Angels in America Context Tony Kushner was born in Manhattan on July sixteen, 1956. His parents, both classical musicians, moved a year later to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Kushner spent his childhood there. Growing up as a gay Jew in the Deep South, he has later said, made him more conscious of his distinctive identity as he might not have in heavily Jewish New York City. Kushner returned to the city for college, receiving a degree in medieval literature from Columbia University. After graduating, he taught in Louisiana for three years, then returned to New York for good, studying for an M.F.A. at New York University and writing and producing plays. His early works included an adaptation of Pierre Corneille's The Illusion in 1988 and A Bright Room Called Day in 1990. Nothing in Kushner's early career, however, predicted the overnight success he attained when Part One of Angels in America, Millennium Approaches, opened in Los Angeles in 1992. Critical reaction to the play was immediately and overwhelmingly positive: the influential New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, for instance, called it "a searching and radical rethinking" of American political drama and "the most extravagant and moving demonstration imaginable" of the artistic response to AIDS. The play's Part Two, Perestroika, was greeted with similar adulation the following year. Kushner received bushels of awards for Angels in America, not least of which were Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994 and 1993's Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Outside liberal literary and theatrical circles, however, the play sometimes sparked controversy. A 1996 production of Angels in Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, took place only under protection of a court order after local officials threatened to prosecute actors for violating indecent- exposure laws, and productions in other cities were picketed. It is impossible to appreciate the play without understanding something about the history of the AIDS crisis as well as the broader story of gays and lesbians in America. Although men and women have engaged in homosexual behavior in all times and cultures, it was only in the twentieth century that homosexuality came to be seen as a fundamental orientation rather than a specific act. In the United States, the modern gay rights movement began after World War Two, which brought millions of unmarried adults into close contact in large cities far from their families. Gay bars and political organizations existed mostly in secret in the 1950s and `60s, but New York City's Stonewall riot in 1969 helped usher in a period of growing openness among gays and greater public acceptance. Although gay life flourished in the 1970s, many gays saw the '80s as a period of retrenchment and tragedy. The first cases of AIDS were diagnosed among gay men in 1981; within ten years more than 100,000 people died of the disease in the U.S. alone. In the early years of the epidemic, ignorance and fear resulted in widespread discrimination against AIDS patients, and the national media reported the story in a sensationalistic manner, if at all. Gays' anger about the mainstream reaction to AIDS became interlinked with political frustration, as a conservative backlash that began in the late '70s hindered the cause of gay rights. For many gay activists, Presidents Reagan and Bush symbolized the opposition: both men's administrations were at best uneasy with and often hostile to the gay cause, and Reagan remained silent on the
subject of AIDS until 1987, when more than 20,000 people had died. Angels in America opened in Los Angeles in the same week that Bill Clinton, the first presidential candidate to openly reach out to lesbian and gay voters, defeated George Bush; among gays the play inevitably became associated with a sense of euphoria and political optimism. Kushner has continued to write plays—such as Slavs! (Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness), Hydriotaphia or The Death of Doctor Browne, and most recently Homebody/Kabul—though none have attracted the praise accorded to Angels. In addition, he has authored a number of essays and op-ed pieces and has delivered addresses at universities and political demonstrations. Robert Vorlicky, a critic and friend, says Kushner occupies "a kind of 'poet laureate' position for many of the disenfranchised an extraordinary, public intellectual." Although Angels so far remains the highlight of his career, it is a career— in drama, letters and political activism—that is far from over.
