests against Hughes's performances, then Community Development Minister Gary Mar said: "There have been some Alberta Foundation for the Arts [AFA] supported shows recently which many Albertans have objected to seeing government dollars going towards funding. I've looked at the situation, reviewed it, and I've asked the AFA to end project-specific funding."7 In the end, of course, no such action was taken, but the threat was, at least at the time, taken seriously.8 In this context, it could be argued that Alberta Theatre Projects would have anticipated both the media and legislature attention and, indeed, their public relations and sponsorship strategies for the play suggest that they had done precisely that.
The Calgary story starts even before Angels had opened at the Martha Cohen theatre in the centrally-located Centre for the Performing Arts. Peter Stockland, a regular columnist for The Calgary Herald, described the play as, among other things, "offering all the benefits of left-wing enlightenment provided by wobbly bare male bottoms, simulated homosexual copulation, and language that would sear the ears of a sailor's parrot" (A12). The other city newspaper, The Calgary Sun, was in the fray two days later with its own description provided by Steve Chase of their Legislature Bureau: "a seven-hour gay epic including sex scenes between men, frequent partial nudity and plenty of swearing." On the same day (September 13, 1996), the paper's editorial took Angels as its subject with a headline "Curtain down":
Alberta Theatre Projects is about to stage a seven-hour homosexual epic at the prestigious Calgary Centre for Performing Arts that depicts simulated sex scenes between men and with obscene language for sound effects.
What great family entertainment for the company that just months ago gave us My Fair Lady!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Due to cutbacks, hospitals are closing and nurses are losing their jobs, teachers have been laid off, schools are overcrowded, and the elderly are caught in a vise.
Yet taxpayers are still having to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that stages a self-indulgent production many feel is abhorrent. It is simply not right.
And five Tory MLAs (Lorne Taylor, Jon Havelock, Heather Forsyth, Judy Gordon and Ron Hierath) had already pitched in to demand, in an echo of Gary Mar, the withdrawal of government support to Alberta Theatre Projects.9
This, by any account, is a public display of intolerance, especially given that ATP's production did not even open until September 15. By the time I saw the production, a couple of weeks into the run, ATP had "opinion boards" up in the lobby for audience members to contribute feedback as well as a programme insert which sought contributions towards a $50,000 goal for underwriting costs of the production of both parts of Kushner's epic. The insert, which had attached to it copies of The Calgary Sun condemnation of the play as well as Peter Stockland's original piece for The Calgary Herald, asked
Despite the outcries from certain members of this community who believe that it is wrong for ATP to present these plays, many Canadians have responded with their support. Currently we are at 52% of our goal. Do you believe in Angels? Please read the attached newspaper articles and decide for yourself. We are looking for people to join our roster of Angels by contributing to one of our nine choirs [donation levels].
Moreover, The Calgary Herald returned to the production some two weeks after opening night with an almost full page coverage, divided between two regular columnists: Peter Stockland (again) and Don Martin who had attended a performance with one of the Tory MLAs, Jon Havelock. (ATP had offered complementary tickets to any MLA who wanted to see the show.)
Quite surprisingly, Don Martin was able to describe a conversion of Jon Havelock to the cause of Kushner's play:
By the end of the show, Havelock was so caught up in the plot he was describing his disappointment that an AIDS victim's gay lover had left for another man. If that sounds like a bizarre conversation with an Alberta Tory, you're right.
Okay, let the record show there was an apparent act of anal sex deep in the shadows. For about two seconds. Two men kissed. Once.
As for the nudity, puhleeze, an actor dropped his shorts and allegedly exposed himself while completely covered with a night shirt.
As for Havelock's reaction, it was a refreshing display of a politician entering a debate with his eyes open and his judgment on hold.
He was enthralled. After one hilarious, insightful dialogue on racism in America, the MLA for Calgary Shaw actually felt compelled to applaud. And he did. Solo.
