Scarlet Masque Theatre Journal New Beginnings and Fond Farewells Vol. 1 | Page 23

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to accept as good, but Prior refuses, recognizing that sameness is death and change is life
which he wants to live. Prior wakes up with a direct quote from The Wizard of Oz where he
wishes nothing but to stay home, telling a group of his friends “…. some of it was terrible, and
some of it was wonderful, but all the same I kept saying I want to go home.” 14
All of this complex plot, of which I offer little more than a confusing and confounding
glimpse at, should probably be met with the expectation of sudden and complete failure with
citations of lofty pretension voiding all artistic and cultural acceptance of the work. I don’t have
to press the obviousness of the controversial and “game-changing” subject matter and genre.
Here we see the loftier, sophisticated realization of the same kind of subversion of traditional
materials that we saw in the previous section with the art coming out of the WOW Café
Theater. 15 The very fact that this play, which directly discussed an amazing variety of queer
characters facing an ongoing epidemic with references to real people and their (fictionalized)
personal lives, opened on Broadway without so much as an Off-Broadway transfer was a sign
that this was something different. Angels in America was an astonishing success, with rave
reviews from the beginning of the workshop cycle to winning multiple nationally-recognized
awards to getting its own HBO-syndicated televised version of the play. The controversy
surrounding the subject matter caused moral outrage from conservative religious groups, who
protested the production itself and the various off-shoots of collegiate productions that occurred
shortly after the end of the Broadway run (of which Wabash College’s was the second-ever
college production of “Part One: Millennium Approaches”). 16 The response was, in short,
massive. This truly marks the point in which we start to see the societal shift that the conclusion
14
Ibid. 271.
Jill Dolan, Carmelita Tropicana, and Holly Hughes. 2015. Memories of the Revolution: The
First Ten Years of the WOW Cafe Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 29-37.
15
Lawrence Biemiller. 1996. “‘Angels in America’ Challenges Students at Wabash College.’ The
Chronicle of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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