Medieval death iconography in the portrayal of AIDS in 'Angels in America'

In 1987, Tony Kushner was commissioned to write a play about the impact of AIDS on San Francisco's gay community, and thus Angels in America was born. Angels in America resonates with powerful iconographic images of death and dying in the medieval tradition, and while the presence of AIDS complicates dying and the progression toward death: having AIDS is living with dying. This thesis explores the resonance of the medieval iconography of death. Themes of death and dying pervade in medieval art and literature and persist in modern works. The significance of the images and ideas presented in Angels in America would be inadequately expressed without the use of alternative discourse. By employing other genres---overlapping of text and images, poetry, question and answer, collage---a multi-genre thesis is created.