The AIDS epidemic that wreaked havoc in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to have faded from media attention just five or six years ago, before its theatrical release. 120 bpm by Robin Campillo. The tri-therapies had tamed the virus without eradicating it, the carriers were now living in good health, the virus no longer seemed fatal, one would have thought at the end of this tragic story.
The end of the story ?
This end of the story, it is also the spring of the play of Tony Kushner Angels in America premiered in San Francisco in 1991 and taken over by Arnaud Desplechin at the Comédie Française until March. Written immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the text is steeped in end-of-millennium concerns and Francis Fukuyama’s theories on the end of the Cold War. Announcing the end of the story didn’t leave much to do for the humans listening to it.
A look back at American history through a multitude of references
Angels in America by Tony Kushner is the story of a success that bounces back: hailed during its creation on Broadway, adapted into a television series, into an opera, the text goes beyond its writing context. Considered from its publication as a major, the work of Tony Kushner touches the universal and summons the major themes of the twentieth century in a poetic and millennial rush. Recovery d’Angels in America also accompanies the sensation of a return to the time of history accelerated by that of mediatized wars and the pressure of an emergency to act to avoid the end of the world.