”Two People, Not One"

Angels in America is a critical retrospective of the Reagan era in the 1980’s America. The Reagan government orchestrated the national ideology against social minorities, and under the Reagan’s violent politics people came to distrust and antagonize one another. The play critically reviews how the government’s politics interrogates its people and changes them in a negative way. Tony Kushner, being against the governmental ideology, suggests the idea of anti-Reaganism with which people recover the broken relationships. Anti- Reaganism in the play means a sense of “being connective” among people. The spirit of “connection”, in Kushner’s term, involves the recovered sense of being connective, which evokes the acknowledgement that the basic building block of the human community is “two people, not one”(Thinking about Longstanding Problem of Virtue and Happiness 39). The play, by the use of its mutual dream scenes and the intermixed stage of reality/illusion, tries to restore the broken relationship of people. In fact, Angels in America is greatly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s idea of history. Being opposed to the idea of linearly-ordered time, Kushner employs the Jewish notion of the time. The illusionary moments of the play reveal unknown or forgotten facts that would be denied in the confines of realistic staging. The sudden interrogation of the illusionary scenes, influenced by Benjamin’s theory of time and progress serves to reestablish the broken relationship of people and society.