http://www.peren-revues.fr/coupdetheatre/838 By looking at several productions in France of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), this contribution explores the meaning of American cross-cultural performance. Considering with Schechner that theater is a “performance text” defined by its context, dramatic traditions, actual performances, reception and repercussions, the essay discusses to what extent Kushner’s play blurs the perception of American theater in France by offering a fecund hybrid style. First, it will delineate some epistemological categories framing the French reception of American performance by pointing out how US shows are often filtered through a binary vision of American theater as either psychological realism (Tennessee Williams) or cutting-edge avant-gardism (Robert Wilson). Then, after highlighting the play’s postmodern themes and style, the essay will uncover the echoes and limits of this reception model by testing it through the productions of Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman (1994; 1996), Krzysztof Warlikowski (2004), Ivo van Hove (2008) and Aurélie Van Den Daele (2015-18). They all provide historical, political, social and esthetic figurations of America on the European stage. If a number of clues (negative reviews) could suggest a cultural bias toward US drama, the staged play overall complicates the meaning of cultural transfer thanks to the artists’ creativity. The success of the play further implies that its “fabulous” epic style could be a measure of a new hybrid American theatricality. The final section focuses on a few tropes (speed, fluidity and queerness) and sheds light on the cross-cultural creative processes of the play’s staging. Ultimately, it underlines the potentiality of the anthropological gap yielded by a performance text. Numéros Crossing Borders: Anglophone Theatre in Europe Part Two: National Stages fr lun., 10 févr. 2025 10:02:43 +0100 mer., 08 juil. 2026 14:02:05 +0200 http://www.peren-revues.fr/coupdetheatre/838 0