WASHINGTON POST: ‘Angels in America’ is decades-old. But it teaches us how to survive under Trump.

Description

The first lesson “The World Only Spins Forward” offers artists is in creating work that is inspired by a given moment but not constricted by it. “Angels in America” is specifically about the dawn of the AIDS crisis and the ascendant Reagan revolution, but Kushner’s play treats those events as portals into larger conversations. As Monica Pearl, a professor of English and American studies at University of Manchester, tells Butler and Kois, it’s possible to look at the events “Angels” describes as safely in the past. But it’s also true that “AIDS exposed all the difficulties that were roiling under the surface anyway” — “homelessness, drug addiction, oppression against gay people” — and given that, it’s impossible “to relegate AIDS into history because none of those problems have gone away.”