Don Martin's intervention in the debate is obviously to be applauded. His attention to how small detail had been overstated in the hostile press, not to mention his willingness to accompany Havelock to the theatre, was undoubtedly useful to those proposing a more open viewing of the play. And even if Havelock's enthusiasm might have been that of a naive and infrequent theatregoer, his change of heart did much, I think, to dampen the spirits of the protesters and give weight to the claims made elsewhere in the world for Kushner's drama. On the other hand, on the same newspaper page, Peter Stockland repeated his original criticism and then some, under the heading "Pump vigor into the arts- - -let's all boo and hiss": "Seen and heard, what's truly alarming about Angels is not its omnipresent profanity and vulgarity, but its reduction of the art form of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière and Oscar Wilde to the depth and breadth of a cast-off T-shirt." The call to return to canonical dramatic literature--which is to say, so-called "good art"--is altogether another tactic, and one to which I'll return, but here one wonders if Stockland remembers the fact that Oedipus slept with his own mother, has heard the profanities that punctuate Shakespeare's English, realizes Molière was denied a Christian burial, or knows that Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.10 If he's tongue in cheek about all this, and I find that unlikely, then it's a subtlety that would be completely lost on his supporters. His conclusion is that the audience must take back the boo and be prepared to hiss at the end of every performance of the play, a recommendation that Calgary audiences failed to seize upon.
On October 7, Alberta Report endorsed Stockland's attack, running the Calgary and Edmonton productions11 of Angels in America as its cover story. Kevin Michael Grace leads off his cover story article as follows: "Live theatre is very much a minority taste in Alberta. Few attend, and despite generous government support, most theatre companies hover perennially on the verge of insolvency" (34) and then turns specifically to the first part of Angels:
Millennium Approaches is an artistic failure but it bears a powerful revolutionary message. While it elevates the belief current in the 'AIDS community' that victims of the disease are holy martyrs, homosexuals and AIDS victims are only one division of Mr. Kushner's vaster army: one that seeks to destroy the very concept of the law--on earth and in heaven (34).
At first glance, it would appear that Alberta Report has realized that its frequent attacks on homosexuality have not been particularly effective and that they have changed their approach to look not at the representation of a minority identity (here, gay) but to focus insteaad on the explicit politics of the play: "Playwright Tony Kushner, however, is not interested primarily in sex. His obsession is politics" (35). And there is a way in which the Alberta Report gets the point--and the play--in a way that other Canadian critical responses seemed determined not to. Sex is not sequestered in order to give way to praise for the play's humanity, spirituality and universality; instead Alberta Report makes gay sex the avatar of Kushner's left-wing agenda. Ironically, they point precisely to the strength of Angels to enact the intolerances of contemporary North American culture, one of which circulates around the visibility of homosexuality.
Moreover, Alberta Report astutely observes the economic benefits that can accrue to a theatre company in the kind of controversy Stockland had stimulated. The piece claims "[c]onsidering Angels' true lack of novelty, Alberta Theatre Projects, and its producer Michael Dobbin, must be pleased with their success in using scandal as a marketing tool. . . . Mr. Dobbin anticipates that Millennium Approaches will fill the theatre to 90% capacity during its run" (35). Theatregoers may or may not have been brought to the theatre by all the deserving praise and awards that Kushner's play has received, but there does seem to have been an unmistakable advantage for any Canadian theatre box office in adding an apparently controversial choice to a production season. Whereas Ian Olorenshaw comments of early Australian productions that audiences were around the 50% capacity and cites the audience development manager at the Melbourne Theatre Company, "the subscription audience for Millennium Approaches was low and that most of the general public ticket sales came from university ranks and the homosexual community" (67), the Canadian audiences have been far more mainstream and far higher in percentage attendance. While I don't mean to suggest that the Alberta Report is right (or, perhaps more accurately, I do mean to suggest they are right but for the wrong reasons), there is the question--important, I think--of what Angels in America offers to mainstream repertory companies and their audiences. How, then, does intolerance--to use a theatrical metaphor--get "performed"?
Rather than see the oppositions to the play in Alberta as symptomatic of the province's dinosaur mentality and its ultra-conservative politics--something that would rely on an all too easy cliché--it might be more useful to see these declarations as the overt and unselfconscious statements of the assumptions and fears that attach to any mainstream production of Angels. It is not a case, then, of "only in Alberta" but, more accurately, "clearly in Alberta," and, I think, instructive as such.
3. "Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean." (Roy, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, 45).