Plot Overview Angels in America focuses on the stories of two troubled couples, one gay, one straight: "word processor" Louis Ironson and his lover Prior Walter, and Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt and his wife Harper. After the funeral of Louis's grandmother, Prior tells him that he has contracted AIDS, and Louis panics. He tries to care for Prior but soon realizes he cannot stand the strain and fear. Meanwhile, Joe is offered a job in the Justice Department by Roy Cohn, his right-wing, bigoted mentor and friend. But Harper, who is addicted to Valium and suffers anxiety and hallucinations, does not want to move to Washington. The two couples' fates quickly become intertwined: Joe stumbles upon Louis crying in the bathroom of the courthouse where he works, and they strike up an unlikely friendship based in part on Louis's suspicion that Joe is gay. Harper and Prior also meet, in a fantastical mutual dream sequence in which Prior, operating on the "threshold of revelation," reveals to Harper that her husband is a closeted homosexual. Harper confronts Joe, who denies it but says he has struggled inwardly with the issue. Roy receives a different kind of surprise: At an appointment with his doctor Henry, he learns that he too has been diagnosed with AIDS. But Roy, who considers gay men weak and ineffectual, thunders that he has nothing in common with them— AIDS is a disease of homosexuals, whereas he has "liver cancer." Henry, disgusted, urges him to use his clout to obtain an experimental AIDS drug. Prior's illness and Harper's terrors both grow worse. Louis strays from Prior's bedside to seek anonymous sex in Central Park at night. Fortunately, Prior has a more reliable caretaker in Belize, an ex-drag queen and dear friend. Prior confesses to Belize that he has been hearing a wonderful and mysterious voice; Belize is skeptical, but once he leaves we hear the voice speak to Prior, telling him she is a messenger who will soon arrive for him. As the days pass, Louis and Joe grow closer and the sexual tinge in their banter grows more and more obvious. Finally, Joe drunkenly telephones his mother Hannah in Salt Lake City to tell her that he is a homosexual, but Hannah tells him he is being ridiculous. Nonetheless, she makes plans to sell her house and come to New York to put things right. In a tense and climactic scene, Joe tells Harper about his feelings, and she screams at him to leave, while simultaneously Louis tells Prior he is moving out. The disconsolate Prior is awakened one night by the ghosts of two ancestors who tell him they have come to prepare the way for the unseen messenger. Tormented by such supernatural appearances and by his anguish over Louis, Prior becomes increasingly desperate. Joe, equally distraught in his own way, tells Roy he cannot accept his offer; Roy explodes at him and calls him a "sissy." He then tells Joe about his greatest achievement, illegally intervening in the espionage trial of Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s and guaranteeing her execution. Joe is shocked by Roy's lack of ethics. When Joe leaves, the ghost of Ethel herself appears, having come to witness Roy's last days on earth. In the climax of Part One, Joe follows Louis to the park, then accompanies him home for sex, while Prior's prophetic visions culminate in the appearance of an imposing and beautiful Angel who crashes through the roof of his apartment and proclaims, "The Great Work begins." In Part Two, Harper indulges in the fantasy that she is in Antarctica with her imaginary
companion Mr. Lies. But Antarctica turns out to be Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and she is picked up by the police. With Joe nowhere to be found, Hannah comes to her rescue, tending to her in the depths of depression. She finally insists that Harper join her at the Mormon Visitor's Center, where she has begun to volunteer. Meanwhile, the increasingly sick Roy checks in to the hospital where Belize works as a nurse. Roy insults him with cutting, racist remarks, but Belize, angry but filled with involuntary respect, gives him valuable advice on his treatment. Their relationship is always bitter but heated and icy by turns. Belize, however, demonstrates his considerable compassion for Prior, who tells him the full story of the Angel's visit. After her dramatic arrival, she gives Prior a prophetic book and explains that she seeks his help to halt the migratory tendency of human beings, which the Angels in Heaven believe tempted God to abandon them. God, she explains, left Heaven forever on the day of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and since then his Angels—whose vast powers are fueled by constant sexual activity—have been rudderless and alone. To reverse the trend, the Angel says humans must end their constant motion, their addiction to change. Not surprisingly, Prior is aghast at her words and vows to flee from her at all costs. Roy learns that his political opponents plan to disbar him for an ethical lapse, but he vows to remain a lawyer until he dies. In a friendly rapprochement, he gives Joe his blessing, until Joe reveals that he has left Harper for a man—he has been living for a