In Context: Angels in America

Watch & Listen

---

Live Stream

Ivo van Hove and Tony Kushner In Conversation
Tune in on Wednesday, October 22 at 7pm to hear Kushner and van Hove discuss all things Angels. 

Audio
Angels In America, 20 Years Later (NPR)
Tony Kushner discusses the Reagan-era context for his play, its controversial subject matter, and more.

Video
Tony Kushner: Does Theater Still Matter? (YouTube)
The greatest gift of theater’s “poverty of means”? For Kushner, allowing people to “believe and disbelieve at the same time.”


Read

---

Interview
Angels Approaching (Time Out New York)
“Ivo van Hove's astonishing production at the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam was done with no scenery whatsoever," says Tony Kushner. "And it was kind of extraordinary.”

Article

What Happens When Love Is Witnessed On Stage? (Out Magazine)

"What attracts me to the homosexual relationship in these plays," says Ivo van Hove, "is that it’s a forbidden thing. It’s not something you can live out in society; it’s hidden and secret."

Even if the play is more or less done, the theatrical event, the live event is not. [Theater] asks people to engage collectively in a relationship with an event, with an action, with a field of meaning and not with a thing, not with an object—and to engage in an event that will respond and be transformed by the degree of your engagement with it. So it has a fluidity in that sense, and a completely human quality, that I think no recorded event can have—which isn't to say that theater is superior, but it's a different kind of experience, and the difficulties and awkwardnesses and inconveniences and imperfections of theater are all part of the power of theatricality. And maybe now that we're entering into the Avatar age, it's even more true that theater teaches a kind of double consciousness, a critical consciousness: You have to learn, if you're really going to play the game and understand what is going on in front of you, you have to be willing to consider the way in which what you're looking at both is and isn't what it appears to be—what the nature of artifice is, and how it relates to meaning and understanding. You could argue that all art participates in questions of artifice and reality, but I think theater more than any other form is a construct that places that dialectic at the center of an event. And I think what makes theater so essential and irreplaceable is that we desperately need to struggle with those questions. Those are the questions that life presents us with over and over again, and you have to be able to see double to be able to make sense of life. —Tony Kushner