I was lucky enough to see Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches on Broadway a long time ago. Reading the script now all these years later, I am surprised to find the written script gave me the shivers just like the live play did. Maybe because I have memories of the experience and have projected them onto the words. But there is no doubt that the play in all its forms is powerful.
The subtitle of the play is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” While Prior, dying of AIDS, seems to be the heart of the story, all characters–even very minor ones–have weight and substance. They all contribute to a greater whole: of America, of power, of cowardice, of courage, of hypocrisy, of life, of death, of delusions, of reality. It’s a play that contains everything in a relatively short form.
One of the central relationships is the gay couple Prior and Louis. Early in the play, Prior reveals he has Kaposi Sarcoma, one of the earliest signs of active AIDS. Louis, in his weakness, soon abandons Prior, too afraid of illness and what’s to come to stay loyal to their over four year-long relationship. He wanders Central Park, soliciting anonymous sex and despising himself. He engages in long monologues with friends about morality, politics, and shows his blindness to the effects of racial prejudice. In the meantime, Prior deals with his condition with sharp humor and bravado, which he uses to cover up his terror.
Historical figure and force for evil Roy Cohn is a character in the play. He is a monster whose only concern is who is at the top of the food chain, of a controlling, triumphant power that is the only thing he is energized by. He is also closeted and dying of AIDS, which he insists to others is just liver cancer. His protegee Joe is a conservative Mormon with a wife, Harper, who is hooked on Valium and often drifts into hallucinations that seem real to her. Joe calls Harper his “buddy,” which is a loyal but unromantic sign of their relationship. During the play, Joe struggles to live the truth that he is gay and has never had any desire for Harper. His religion and idealistic, Republican politics tears him in multiple directions. Cohn urges him to take a job in Washington DC, to operate as Cohn’s mole in the Justice Department.
Angels in America has scenes that are overtly philosophical, overtly political, and seem entirely natural under the umbrella of a fantasia. This is not a subtle critique of America and its treatment of gay people and other outsiders. The characters address America’s corruption, its racism, its anti-semitism, the destructive horror of the country under plague–those who are dying and those who will and will not bear witness. I was unhappily amazed to see how little has changed between the mid-80s and now. At one point, Cohn waxes rhapsodic about the government under Reagan, claiming:
It’s a revolution in Washington…We have a new agenda and finally a real leader. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees–Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn…We’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate.”
Where are the angels? In the beginning of the play, Harper–who fears the environmental destruction of earth–sees the ozone layer as a pale blue ring around the earth, made up of guardian angels. In a long monologue, Louis states that Americans reach for a spiritual past that is no longer there, that there are no “angels in America.”
Prior’s angel is unseen, but powerful. Prior’s scenes are usually in bed as he is treated at the hospital. He sees the ghosts of his ancestors who also went through different plagues, who speak of paving the way for a great figure to come. Throughout the play, Prior thinks he hears a great rustling of wings and thunderous music. A voice comes from above:
Look up, look up,
prepare the way
the infinite descent
A breath in the air
floating down
Glory to . . .
In the last scene, the angel descends through the ceiling, among plaster dust and beams, hovering over Prior with a final “The Messenger has arrived.” Here the play ends, to be continued in Angels in America: Perestroika, the book I’ll be reading next.
