Submission Date

5-4-2026

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

English

Adviser

Patricia Lott

Committee Member

Jay Shelat

Committee Member

Domenick Scudera

Department Chair

Kara McShane

Project Description

In this paper, I suggest that the use of the word ‘seer’ to reference theatergoers to Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America (1991) evokes the term’s staunchly religious underpinning, thereby making an ill-conceived link between the audience and prophets, as well as reduces the theatergoing experience to the realm of sight. Thus, “seer” excludes other pivotal sensations, particularly that of hearing and feeling sounds such as the physical vibrations coming from actors’ voices through mics, music playing over speakers, and actors’ heavy footsteps on stage. In other words, theatergoing immerses theatergoers into what Walter Benjamin calls the natural “aura” of an object or experience—or, as he puts it, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” which he explains can “never [be] entirely separated from its ritual function…[since the] unique value of the ’authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value” (Benjamin 4,6). In my application of this understanding of aura onto theatergoers of Angels, I also propose that the presence of a human body within a theater, pressed shoulder to shoulder amongst a sea of others in the dark, urges a forced sense of communal witnessing—with a specific concentration on an expanded reading of the legal term “witness.” More specifically, building upon Walter Benjamin’s understanding of ‘aura’ in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), I propose the dual-faceted term “aura-witness” as a replacement of ‘seer.’ I define an aura-witness as “an audience member of a theatrical production who, through their direct involvement with or proximity to the production as it occurred, is responsible for authenticating the occurrence of the play’s ephemeral, profoundly human encounters between its actors and its audience more generally.” Ultimately, I suggest that “aura-witness” encapsulates a more well-rounded experience of theatergoing. Additionally, I use “aura-witness” to understand the extent to which the Benjaminian aura of the theater diminished when Angels entered film through its official HBO series adaptation in 2003.

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