The principle of hope: Reflections on a revival of angels in America

When Signature Theatre Company announced that its 2010/2011 season would include a Michael Greif-helmed production of Tony Kushner's Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, it was much remarked that this would be the first major professional production of Angels in New York City since it first debuted. Angels in America is one of the most produced contemporary plays and is also the source of a compendium of critical attention.1 It has been heralded and critiqued as a lyrical meditation on the question of America; a heartbreaking interrogation of personal and political loss; and a sometimes-cloying documentation of a specific vision of urban, middle-class, white, queer intellectual liberalism at the end of the millennium. Signature's return to Angels 20 years after the play's debut is more than just all of the above: it manifests the performative force of Angels, drawing attention less to what Angels means and more to what it does.