In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom answers the question of what makes a writer and his or her work canonical:

The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.

Tony Kushner's Angels In America, at least as presented over the past two Sunday nights on HBO, offers much of which Bloom would approve. In fact, the play was the last entry in the list of canonical works that he included in the appendices of The Western Canon, and having now seen it, I can understand why. There are echoes of the theological definition of America of Emerson and Whitman, the homoerotic prophecy of Whitman and of James Merrill in The Changing Light at Sandover, the violation of the sanctity of death of Merrill and Dante, and the humanist apocalypses of Merrill and Freud. It's thematically fecund enough to fuel generations of dissertations, but what is most apparent is Kushner's astonishing originality.

At the end of the first part of the play, "Millennium Approaches," Prior Walter is visited by an angel and informed that he's a prophet. The prophecy that he's to spread is Freud's Thanatos, the Buddha's nibanna, Merrill's "great clear pool"--an exhortation to stillness and the end of suffering. This is an idea with a rich spiritual, psychological, and aesthetic history, and a belief to which I subscribe. Throughout the second part of the play, "Perestroika," Walter wrestles with the burden of this prophecy. In the end, he battles an angel, climbs to heaven, and refuses the prophecy, taking the play beyond Freud, Buddha, Merrill, and Kushner's other influences. And this is not simply a negation. As I watched my belief being dismissed with an almost nihilistic blasphemy, I felt deep, pure exhilaration. This is art with the power of Dante's elevation of a Florentine teenager to the pinnacle of the Christian hierarchy. It's the most audacious sort of genius. Imagine a drama about AIDS, evil, and failed love that leaves you joyous.