To return to Alan Sinfield's provocative question and gay "ethnicity," it is worth remembering, as Sinfield himself suggests that, "it is not that existing categories of gay men and lesbians have come forward to claim their rights, but that we have become constituted as gay in the terms of a discourse of ethnicity-and-rights" (272). As he continues:
There are drawbacks with envisaging ourselves through a framework of ethnicity-and-rights. One is that it consolidates our constituency at the expense of limiting it. . . .
Also, fixing our constituency on the ethnicity-and-rights model lets the sex-gender system off the hook. It encourages the inference that an out-group needs concessions, rather than the mainstream needing correction. (272-73)
It is precisely this kind of performance of ethnicity-and-rights which prompts Gordon Rogoff to offer an ironic assessment of Angels:
[I]f Kushner wished merely to be current, he would have had to be more inclusive, offering a rainbow coalition of super-shifts and sappy saints--more WASPs, surely more fundamentalists, one real Lesbian at least, a Native American to go with the Eskimo who passes through the Mormon wife's fantasy, and no doubt some country-western twangers, Hispanics, CEOs, students, seniors, and maybe even a token president or Supreme Court justice or car salesman, real estate agent, talk-show host, or perhaps David Schine, the forgotten man in the real Roy Cohn saga. (28)
But Kushner knows exactly the "trap of the visual field," as Peggy Phelan has described it. Phelan argues the trap lies in the seeming "promise to show all, even while [the visual field] fails to show the subject who looks, and thus fails to show what the looker most wants to see (24). And this is true. So, to enter the specular economy "as a" gay man (or any other "ethnicity" under the rights model) provides a very limited political opportunity. More likely, it is limited to and by the very conditions of heteronormative reception processes which Tom Waugh has usefully elaborated in the context of gay male film:
[N]on-gay spectators, one can speculate, attach their voyeuristic fix on the gay subject himself, shaped through discourses of stereotype, freakshow, and pathos/victimization. . . . Meanwhile, straight critics actively stifled gay discourses around these films, either through homophobic panic, liberal tolerance ("I'm so matter-of-fact and cool that sexual orientation doesn't have to be mentioned"), or allegorical exegesis ("This film is not about gayness, it's about fill-in-the-blank"). If the built-in ambiguity of the narrative codes of the art cinema allowed gay authors space to create, it denied them the chance to nurture a continuous and coherent gay audience. Instead, we remained invisible and covert spectators, a divided and discontinuous audience. (156)
In the Canadian reviews of Angels, there is plenty of evidence for liberal tolerance and allegorical exegesis--indeed, it is encouraged by the play itself. Homophobic panic, something the play lays bare in Joe's own horror at his sexual desires, is, too, evident in the narratives that attempt to make sense of Kushner's project for a mainstream theatre-going public. Consider, in this regard, Elissa Barnard's preview piece for the Halifax press. While on the one hand, she quotes actor Peter Hutt's criticism of the real Roy Cohn and his refusal in a 60 Minutes interview to admit to either homosexuality or AIDS, she is also at pains to point out that Hutt will celebrate finishing his run as Kushner's Roy Cohn with a Caribbean holiday "with his wife, who'll come to see him in Angels, and two young daughters, who won't" (B4). Also, we're told, that Jordan Pettle (Louis in the Neptune Theatre production) got into acting in high school because acting, rather than sport (his apparent first choice) made it easier to meet girls.
An effect, then, of making gay identity visible and to find that project garnering mainstream recognition is, inevitably, "yet another measure of the power of liberal pluralism to neutralize oppositional practices" (Savran 226). Where the liberal pluralism is a little less liberal (which is to say, in the Canadian context, Alberta), the specificities of that effect become just a little better focussed. The attack returns here to the notion of "good art" (in itself, always already a dangerous territory because of its attractiveness as a career choice to gay men and promiscuous women). In our contemporary moment, Alberta dares to say out loud what most Western societies have been practising: cut funding for art because it is undeserving and only of interest to a small percentage of the population. And the New Right assumes the right to say what small percentage of society that can be (those who, in the most conservative sense, can afford it). This is a political issue that continues to confront artists in all media. Related and relevant is the introduction of H.R. 122 in Congress by Sam Johnson (a Republican from Texas) on 7 January 1997; H.R. 122 would amend the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Council on the Arts. Equally germane is a critical practice, explicit or implicit, that would elide sexuality under the banner of politics (akin to Sinfield's attention to "letting the sex-gender system off the hook"). Once again, the New Right sets the agenda, claiming "their" art is above and beyond politics (and therefore, ironically, "good"), leaving the Left scrambling to defend itself and its own art. Furthermore, a recourse to the generalized category "politics" denies the particulars of gay history. This is absolutely what Angels in America seeks to avoid.
