The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time?”
In my review of the first play in Tony Kushner’s the Angels in America duology, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, we left the characters after the angel has burst down through Prior’s ceiling and hovers above him proclaiming, “The Messenger has arrived.” We start Angels in America: Perestroika with an old, blind Russian man posing the Great Question. At the end of his speech, we flash to Prior and the angel, and his words to her are: “Go away.”
Beyond the economic reform embedded in Perestroika, it means “restructuring.” And so the play unfolds the tearing down and building up of the characters, each wrestling with their own losses and future hope. We are reintroduced to Prior, who is dying of AIDS; his ex-lover Louis, guilty and politics obsessed, who abandoned Prior in his time of need; Harper, the wife of Joe, prone to vivid hallucinations due to a pill dependency; Joe, a Mormon and the secretly gay Republican who becomes Louis’s lover; Hannah, Joe’s religious mother; Belize, the full-time nurse and part-time drag queen who is friends with Prior and Louis, as well as Roy Cohn’s nurse; and Roy Cohn, the despicable historical figure secretly dying of AIDS.
The play is broken up into many scenes that feature different dyads: Louis and Joe, Hannah and Harper, Belize and Roy, Prior and Harper, Belize and Prior, Louis and Prior, Prior and Hannah. At the end, there is also a scene of Prior meeting a council of angels, with the Angel of America presenting Prior as a prophet.
In the first play, the angel urged Prior to help stop humanity’s progress after God abandoned the world. She argues against movement, as do the council of angels, as the angels can see the horror of the future–what is to come–and it is better if humans freeze where they are rather than enter the darkness. Prior says, “The [angels] think…It’s all gone too far, too much loss is what they think, we should stop somehow, go back.”
The play shows the characters revolve between stasis and progress, between change and despair, between life and death. Prior is the center of the play and his fight against his worsening disease coincides with his exploring the role of prophet. He leaves his hospital bed and wanders the city, or so it seems. There is a scene with Harper that reads like a hallucination, and Prior has previously appeared in surreal scenes, so it’s not entirely clear what’s real and what’s a vision (hence the plays being called a “fantasia.”) At one point, his friend Belize confronts Prior about his angel visions, saying,
You better fucking not flip out. This is not dementia. And this is not real. This is just you, Prior, afraid of the future, afraid of time. Longing to go backwards so bad you made this angel up, a cosmic reactionary.”
Everyone’s stories interconnect and duos are swapped. They talk about change in stark terms. At one point, Harper asks Hannah, “How do people change?” and Hannah relates a gruesome process by which God reaches into a person’s guts, and then shoves them back in, tangled and torn. People then walk around, she says, mangled guts and pretending. In the play, change is visceral, alongside the characters looking back and afraid to look forward. Joe, in love with Louis, sees happiness ahead, while Louis–wracked with guilt over his abandonment of Prior and consumed with rage at the evil politics of the world around him–argues with him that it is not real love. Later, Louis finds out that Joe is a Republican who clerked and wrote opinions for a conservative judge, in one case turning against other gay people. He also discovers Joe works with Roy Cohn, who he calls “the polestar of human evil.” As Louis recoils from Joe and they argue, Joe reacts in fury and beats Louis. Louis leaves and presents himself, bruised and beaten, to Prior, who pushes back on Louis with fury. Their love eventually repairs by the end of the play.
I have not given enough time to Belize. Belize is Black, and calls out Louis’s racial blindness. He is a dear friend to Prior, in the end risking his job to secure Prior the AIDS treatment AZT. He is a nurse in the AIDS ward who doesn’t let Roy Cohn degrade him, as hard as Roy tries. After Roy dies, he shows his wisdom and compassion when he says to Louis:
[Cohn] was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe. . . .A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at least. Isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for?”
Towards the end of the play, there is a very meaningful vision for Harper. In the first play, concerned about the destruction of the earth, she sees the ozone layer as a pale blue ring of guardian angels. In Perestroika, she finishes her story arc with this vision, after she gives up Joe for good:
The outer rim, ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it thread-bare as old cheesecloth…But I saw something only I could see…Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead…they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. The souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.”
The guardian angels have been replaced with humanity, and this ring of humanity serves as protection to those going into the future.
In the end, Prior tells the angel council, “I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but…Bless me anyway. I want more life.”
Both Angels in America plays blew me away. They are so heartfelt, so searing, so magically trippy. I’m so glad I got to see the first play, and wish I could have seen the second.
