Tony Kushner against the end of history

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.

Angels in America returns to American history with some great figures such as Roy Cohn, a shameful homosexual and a convinced McCarthyist, haunted on stage by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he largely contributed to condemning to the electric chair. A multitude of religious, cinematographic and historical references create the alloy of the play – from Wizard of Oz to Soviet espionage through an approximate kaddish or even The Cage aux folles – and the neurotic image of an American society in the 1980s on high-dose sedatives. A construction that seems to jostle the characters – and the world – towards their own end and in the most extreme loneliness, since the competing ideology has collapsed, that politics seems confined in the dead end of cynicism against the backdrop of the withdrawal from the affairs of the world of a god who left at the helm only uninspired delegates, paragons of creationism carried by evil angels.

Fight against the immobility of angels

It is the disease that puts in action Prior, representative of the American pioneering narrative of the Mayflower, against the immobility of angels in need of a master who is no longer expected. Angels in America brings together a gallery of characters who confront the disease in a North America presided over by a Ronald Reagan who fought fiercely not to see the urgency of taking note of this epidemic which was going to cost too many lives. A universal dimension that has not escaped Arnaud Desplechin.

through Anaïs Kien

For more information : Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Scenic version and directed by Arnaud Desplechin, from January 18 to March 27, 2020 at the Comédie Française

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