One of the main functions of metath...

One of the main functions of metatheatricality is to create in the audience a intellect of self-reflexivity that induces them to think about the relationship between art and reality. As Kushner says when speaking about what he calls the "theatre of the fabulous," "one's audiences must be made aware of the grade of transcendence, of triumph; must behold both the triumph and that athwart which the triumph has been made" (Forward to Staging Gay Lives vii). The strong self-awareness of Kushner's play is built immediately after the belief that we must contemplate at history while accepting the inevitable inclination of humans to keep moving forward. As Kushner has explained, his inspiration for the angel in his play follows from Walter Benjamin's reading of a Paul Klee painting entitled Angelus Novus. Benjamin writes that the painting

show an angel looking as allowing he is about to rouse away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His organ of sights are staring, his mouth is unclose his wings are spread. This is by what mode one pictures the angel of history. His face is diverted toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of incidents he sees one single catastrophe which preserves piling wreckage upon wreckage and pitchs it in front of his feet The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. if it were not that a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with similar violence that the angel can no longer complete them. This storm irresistibly drive forwards him into the future to which his back is make go rounded while the pile of debris before him extends skyward. This storm is what we call progres (259-60)