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Tony Kushner's Angels in America has been the most visible of the recent plays about life in the age of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Both part 1, Millennium Approaches, and part 2, Perestroika, enjoyed long runs on Broadway after opening in May of 1993, and part 1 received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Although not the only dramatic piece dealing with AIDS, Angels in America has the distinction of being hailed by some as "the most important theatrical event of the latter part of the century" (Weber 29-30). The play is a two-part, sevenhour-long production that takes "the AIDS plague as the central defining metaphor for a national spiritual decline during the 1980s and as a starting point of a social order for the next century" (30). Heavily intertwined with this message is the theme of judgment. Prior Walter, a main character with AIDS, feels dirty, as though his heart is "pumping polluted blood." He literally wrestles with angels to try to figure out why such a disastrous illness has come to plague the earth (Kushner, Millennium Approaches 34). As he grows ever sicker, Prior finds himself drawn to cosmologies with "no judgment, no guilt, or responsibility" (42). However, as the "American Prophet," Prior finds that there really is no judgment. Angelic symbolism has been appropriated from traditional religious systems in order to shape new strategies of individual and collective behavior in a period of social transformation. Using the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim (Elementary Forms) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (Social Construction), I will explore the resurgent popularity of angel imagery in the United States of America from 1990 through 1996, and its relation to the AIDS epidemic.
A person interested in bringing angelic symbolism into play can attend workshops and join networks devoted to contacting angels, and can read some of the 200 or so books on the subject of angels which have been published since 1990 (Woodward 57). One can surf the "Angel Ring" of Internet sites on the World Wide Web. And the interested individual can even dress for these activities in a complete array of angel clothing, "from an angel vest and suspenders to angel boxer shorts," finished off with a splash of Angel Water- perfume...