blissful month with Louis. Stunned and angry, he demands that Joe end his gay relationship at once. Ethel comes to observe him in his misery. Joe's wife, on the other hand, spends her days at the Mormon Visitor's Center watching a diorama of the Mormon migration featuring a father dummy who looks suspiciously like Joe. When Prior drops in to conduct research on angels, a fantasy sequence ensues in which Louis and Joe appear in the diorama. The formerly silent Mormon mother comes to life and leaves with Harper, giving her painful but valuable advice on loss and change. Louis and Joe's idyll draws to an end when Louis says he wants to see Prior again. At their meeting, Prior coldly insists that he must present visible proof of his internal bruises. Belize later tells Louis about Joe's relationship with Roy, whose politics and personal history Louis despises. When Louis angrily confronts Joe, their fight turns physical and Joe punches him. He apologizes, horrified, but they never speak again. Roy nears his end as well, reeling from Joe's disclosure and from Ethel's news that he has been disbarred. He dies, but not before tricking Ethel into tenderly singing for him. After his death, Belize summons Louis to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, to demonstrate thanks (for his stash of AIDS drugs) and forgiveness. Ethel leads Louis in the prayer, the play's emotional and moral climax. After Prior suffers an episode at the visitor's center, Hannah takes him to the hospital. There, the Angel descends, and Prior wrestles her. He succeeds, and is granted entry into Heaven to refuse his prophecy. In Heaven, which resembles San Francisco after the great earthquake, Prior tells the Angels that despite all his suffering he wants them to bless him and give him more life. The Angels sympathize but say they cannot halt the plague. He tells them should God return, they should sue Him for abandonment. Back on earth, his fever broken, Prior tells Louis he loves him but that he cannot ever come back. Harper leaves Joe for the last time and sets off on an optimistic voyage to San Francisco to begin her own life. In 1990, four years later, Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah appear in a moving epilogue. Prior
says that the disease has killed many but that he intends to live on, and that the "Great Work" will continue.
Character List Louis Ironson - A "word processor" who works at the federal appeals court in Brooklyn. Louis embodies all the stereotypes of the neurotic Jew: anxious, ambivalent and perpetually guilty. Yet that guilt does not prevent him from leaving his lover Prior when he contracts AIDS. Louis's moral journey, from callous abandonment to genuine repentance and sorrow, is one of the key maturations in the play; his awakening of responsibility parallels the awakening that the play seeks to awaken in its audiences. Louis's idealistic faith in American democracy, while often naive or self-absorbed, is similar to the faith Kushner himself manifests, so much so that some critics call Louis a stand-in for the playwright. Read an in-depth analysis of Louis Ironson. Prior Walter - The boyfriend Louis abandons after Prior reveals that he has AIDS. Prior becomes a prophet when he is visited by an Angel of God, but he eventually rejects his prophecy and demands a blessing of additional life. The Angel is drawn to Prior because of his illness, which inscribes a kind of ending in his bloodstream, and because of his ancient AngloSaxon lineage, representing the notion of being rooted and stable. But he proves wiser than the Angels in rejecting their doctrine of stasis in favor of the painful necessity of movement and migration. Prior is as genuinely decent and moral as Louis is flawed. His AIDS infection renders him weak and victimized, but he manages to transcend that mere victimhood, surviving and becoming the center of a new, utopian community at the play's end. Read an in-depth analysis of Prior Walter. Joe Pitt - A Mormon, Republican lawyer at the appeals court, Joe grapples with his latent homosexuality, leaving his wife Harper for Louis and being left in turn by Louis. Louis is at first drawn to Joe's ideology but ultimately turns on him because he is a conservative and an intimate of the hated Roy Cohn. His initial naiveté is challenged by Roy's unethical behavior and his painful love affair. Joe's path in the play (from self-sufficient and strong to helpless and dependent) is in some ways the opposite of Prior's trajectory. The play finally seems to abandon Joe, excluding him from its vision of the good society because of his ideology—an omission that comes off as uncharacteristically narrow and intolerant. Harper Pitt - Joe's wife, a Valium-addicted agoraphobe trapped in a failing marriage who hallucinates and invents imaginary characters to escape her troubles. The perpetually fearful Harper obsesses about knife-wielding men and the ozone layer as a subconscious stand-in for her own difficulties. But through an inexplicable dream encounter with Prior, she learns that her husband is gay and begins to take control of her own destiny. Of all the major characters, Harper ends the play the farthest from where she began: as an independent, confident woman newly in love with life and setting off to build her own life in San Francisco. Roy Cohn - A famous New York lawyer and powerbroker, Roy Cohn was a real-life figure whom Kushner adapted for his play. Roy is the play's most vicious and disturbing character, a closeted homosexual who disavows other gays and cares only about amassing clout. His lack of ethics led him to illegally intervene in the espionage trial of Ethel Rosenberg, which resulted in her execution. Roy represents the opposite of community, the selfishness and loneliness all too endemic to American life. However, his malevolence goes beyond mere isolation to actual
