The Unstoppable Forces of Change in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Anonymous 12th Grade

There are many factors that work together in motivating human beings to take action or to remain stagnant. Tony Kushner, a gay, Jewish playwright, often displays the underlying effects of homosexuality and religion on a character’s actions. Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play Angels in America features a heavy emphasis on belief systems and ethics that motivate change. His characters experience major life alterations that are prompted by both the sociopolitical environment of the Reagan era and their own personal sets of values. Tony Kushner combines politics and oppositional belief systems, as well as inevitable change, in Angels in America that force characters to evolve within the context of queer New York in the 1980s.

In Angels in America, certain characters portray politics as the driving force of everything in America. Louis Ironson, the Jewish ex-lover of Prior Walter, whose case of AIDS slowly renders him more and more ill, is one of these believers. In one of Louis’ argumentative dialogues with his friend Belize, he explains his view: “There's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics” (Kushner, Millennium 96). Kushner spends the majority of the play proving...