Reviewed by: Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, and: Essays on Kushner’s Angels, and: Tony Kushner in Conversation James Fisher Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997; pp. viii + 306. $42.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. Essays on Kushner’s Angels. Edited by Per Brask. Winnipeg, Canada: Blizzard Publishing, 1995; pp. 154. $14.95 paper. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Edited by Robert Vorlicky. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. 286. $42.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. Larry Kramer writes that Tony Kushner, author of the acclaimed Angels in America plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, is “drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world” (quoted in Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness [New York: TCG, 1995]). Few contemporary dramatists have engaged as large an audience as Kushner has with these epic dramas; even the estimable Harold Bloom lists Angels in his canon of western literary culture, along with Shakespeare and the Bible. Controversy arises wherever Angels is performed, engaging communities in a critical dialogue over complex issues and the rights and responsibilities of artists. Looking within the broad scope of American politics, religion, history, and social relationships, Angels presents a poignant tapestry of the central human and spiritual issues of the second half of the twentieth century. Opposing poles of conservative and liberal, gay and straight, and transgressor and victim are set within Kushner’s portrait of life in America in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He asks a variety of questions about this nation of diverse and often conflicted views and values. Can we face change? Is the United States rushing headlong toward disaster or a bright new future? What will the millennial apocalypse reveal? Inevitably, scholars and artists have been drawn to Kushner’s achievement, and a cottage industry of publications about Kushner has sprung up. Kushner himself has published a collection of some of his essays, speeches, and his play Slavs! in Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. A number of other books have since appeared. Essays on Kushner’s Angels has its strong points but is ultimately a disappointment. Though Per Brask states that his aim is to “get a sense of how [End Page 550] these amazing plays have fared in different contexts in the Western world” (11), he does not effectively carry out this goal. On the plus side, this slim volume features two interviews with Kushner: a brief exchange with Patrick Pacheco originally published in The Body Positive Magazine and a penetrating dialogue with David Savran from American Theatre in 1994, undoubtedly the most in-depth interview with Kushner available. Bent Holm recounts Danish productions at the Aarhus and Det Kongelige Teaters, both staged in 1995. Holm probes the difficulties of moving this distinctly American play to different cultural contexts, and Franz Wille’s contribution follows suit by describing various performances in Zurich, Hamburg, Essen and Frankfurt. Ian Olorenshaw similarly looks at stagings in Sydney and Melbourne. Essays on Kushner’s Angels would have been more useful had it focused more exclusively on a variety of international productions; two additional articles are of lesser interest. Patrick Friesen’s “How Like an Angel Came I Down” offers a short, impressionistic riff on angel imagery that contributes little to a deeper understanding of the plays; Graham Dixon’s “The Obscene Paradox” is somewhat more useful as a thorough examination of AIDS and issues of sexuality present in Angels. Approaching the Millennium provides a broader and bolder collection of essays on Angels than the Brask volume. Geis and Kruger believe Angels has influenced everything from “dramaturgy to queer theory, from AIDS activism to Brechtian epic theatre”; they and their contributors approach Angels as “theatrical texts, as literary work, as popular culture phenomenon, as political reflection and intervention” (1). The first of the volume’s four sections, “Reagan’s Children: Angels, Politics, and American History,” offers five penetrating essays that respond to “charged and conflicted” historical moments reflected in the play (3). David Román focuses on the impact of AIDS...