Abstract

Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-prize winning play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" (1991–92) uses apocalyptic motifs—end times, revelation, angels, prophecy, new heaven—to analyze American politics. The two-part play laments political corruption and social cruelty while imagining the emergence of an all-inclusive, multiracial, multiethnic polis in which unlikely partners achieve unity across difference in a utopian community of care. Kushner’s uses of apocalyptic demonstrate that the genre offers religious and secular authors alike a powerful symbolic vocabulary for political discourse. In the United States, apocalypse tropes are often made to serve conservative or reactionary political agendas, but Kushner’s play illuminates the progressive potential of the ancient text’s visual language; "Angels in America" exemplifies a variation of the genre theologian Catherine Keller calls "counter-apocalypse".