Angels in (Lubbock, Texas) America.

Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches upsets some people so much that they often work to shut down any theater that produces it. In one case, organizers even tried to block funding to an entire college, just because the theater department there had decided to perform Angels!

This play deals openly and bluntly with the early days of AIDS and the issues surrounding it, focusing largely on gay characters and religious themes. Many people find that unacceptable, but many theater departments see this winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as an important document of American culture that provokes relevant discussions.

In February of 2003, the Texas Tech University Theatre in Lubbock, Texas, will present a production of Angels. Appropriately enough, Tech’s theater department recently produced The Laramie Project, a play about interviews conducted in the town where Matthew Shepard was murdered. I say “appropriately” because references to a local production of Angels play an important part in that drama. I hope Texas Tech University Theatre does as good a job on Angels as The Laramie Project. From past experiences, I think they will.

I’ll have more about Angels, before and after the local production, both here and in Rainbow: Lubbock.