Submission Date

7-19-2024

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

English

Faculty Mentor

Patricia Lott

Second Faculty Mentor

Jay Shelat

Comments

Presented during the 26th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 19, 2024 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

This project examines how the embodied and affective movement of characters in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991 and 2013) signifies these characters’ status as either catalysts for progress or agents of stagnation in relation to the moral panic surrounding sex, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS. I carry out a queer cultural analysis of Kushner’s original and revised script of Angels in America alongside recordings of the play as it was staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre of New York in1994 and the National Theatre of London in 2017.

I use “Threshold of Revelation”—the play’s phrase for describing the experiential space in which characters come to know things about one another—as one facet of the trifocal conceptual lens through which I investigate movement and statis throughout Angels. More specifically, Threshold of Revelation expands the primary definition of “movement” as a physical act into a second and pivotal meaning as a figurative shift into enlightenment. To consider characters’ relation to this Threshold of Revelation more fully, my queer cultural analysis puts forward two additional conceptual lenses, namely what I call a Threshold of Refusal and a Threshold of Stasis. Through these lenses, I closely, carefully, and critically analyze the embodied movement of characters as dictated by stage directions and seen in on-stage recordings of the play as well as interpret how dialogue and actor-specific voice inflections signify emotional shifts within the aforesaid ‘thresholds.’ Ultimately, I explore how these thresholds and movements define characters’ relation to homophobic ideology and the subsequent commentary these relations make about the lives of real individuals who hold similar beliefs.

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