In a Foreword to John Clum's anthology of gay male plays, Kushner describes "having arrived as a community with a history--of both oppression and liberation" (ix) and it is the hybrid experience of oppression and liberation that makes Angels such an important and such an impressive drama. As well as contributing to a liberal pluralist economy (which can only ever re-affirm the status quo), the play's success, David Savran rightly claims, "also suggests a willingness to recognize the contributions of gay men to American culture and to American literature, in particular" (226).12
Finally, then, it might be said that homosexuality, as it is made visible in Angels in America, is tolerated rather intolerantly. And that, in the end, is not altogether a bad thing. The play falls into the trap of the visual field with a self-conscious fashioning. It performs a hybridity of oppression and liberation that cannot ever quite be subsumed by liberal humanism or related homophobic panic precisely because it assumes a relation to these expressions of mainstream Western cultures, a relation that is pliable and contingent. At the end of his powerful argument, Sinfield concludes:
One inference from anti-essentialist theory should be that we cannot simply throw off our current constructions. We are consequences of our histories - those that have been forced upon us and those that we have made ourselves--and we have to start from there. The notion of gay ethnicity is intuitively powerful and therefore we have to remain in negotiation with it. At the same time, it is because we believe that culture constructs the scope for our identities that we may believe those identities to be contingent and provisional, and therefore may strive to revise our own self-understanding and representation. Subcultural work is our opportunity to support each other in our present conditions, and to work towards transforming those conditions. 'Together, we will learn and teach' - 'Go West.'
Sinfield's reference is, of course, to a hit song from 70s disco stars and gay icons, the Village People (and, more recently, the Pet Shop Boys' remake of the same), but he might as well be referring to Angels in America in Calgary. In the subculture of theatre in this particular West, the very premises in which art and the ethnicity of identity are conceived and regulated strain at the limits of liberal tolerance. At the same time, both somehow exceed their prescribed conditions. How, then, could it be any surprise that the very province that has made so much fuss about Angels in America and Canada is expecting to host Tony Kushner as a 1998 Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary. Go West, indeed.
Notes
1. Angels in America has also been widely produced in very many other countries; according to
David Savran, there would be productions in seventeen countries during the 1994-95 theatre
season (129). His interview with Kushner--as well as essays about Danish, German and
Australian productions of the play--can be found in Per Brask's Essays on Kushner's Angels.
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2. Brustein's article on Angels entitled "Angles in America" which contained some speculation on
some fighting between Oscar Eustis (the director of the Los Angeles production) and the
playwright brought about a swift and angry response from Kusher. And, in turn, Brustein
responds, concluding that "Kushner wants to be both a radical non-conformist and universally
loved." Kushner's letter and Brustein's riposte are in The New Republic 14 June 1993: 4-5.
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3. The preview piece and review in the Globe & Mail for the Toronto production some eight
months later were also authored by Kate Taylor--her rather more animated discussion in these
columns is discussed later in my article.
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4. Nicholls writes:
The arguments are big, and extravagantly put. They restore theatre to the kind of central hotspot in American political life it hasn't occupied for years, not to say decades. And they locate, and empower, the gay community in the larger context of American history and politics (B9).
She, better than any other reviewer, understands Kushner's interweaving of social and sexual
issues in Angels and doesn't for a moment recuperate the play for a liberal humanist agenda:
"And it's no mere liberal apology, though Kushner has puckishly said that it's easier to come out
of the closet as a homosexual than a socialist in modern America" (B9).
