Tony Kushner | Angels in America: Millennium Approaches / 1993

crashing through the ceiling of despair

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tony Kushner Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Walter Kerr Theatre, New York / 1993

 

Despite all the attendant hoopla and acclaim, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is truly a great American play.* Ranging from the Plague of the Middle Ages through American history (from Ethel Rosenberg and the McCarthy hearings to the Regan days) and into the subconscious of American belief (the play begins with a Rabbi, focuses upon a Mormon couple, and ends with a Catholic angel), the play pushes out beyond the traditional Broadway fare, and explores some rather terrifying aspects of the American psyche.

      With comic horror, Ron Leibman portrays Roy Cohn as a mad Faustian force underlying American politics. Power is the only definition of the human species in Cohn’s lonely world at the top; abusing those around him and himself, Cohn denies not only his own sexuality, but sex as anything but another form of power, a sadomasochistic act in which one is either consumer or consumed. But Cohn’s world is a deflationary one; dying of AIDS he refuses to face the implications that he has become one of the consumed, eaten up by his equally predatory cronies and closet homosexuality.

     Despite Cohn’s own definition of centrality, Kushner places Cohn at the edge of his play, balanced by a Mormon couple desperate to live out their religious convictions. Harper Pitt, as deluded as Cohn, lives in a pill-popping reality of hallucinatory eco-systems, fortunetelling drag-queens, and Eskimo lovers. Her lawyer husband Joe has attempted to scrub his existence clean of all usual feelings to deny his latent homosexuality; but as Cohn attempts to manipulate him into a father-son-holy savior relationship, Joe’s sexuality becomes apparent, creating a barrier around him and everything he supposedly respects and admires. Trapped on the outside of his own life, Joe rushes into the arms of Louis Ironson, a man who has also been unable to live according to his convictions.

     Louis and his dying lover Prior are at dead-center of Kushner’s gay anatomy. In one of the very first scenes of this 3 1/2-hour play, Prior announces to Louis that he has AIDS, and for a while it appears that Louis, a true American idealist, will succor him and help him to face his death. But Louis, like most idealists, is more in love with language than the pain and sour smells of the human body from which it emanates. He bolts, taking with him, so it would seem, all hope of salvation. We are left at the end of act two with three versions of hell.

     But Kushner refuses to allow us the sentimentality of failure; and despite occasional lapses into Boys in the Band-like dialogue and Neil Simon situations, the author undercuts any simple condemnations. No, there is something better than the condition of these poor humans; there is the vision of a Christ, so Kushner seems to argue; there is forgiveness. There is always that angel about to crash through the ceiling of one’s despair.

     Religion, forgiveness, angels in a world of corrupt politics and AIDS: these are rare concepts in our either bigoted or correct-thinking dichotomies of today. It is a bold act to write such a play, and even bolder to threaten “peace” (Perestroika) as a conclusion to this panoramic examination of the heart.

 

*I saw Angels in America on Broadway in May 1993, but was unable to attend the second section of this grand “diptych” of American sexuality and politics. The theater-going experience was a particularly emotional one, I believe, for all who sat in the Walter Kerr Theatre. The audience represented a wide mix of gay men, lesbians, heterosexual couples, and children—a much younger audience than one observes at most Broadway dramas of today. But it wasn’t just an “audience” one was observing, one sensed that one was part of a special experience shared with these clearly politicized individuals. As I have observed elsewhere, Howard and I—as a readily accepted couple in the circles of friends we encounter—have seldom felt like outsiders, and, accordingly, have little connection with the sometimes self-segregated gay community. Sitting in that theater, however, one felt truly proud to be part of that community, and there was a shared bond in the experience of the sorrows—at some points in the play I perceived the entire audience weeping—and joys in the uplifting beliefs expressed in Kushner’s work. In this sense, it was not just a play one attended but an “event,” a drama combined with an audience participating in the issues with which Kushner’s play was concerned; and if the voices of the drama’s characters were often lost in the muddle of madness and despair, the voice of the audience came through loud and clear.

    Soon after this, I met Tony Kushner, who told me he greatly admired Sun & Moon Press. He sent me, often through agents, the works of several younger playwrights; but unfortunately they were highly politicized works without the scope and dramatic writing style of his own work. When his publisher, somewhat understandably, disallowed me the rights to reprint Angels in America—Millennium Approaches in Sun & Moon’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, Kushner graciously sent me a short new work, “Reverse Transcription,” for inclusion in the volume. I must admit, however, it is not one of his most brilliant pieces for theater and misrepresents his dramatic talents.

 

 

Los Angeles, 1993

Reprinted from El-E-Phant: A Language Arts Review (August 1993).