Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America

Employing a montage of scenes, styles, and personal stories and plots, Tony Kushner’s monumental theatrical undertaking Angels in America offers a dialectical examination of end-of-themillennium America. This paper attempts to explore how Kushner’s dramatic approach makes use of the dialectics inherent in the figure of the angel – with all of the implicit contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Kushner’s aesthetic functions on the basis of recurrent defamiliarization and re-familiarization which, though Brechtian in essence, technically provides the author and, in turn, also the audience with a space where elements of the epic theatre mix with traditional Aristotelian structure to offer a paradoxical unity between Verfremdung and catharsis. The intentional subversion of traditional forms and concepts (such as the character of the divine messenger) allows the dramatic presentation of a whole variety of ideas, implications and perceptions.