hatred and evil. He is forgiven (though not exonerated) in the play's moral climax, after his death (from AIDS) unwittingly reconnects him to the gay community from which he always distanced himself. Read an in-depth analysis of Roy Cohn. Belize - A black ex-drag queen and registered nurse, Belize is Prior's best friend and—quite against Belize's will—Roy's caretaker. He is the most ethical and reasonable character in the play, generously looking out for Prior, grappling with Roy and rebutting Louis's blindly selfcentered politics. At times Belize feels less like an individual than a symbol of marginalized groups, particularly since most of his history and personal life are hidden from the audience. But despite these omissions he remains complex—full of hatred for Roy, yet possessing sufficient character and morality to forgive him. Hannah Pitt - Joe's mother, who moves from Salt Lake City to New York after Joe confesses he is gay in a late-night phone call. Hannah tends sternly to Harper but blossoms after she encounters Prior, becoming his companion and friend. Her chilly demeanor is melted by Prior and by a remarkable sexual encounter with the Angel. The Angel of America - An imposing, terrifying, divine presence who descends from Heaven to bestow prophecy on Prior. The Angel seeks a prophet to overturn the migratory impulse of human beings, believing that their constant motion and change have driven God to abandon creation. Her cosmology is disturbingly reactionary, even deadly, and Prior successfully resists it in a visit to Heaven. This reactionary nature is rather surprisingly blended with a dramatic, Whitman-esque speaking style and an overpowering, multigendered sexuality. Ethel Rosenberg - A real-life Jewish woman who was executed for treason during the McCarthy era. The Ethel of the play returns as a ghost to take satisfaction in the death of her persecutor, Roy. Ethel hates Roy with a "needlesharp" passion, yet on his deathbed she musters enough compassion to sing to him. Her recitation of the Kaddish with Louis indicates her forgiveness. Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz - An elderly rabbi who delivers the eulogy at the funeral of Sarah Ironson, Rabbi Chemelwitz describes the conservative process by which Jewish immigrants resisted assimilation. Louis seeks spiritual guidance from him, and Prior later encounters him in Heaven on his way to confront the Angels. Mr. Lies - A travel agent who resembles a jazz musician, Mr. Lies is one of Harper's imaginary creations. She summons him whenever she wants to escape from her present surroundings, though Mr. Lies cautions her that there is a limit to her ability to flee from reality. Henry - Roy's doctor, whom Roy threatens with destruction lest he refer to him as a homosexual. Henry recognizes the folly of Roy's self-delusion but ultimately gives in to it, agreeing to set down his official condition as liver cancer. Emily - A nurse who attends to Prior in the hospital. Emily is one of several characters who give voice to the same anti-migratory impulse as the Angel, she tells Prior in no uncertain terms to stay put. Martin Heller - A Justice Department official and political ally of Roy's. Martin is fundamentally spineless, allowing Roy to manipulate him in order to impress Joe and then taking the abuse that Roy heaps on him along with a blackmail threat. Sister Ella Chapter - A real estate agent who handles the sale of Hannah's house in Salt Lake.
Like Emily, she urges her friend to settle down and remain at home. Prior I and Prior II - Prior's ancestors who are summoned from the dead to help prepare the way for the Angel's arrival. Prior I is a medieval farmer, Prior II a seventeenth- century Londoner who is more sophisticated and cosmopolitan in outlook. Both men died of the plague. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov - The World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, who delivers the tirade that marks the beginning of Perestroika. Prelapsarianov criticizes the pettiness of modern American life, the pointless quality of life in the absence of a governing theory. The Mormon Mother - A dummy from the diorama at the Mormon Visitor's Center who is silenced while her husband and son speak. The Mormon mother comes to life, however, and accompanies Harper while sharing painful truths about life and change. Sarah Ironson - Louis's grandmother, Sarah's funeral takes place in the first scene of Millennium. Prior encounters her in Heaven, playing cards with Rabbi Chemelwitz.
