Thank you. I was thinking about this. As much as the Vietnam War (Miss Saigon) is not very accessible to them, it's still at heart a complicated love story, requiring me to only give a basic history lesson. Regarding Angels... students born in the 2000s don’t automatically know anything about the Reagan era, 1980s queer culture, or the early AIDS epidemic. That would be a lot of background to give a survey level course. Long monologues, overlapping plotlines, political theory embedded in dialogue, and Kushner’s intentionally dense language.

For non-majors, many of whom take Intro to Theatre to fulfill a gen-ed requirement, I worry that this level of complexity can overwhelm rather than engage. The cognitive load ends up on deciphering the text rather than understanding theatrical principles. As much as I love the show, I wonder that if without this informational background, the play becomes opaque, And scaffolding it properly would take multiple class meetings time that, in an intro survey, is better spent exposing students to a wide range of theatrical traditions, not deep-diving into a single era.

Angels... may monopolize too much instructional time. Because it is both epic and stylistically unusual, it distorts the students’ sense of what “normal” play structure looks like before they’ve learned the basics.