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5. See Kate Taylor's piece for The Globe and Mail (September 26, 1996: C1-2). Accounts of
protests in Charlotte seem to be centered, not surprisingly, on the opinion of one fundamentalist
minister and in opposition to general opinion in the town--a town, it might be noted, with only
about half the population of Calgary.
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6. Hughes had achieved international notoriety as one of the four performance artists defunded by
the National Endowment for the Arts. As she puts it, "When Congress passed restrictive
language in 1989, equating homosexuality with obsecnity, I knew that as one of the few lesbians
to get NEA funding for 'out' work presented in publicly funded spaces, I was skating on thin ice'
(Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996, 19).
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7. The backlash against Holly Hughes's performances in Calgary I have discussed in a piece co-written with Maenad Artistic Director, Alexandria Patience. "Bad Girls Looking for Money" is
in Canadian Theatre Review 82 (Spring 1995) 10-13. For the discussion of Hughes and the
government reaction, see especially 13.
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8. The truly puzzling aspect is why the Legislature seems to scrutinize Calgary's theatre much
more avidly than Edmonton's, at least beyond the capital city's general anxiety about its faster
growing competitor to the south.
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9. Alberta Theatre Projects was the recipient of about $500,000 from the Alberta Foundation for
the Arts towards the 1996-97 operating season.
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10. Tom Waugh writes of Dorian Gray that the play "may not have been the first work to posit
artistic representatoin as some kind of metaphoric analogue of gay identity, and the artist-intellectual as the gay prototype, but it is undoubtedly the Ur-text of the third body [implied gay
subject] narratives" (149).
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11. Calgary's production was still on stage; Edmonton's was soon to open.
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12. Savran goes on to ask:
What is one to make of the remarkable ease with which Angels in America has been accommodated to that lineage of American drama (and literature) that focuses on masculine experience and agency and produces women as the premise for history, as the ground on which it is constructed? Are not women sacrificed--yet again--to the male citizenry of a (queer) nation? (226)
This seems like an important, and disturbingly accurate, observation. That Angels in America is
all about men is probably the best reason there is for its success. A more recent tirade in Alberta
Report came in the form of an attack on the University of Alberta's "doctrinaire feminism" (by
which they referred to the appointment of a new woman chairman of the Political Science
Department involving for "her close personal friend and colleague" an assistant professorship in
women's studies) and gestures tellingly through some faux graffiti in their cover illustration that
this means "Death to Dead White Males"---hardly, one would have thought, much of a threat.
See Alberta Report, 30 September 1996.
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I am grateful to my assistant, bj wray, for the excellent research on Angels in Americashe produced. Her help has been made possible through a grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
WORKS CITED
Barnard, Elissa. "Angels among us." Halifax Chronicle-Herald 6 Feb.1997: B1+.
Bennett, Susan and Alexandria Patience. "Maenad Making Feminist Theatre in Alberta." Canadian Theatre Review 82 (1995) 10-13.
Brask, Per. Essays on Kushner's Angels. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1995.
Brustein, Robert. "Angels in America." The New Republic 24 May 1993: 29-31.
Chase, Steve. "Anger rises over gay play." The Calgary Sun 13 Sept.1996: 7.
Clum, John M. Staging Gay Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay Theatre. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996.
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Grace, Kevin Michael. "The Lawless Millennium." Alberta Report 7 Oct.1996: 34-7.
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Mar, Gary. Alberta Hansard 26 May 1994: 2126
Martin, Don. The Calgary Herald Sept. 27, 1996: A15.
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- - -. "Part II Angels." The Edmonton Journal 27 October 1996: D1.
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Rich, Frank. Rev. of Angels in America. New York Times 5 May 1993: C15.
- - -. Rev. of Angels in America. New York Times 6 June 1993: 2.1.
Rogoff, Gordon. "Angels in America, Devils in the Wings." Theatre 24.2 (1993): 21-9.
Rosborough, Linda. "Angels in America earns its praise." Winnipeg Free Press 19 Jan.1996: D4.
Savran, David. "Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation." Theatre Journal 47.2 (1995) 207-227.
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Wagner, Vit. "Millennium solid top to bottom." The Toronto Star 27 Sept. 1996: C3.
Waugh, Tom. "The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject." Gever, Parmar and Greyson 141-161.