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Angels in America: Difference between revisions
→Major Themes
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==Major Themes== | ==Major Themes== | ||
''Angels in America'' is in many ways a play about conversion.The experience of HIV illness is often conceived as involving a conversion of the self, and Prior's discovery that he has AIDS is depicted in part as making him a new person: I'm a lessionnaire". The Angel's visitation to Prior takes the form of a mission of conversion:given a new identity, Prior is like Joseph Smith, to become Prophet of a new dispensation. Indeed, in the course of the play all its characters undergo startling shifts in identity. Hannah is not only physically transplanted to New York but becomes ''"noticeably different--she looks like a New Yorker''. Roy , who clings tenaciously to his professional status a a lawyer,is disbarred just before his death. Harper moves through a period of dysfunction to strike out on her own, choosing "the real San Francisco, on earth," with its "unspeakable beauty" (Kruger 4). | |||
Kushner uses split scenes to make more explicit the contrapuntal relationship between these seemingly disconnected narrative worlds. Roy's meeting with Joe, to discuss the junior attorney's future as a "Roy-Boy" in Washington, occurs alongside the scene in which Louis is sodomized in the Central Park Rambles by a leather clad mama's boy.Louis's mini-symposium at the coffee shop is simultaneous with Prior's medical checkup at an outpatient clinic. Dreams,ghosts, and a flock of dithering, hermaphroditic angels are also used to break through the play's realistic structure, to conjoin seemingly disparate characters, and to reveal the poetic resonances and interconnectedness of everyday life (McNulty 4). | |||
==Major Symbols== | ==Major Symbols== | ||