Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Tony Kushner (2005) (206p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Tony Kushner (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Author: Harold Bloom (Editor)
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 197 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (March 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791081397
ISBN-13: 978-0791081396

Description:
- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights - Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world--from the English medievalists to contemporary writers - Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

Editor’s Note
My Introduction centers upon the interplay of the spiritual and the political in Kushner, and states an aesthetic preference for the fantasia element in his art.
Mark Steyn reviews Slavs! and finds it “nervous and ambiguous,” and comparable to the musical Oklahoma!, in that they share a common form, the revue.
Examining the ambivalences of Angels in America, David Savran finds one of its authentic sources in Walter Benjamin’s allegorical angel of history, and another in early Mormonism.
Charles McNulty also cites Walter Benjamin as a Kushnerian source, but finds Kushner a wistful idealist in contrast to Benjamin.
To Janelle Reinelt, Angels in America is not Brechtian enough to qualify as American “epic theater,” while Allen J. Frantzen takes us back to Chaucer, the Venerable Bede, and Bale before coming forward to Kushner’s Prior Walter and his rather diffuse relation to Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Jonathan Freedman directly confronts Jewish identity in Angels, tracing the parallel history of homoerotic and Jewish otherness, and goes on to see the plays as losing much of the Jewish element in the “collapse” of its conclusion, judged by Freedman to be essentially Christian.
Medieval mystery plays are invoked as Angels’ genre by Benilde Montgomery, though she rightly saw little of this form in George C. Wolfe’s direction of the New York City presentation of the epic extravaganza.
An erudite reading of Kushner’s little-known epic farce, Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne is provided by James Fisher, who seems to me the most deeply informed of Kushner scholars.
Homebody/Kabul is celebrated by James Reston Jr. as apt prophecy,
after which Framji Minwalla assimilates the play, all too accurately, to our current “post-colonial” shibboleths.