A Senior Capstone Experience by Evelyn Lucado ’26

Submitted to the Department of English

Advised by Dr. Rydel

Contributor Biography: Evelyn Lucado graduated from WC in 2026. During her time at Washington, she served as Editor in Chief of The Elm and social media manager for Writers’ Union, worked as a poetry screener for Cherry Tree, and was a finalist for the 2026 Sophie Kerr Prize. Since graduating, she now works as the Editor of The Avenue News in eastern Baltimore County, where she is living out her Lois Lane dreams.

Short Description: My inspiration for my project came after I first read Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes during my first semester here at Washington College. The play is set in the 1980s amidst the HIV/AIDS crisis, a crisis compounded by the stigmatization of HIV/Aids as a “gay man’s disease.” While there is so much to talk about with this play, my project focused on the character of Prior Walter, a gay man with AIDS who throughout the course of the play is visited by the Angel of America, who claims that the only way to bring God back to heaven is to stop the migratory patterns of humankind. Through Prior and the Angel, Kushner recreates two key moments from the Hebrew Bible and the LDS faith; Jacob wrestling the Angel in Genesis, and the discovery of the Book of Mormon. While there is much scholarship addressing either the Jewish or Mormon elements of the play, I couldn’t find much that addressed both. My project aimed to put these two crucial moments in conversation with one another, building off of the analysis of scholar Yair Lipshitz, who focused on the transformative nature of having Prior, a man rejected by religious communities, reenacts the same transformative moment as one of the patriarchs of the Israelites in the Old Testament. Where my analysis differed was with the idea of continuing theophany, or the notion that revelations from the divine are ongoing. I argued that, through recreating both the Jacob Cycle and the discovery of the Book of Mormon, continuing theophany for Kushner is not a literal revelation from the divine, but instead, revelations in how we as a culture interact with religion— It is a rejection of stasis and repression. While on the surface, Angels is a play about the AIDS crisis, on a deeper level it is about the experience of minority groups in America.

Read Evelyn’s SCE below: