ABSTRACT
At first thought, teaching Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America through a virtual environment may seem paradoxical to the core themes of the play. After all, Angels in America, through its examination of the AIDS crisis and American values, asserts our most fundamental need for humanity and community amid the enormity of change. In Angels, Kushner privileges a hierarchy of compassion where being present to share in another’s life and community suffering, even when doing so entails harrowing grief and enormous loss, is a more essential act than even a calling from heaven to be a prophet. This sense of presence and community is so powerful it even becomes a thematic concern attending the play’s performance. As David Roman suggests in his Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS, being present at a performance of the play throughout its 8-hour length makes the audience part of the work’s insistence on presence and community, endurance and hope.
To participate in the marathon performances of a play as demanding as Angels in America, as spectator or actor, is to participate in a ritual of endurance (and also of commitment: the marathon performances run the length of a conventional workday and cost more than what many people earn for a day of labor). […] The convergence of the physical experience of watching a performance of Angels in America with the feelings produced by Angels in America transforms a ritual of endurance into a ritual of hope.
(Roman, 219–220)