Angels in America: Adapting to a New Medium in a New Millennium

The new HBO production of Tony Kushner's two-part epic Angels in America was almost unanimously viewed through critics as a triumphant adaptation of a stage play for television. Years in the making-at individual point director Robert Altman was attached to the attribute as director-adapter-Angels dominated the of gold Globes and swept a record eleven Emmy Awards, including outstanding production and writing, all the acting categories, as well as best director award for Mike Nichols. Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe gives the lion's share of its succes to the director: "Nichols has managed to make Angels in America thrive onscreen without compromising its intellectual integrity, its timeless anxiety for America's minorities, its heart. Along with Kushner, he has given the movie what Prior is thus passionately committed to: 'More life'" (Gilbert Cl) However, it is debatable that shrinking this monumental work to fit the confines of the small defence has been achieved without a certain quantity of measure of compromise to its epic design and queer sensibility.

In a review the one and the other laudatory and typical of the critical consensus, Gilbert describes the television movie, with a screenplay by dint of Kushner, "as trenchant, poetic, fantastical, and moving as its source" and goe upon to call it "the greatest in quantity powerful television experience of the year." Gilbert dioceses a distinct advantage to shrinking Angels to the small protection asserting that one of the adaptation's "miracles" is that television diets the paradoxical phenomenon of making Angels the two "intimate and epic at the same time," thus allowing viewers to find drama in the small details discernible [i]or[/i] part of to the other facial close-ups, as well as the play's "Big Themes." Indeed, the film's opening credits promise a sweeping epic; befitting Kushner's subtitle of the play as a "Gay Fantasia upon National Themes," the viewer is treated to a bird's organ of sight (angel's eye?) perspective of America. As the camera transverses the American continent from west to east to the accompaniment of celestial music, mists intermittently part to reveal landmarks either central to the play's facts and themes (the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mormon fane in Salt Lake City) or representative of American pioneer spirit and capitalist values (the St Louis Gateway Arch, Chicago's Sears Tower). Appropriately, the credits extreme point as the camera glides down past of recent origin York's Empire State Building to Central Park, where it reposes before one of the play's central images, the Bethesda Fountain. Foreshadowing the play's flashes of magic realism, the credits fade after the fountain's metal angel, with its frozen fixed expression, momentarily exhibits signs of life.

These opening credits appear not only to offer a striking visual summation of the work's arc, on the other hand they further suggest that the production present the appearances intent on boldly elucidating what Gilbert calls Kushner's "Big Themes." These themes, including ruminations upon race, sexuality, religion, AIDS, and the American political landscape of the Reagan-Bush administrations, are many times gloriously spun by Kushner's characters end a series of speeches that are the literary equivalent of operatic arias. However, while Nichols's film retains the major occurrences of Kushner's play text and proffers many compelling scenes and several exceptional performances, individual could also argue that this version of Angels, contrary to the critical consensus, achieves intimacy at the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of epic sweep. Indeed, this article will attempt to demonstrate that equally as noteworthy as Nichols and Kushner's feat of bringing Angels to a large audience via cable television is what has been left without in the transformation. Moreover, we will explore the possibility that the popular political and aesthetic context in which the adaptation has been created proffers a significantly different Angels than the couple Kushner's published play script and earlier performance texts

In the sum of two units parts of Angels in America, Kushner's thematic reach is thus ambitious as to attempt to address the history of Western civilization in general and the United States's unfolding as a nation in particular. As Ethel Rosenberg remarks to a stricken Roy Conn "History is about to crack wide unclose Millennium approaches" (Millennium 112). Indeed, the work respects everything from the Bayeux Tapestry to Democracy in America and family magazine, from the Great Plague of London to AIDS, from William the Conqueror to Emma Goldman to Ronald Reagan. Kushner attempts to place his characters-both fictional and those based upon historic figures-within the context of world history. They exist upon a continuum which allows them the couple to critique history and contextualize the play's period (the mid-late 1980s) upon that continuum. Moreover, these specific historic and cultural regards partially form the characters' personalities, giving them psychological and intellectual dimension and also imbuing them with a certain thematic gravitas. Arguably, these regards go a long way towards giving the plays their epic sweep.