Analysis of Major Characters Louis Ironson Of all the characters in Angels in America, Louis most resembles Tony Kushner: a young, progressive, Jewish New Yorker whose wordiness feels like an affectionate parody of the playwright's own rambling prose style. While it is always problematic, albeit tempting, to equate author with character, we can at least infer from the similarity between Louis and Kushner that Kushner does not intend Louis to be seen as a heartless villain, as some readers have proposed. It would be easy enough to reduce Louis to a caricature—the idealist who loudly discusses virtue but reneges on his own responsibilities. Louis's actions are clearly condemned: his abandonment of Prior is weak, selfish and insensitive. But because the hardships of his situation are painted so vividly that the audience can understand Louis's failings and empathize with him. Caring for Prior is complicated and excruciating, and Louis's guilt is genuine. He walks out on Prior with his eyes open, aware of the callousness of his action (despite a few petty attempts to justify himself) yet brave enough to do what he feels he must. Belize berates Louis for his "Big Ideas," but introducing Big Ideas into the play is one of Louis's important roles. Louis's musings to Prior about the meting out of eternal justice form the core of his eventual answer to Roy's and Joe's amoral veneration of pure law. In a conversation with Emily, Prior's nurse, Louis is the one to describe Prior's venerable heritage, which introduces the themes of history and stability. Most obviously, Louis voices most of the play's ideas about politics (at least, the ideas that the playwright accepts—Joe is just as political as Louis, but his ideas are ultimately discarded). Louis is the spokesman for a brand of democratic optimism with which Belize finds fault but which Belize does not fully discredit. In a play whose title promises a discussion of national themes, Louis is the character who most consistently examines the big picture. Louis's journey from callous heartbreaker to sincere penitent is one of the strongest moral developments in the play. For a long time, Louis wallows in self-pity and self-protection, but over time he learns to take responsibility for his actions. Prior accuses Louis of crying without endangering himself, a meaningless performance of emotion. But by the end of the play, there seems to be no question that Louis's love for Prior is real and that Louis understands the true import of what he did. Prior's journey to the afterlife and back is mirrored by Louis's voyage to self-awareness. Prior Walter In classic terms, Prior is the character most easily identifiable as the play's protagonist— ironically and precisely because he is the play's chief victim. Prior begins the play at the mercy of everyone and everything around him: abandoned by Louis, infected with a disease that takes control of his body and its functions, and harassed by a merciless and unfathomable Angel. As a homosexual, an effeminate man and a person with AIDS, he is also the victim of social prejudice as epitomized by the self-hating but extremely powerful Roy.
