Angels in America/Influences

These are works credited as influences on the original production, both artistic and journalistic, included here for potential inspiration.

* Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" is described by Kushner as "staggering" and something that became central to his work.

> A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
>
> — Walter Benjamin

* "**1,112 and Counting**", a 1983 essay written by playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer, originally published in the New York Native. It is a caustic indictment of public indifference and government negligence to the rising death toll of the AIDS epidemic.

> I wasn’t fully out of the closet in 1983 when I read the New York Native essay “1,112 and Counting,” Larry’s primal scream/howitzer blast of a wake-up call to gay men who were struggling with the unassimilable scientific reality of a new, fatal, sexually transmitted disease. I hated the essay and I hated him for writing it; it felt abusive and violent. I wasn’t alone in feeling this. Many of us couldn’t absorb what Larry was telling us; we relegated him to the cave of our demons, the bullies and abusers with which we’d all had to contend. But for some of us — certainly for me — Larry’s scorched-earth harangue provoked painful introspection. It’s unpleasant and scary to be yelled at, but you ignore the meaning of what’s being yelled at your own peril. Larry was howling demands at us, but the shattering words of his essay articulated a stark truth. He was demanding not that we submit but that we rise up and begin to take ourselves, our lives, our health and each other as seriously as he did.
>
> — Tony Kushner

* "***The Normal Heart***", a play written by Larry Kramer and produced in 1985, fictionalizing his own experiences working in HIV advocacy. It was hugely influential as the first popular mainstream play about AIDS.
* "**King Cohn**", 1988 article by Robert Sherrill for The Nation. Oskar Eustis describes it as "a particularly nasty piece of homophobic leftism." Kushner referenced this article in his decision to write about Roy Cohn, alongside the AIDS Quilt panel describing him as "Bully. Coward. Victim."
* ***Citizen Cohn*** is a 1992 biographical film starring actor James Woods, a contemporary work sharing surprising similarities with *Angels*. It takes more of a historical overview on Cohn, following him from the beginning of his career through his death. These scenes are intercut with Cohn in his deathbed, where he is visited by a series of ghosts from his past including Ethel Rosenberg among others. It is unclear whether this was influence or parallel thinking, as the two were produced at roughly the same time.

## References

This section is for footnotes and citations.

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 *The World Only Spins Forward* (2018)
2. ↑ *Theses on the Philosophy of History* (1940)
3. ↑ "Tony Kushner: Larry Kramer Spoke the Truths We Needed to Hear" at New York Times