Theater as National Memorial: How Angels in America Remembers

Authors

Alice Endo, Macalester CollegeFollow

Document Type

Honors Project

Abstract

Applying a framework of audience experience and scenographic analysis, this paper explores the connections between public memorials and performance. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. uses scenography to present itself as a “linking object,” gaining its meaning through audience projection. Millennium Approaches—part one of Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—produced at Macalester College in 2021, also functions as a public memorial. Its scenography situates the play in a heightened, and specifically American, space and time. It becomes a receptacle for audience memory, reconstructs that memory, and ultimately reconstructs ideas of American nationhood.

Recommended Citation

Endo, Alice, "Theater as National Memorial: How Angels in America Remembers" (2022). Theatre and Dance Honors Projects. 3.
https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thda_honors/3