Angel in America
Part 1: the turn of the century approaches
Part 2: Perestroika
Part 2: Perestroika
by Tony Kushner
translated from English by Frank Heibert
Depot 2
Premiere:
May 2022
May 2022
1981 – exactly forty years go. Unusual cases of a lung disease are discovered in young men from large cities across the United States of America. These will later go down in history as some of the first known cases of AIDS. Yet, it will take seven years for the former republican president Ronald Reagan, to speak publicly about the disease for the first time. The dangers posed by the AIDS epidemic are systematically neglected and played down for several years under the conservative government.
The US author Tony Kushner, who is part of the New York gay community, is deeply moved by the AIDS-Trauma. At the start of the 1990s, when he dreams that an angel descends on the hospital bed of a dancer close to him who is suffering with AIDS, the idea for his monumental piece, Angel in America is born.
The play still resonates today with its razor-sharp dissection of a society that has fallen ill with itself. In times of the Corona pandemic and right-wing backlash, the piece regains significance in an almost disturbing way. The director Moritz Sostmann brings Kushner’s magically realistic piece to the open-air stage.
The US author Tony Kushner, who is part of the New York gay community, is deeply moved by the AIDS-Trauma. At the start of the 1990s, when he dreams that an angel descends on the hospital bed of a dancer close to him who is suffering with AIDS, the idea for his monumental piece, Angel in America is born.
The play still resonates today with its razor-sharp dissection of a society that has fallen ill with itself. In times of the Corona pandemic and right-wing backlash, the piece regains significance in an almost disturbing way. The director Moritz Sostmann brings Kushner’s magically realistic piece to the open-air stage.