Astrid Haas: Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse

Stages of Agency very exhaustively presents and analyzes staged American AIDS drama from the beginning of the AIDS crisis to the moment of publication. I would say that it is also pretty exhaustive on the AIDS drama criticism as well – the book is replete with references – except that she misses an important 2007 essay on Angels in America: mine. No matter, we come to some very similar conclusions about the play, which Haas rightly spends a lot of words and pages on – more than on any other play (and far more than I did: so she has a lot more to say about it). We agree therefore that Angels in America is a very important text to come out of the American AIDS crisis and indeed to emerge at all from twentieth century American dramaturgy. Haas writes, “Tony Kushner’s Angels in America holds a unique critical and popular position among U.S.- American AIDS plays written to date. More than any other work of this genre, the drama offers a complex depiction of the epidemic in the United States”.