Only in Alberta? Angels in America and Canada

Abstract

"Only in Alberta? Angels in America and Canada" provides a Canadian theatre history for Kushner's Pulitzer prize-winning epic. In the context of Angels' critical reception, the paper examines the entry of the play into such a history as both a gay play and a history play. The discussion elaborates the critical discourses which would subsume gay identity under a broader politic of liberal pluralism, an effect of which, it is suggested, is to render the homosexual intolerable. Angels in America, however, is seen as a resistant text which calls into question the very operations of that politic. Following from Alan Sinfield's recent discussion of gay identity claimed by an ethnicity-and-rights model, the essay considers the potentialities of Angels in laying bare the assumptions that make such identifications crucial to the play's reception.