ABSTRACT
From the mid-twentieth century, two related changes take place, pushing residents of the Global North to seek new scripts to make sense of death and dying. In the first change, death increasingly takes place in hospitals under the specialised care of doctors. As actual encounters with death become rare, the public turns to art and media to guide their understanding of what makes a ‘good death’. Hospital personnel, similarly, seek reassuring patterns of performance and ritual to make death meaningful for patients, their families, and themselves. In the second change, death and dying movements such as hospice offer a backlash against this medicalised death and develop a new set of principles constituting the proper way to die. Plays written since the 1970s, including Wit, Shadow Box, and Angels in America, stage a new vision of death with dignity.
