Essays on Kushner's Angels

Rating:
Summary: A variety of Un-American Angels
Review: Possibly the most interesting thing about Per Brask's 1995 collection of essays on Kushner's groundbreaking play is the interview with the playwright that ends the collection. This conversation reveals a franker, less careful of offending others Kushner that has been missing from some subsequent published interviews.

The main idea behind Brask's collection (although one would not know it from its title) is to discuss the impact of productions of Kushner's Tony and Olivier award-winning play in countries outside America. It is an interesting and important editorial decision, after all most countries are affected culturally, politically and/or economically by the United States more than other nations. The problem is that the essays vary greatly in scope. For example, Patrick Friesen's descriptive/poetic "How Like an Angel I Came Down" cowers unintellectually in the shadow of Graham Dixon's insightful essay which sets the play against a Baudrillardian context of appearance and reality.

There is an interesting essay by Bent Holm which concerns the play's reception in Scandinavia, and a potentially interesting piece by Ian Olorenshaw about why Australian productions did not find the audiences that they deserved, but the former drifts off into a survey of newspaper criticisms, and the latter is filled with conjecture, and has little evidence to base the (fairly simplistic) claim on.

That said, the collection acts as an interesting companion to other meta-texts on Kushner's play, although some of the essays have been published elsewhere, and the production photographs provide a nice introduction to each piece of writing. It seems a shame that aside from translating Holm's contribution and a slim, three-page foreword, Brask's work on the collection is behind the scenes. One wonders what his connection with the play really is, and where his interest in the global impact of the texts stems from. One might even expect a summing up, an overview of the various countries' responses. An engaging, if slightly disappointing read.