The Millenium Myth in Tony Kushner's Angels in America

Tony Kushner’s new play, Angels in America, is a seven-hour epic in which he endeavours to awaken the spirit of hope asleep in the American psyche. His intent is to show us that spiritual transcendence still exists after the ‘death of God’ and that it is more than a hollow tool with which political and religious extremists can rally for our souls. Kushner does this by presenting a hypothetical scenario: one in which the new age millennium myth is true, that the close of the twentieth century marks the beginning of a paradigm shift, or “new millennium.” For our purposes, I will be using the phrase, ‘new millennium’ and ‘new paradigm’ interchangeably, because in essence they mean the same thing, though the first term is from a religious lexicon, and the latter scientific. These terms will refer to what Professor Michael Grosse of the University of Illinois calls “a radical shift in our concept of reality, a vision for a new heaven and earth -in scientific language, a new cosmology.”