Over the course of the play, however, the victim gains power and authority far beyond what we imagined he was capable of. The characters who seem the most confident: the strong, the opinionated, the straight-acting, those who wield influence and wealth in the world—the Roys, Joes and Louises—are humbled and changed. At the same time, dispossessed and marginal people—whether by identity, be it black, female or gay, by ideology, or by their own passive personalities—take their places as moral arbiters and shapers of destiny. Put simply, the meek inherit this earth. In Prior's case, he turns the emotional tables on Louis, essentially from being a "woman scorned" to having the wisdom and the willpower to reject Louis's entreaties. His AIDS continues to plague him but not to dominate him, and he defiantly delivers the play's final, stirring monologue. And most spectacularly, the prophet who wanted nothing more than to run from his Angel ends up cowing the assembled ranks of Heaven with an impassioned bit of "theology," wresting from them that which he believes he deserves physically as well as intellectually. In another, literally progressive trend, Prior embodies the rejection of conservatism and stasis and the embrace of a painful but necessary spirit of change. Prior's connection to stasis is rooted in his very being: in his ancient, respectable bloodlines and in "The End" inscribed in his veins, whether in reference to his AIDS or to the homosexuality that will leave him childless. But by rejecting his Angel-imposed prophecy, Prior becomes the prophet of an alternate philosophy that the play shares. His speech in Heaven is the clearest statement of the theme of stasis versus change that predominates throughout the play, and the firmest rejection of stasis offered throughout. Roy Cohn In an era of super-villains who match wits with equally cardboard superheroes, the Roy Cohn of Angels in America stands out as a genuinely original and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of intentional malice. At the end of the play, the audience understands Roy deeply and compassionately; perhaps they weep at his death, glimpsing the ferocious pain of his life and the secrets bottled up within. But Roy is not excused by his pathos for a minute. Kushner's depiction of Cohn is so successful because his human side is never decorated with sentimentality or nostalgia—at several uncomfortable moments he represents raw evil. The Roy who calls Belize a string of disgusting racial epithets, who delights in Ethel Rosenberg's execution and shamelessly bullies his protégé Joe cannot ever be obscured by the tough, damaged survivor with the gloriously schmaltzy death. Kushner employs a stereotypical image of the Jew in drawing Roy as a comment on antiSemitism and prevailing images of Jewish people. Stripped of his telephone and his New York moxie, Roy almost resembles Shylock of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice —the heartless, greedy middleman who cares only for money and self-promotion. With his back-channel access and wheeler-dealer savvy, Roy also fits with more modern stereotypes of Jews as quietly influential overlords. Kushner does not try to obscure this linkage—he revels in it. The first scene in which Roy appears announces him as a grandly over-the-top villain for whom subtlety is less important than showmanship. By making Roy the cousin of these Jewish stereotypes, the play ironically highlights his own ill- concealed anti-Semitism and homophobia. Roy assumes he is persecuted for his Judaism in part because he does not like other Jews; part of what fuels his hatred of Ethel is her Jewishness (likewise, his attraction to Joe is indivisible from Joe's
image as an all-American Gentile). But, the play suggests, what makes Roy a monster is not his Judaism but his prejudice, ironically targeted at his own. The traces of Judaism or homosexuality in Roy's persona (humorously hinted at in his first scene, for instance, by his affection for the musical La Cage Aux Folles) cannot be eradicated, and in death his link to his ancestral communities only grows stronger. But while he lives, Roy's isolation from his natural identity contributes to his twisted villainy and his unprofessed but profound loneliness.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols Themes Community
Discussing his play, Tony Kushner has said, "The question I am trying to ask is how broad is a community's embrace. How wide does it reach?" "Community" refers both to personal bonds between individuals and the political bonds we might call democratic citizenship. In simplified form, the plot of Angels in America focuses on the fact that both kinds of community are destroyed and then recreated. In Millennium, relationships end, Roy stretches and contorts the law, the characters slide further into isolation and loneliness. All this wreckage is symbolized by the physical destruction caused by the Angel's appearance at the end of Part One. But Perestroika reconstitutes community in new and unlikely ways, forging bonds between seemingly unconnected characters (Hannah and Prior, Prior and Harper) and repudiating those, like Joe, who see law as unconnected to morality. Louis's optimism for democracy is naive but not invalid—democratic community is even able to withstand the crisis of AIDS. Even Roy, the play's most difficult character, is not abandoned to the wilds of isolation: his death unwittingly links him to communities he had abandoned—gays and lesbians, people with AIDS, Jews—and he is reclaimed, albeit with difficulty, by those with whom he had tried to sever all connections. Identity: ethnicity, race, homosexuality
The theme of identity is closely tied to the play's notion of community, since identity groups are one of the types of connection around which communities form. Although we are accustomed to thinking of white people as lacking an identity, in this play all the characters are marked by ethnicity: WASP, Jewish, Mormon, as well as black; in addition, the male characters are defined by their homosexuality. Even AIDS infection serves as an identity type, written into the skin as visibly as race. Identity can certainly have a divisive power: Louis's callousness about race and his suspicion that Belize is anti-Semitic drive a wedge between them, while Prior's AIDS infection is too great a barrier for Louis to overcome. Nor is Kushner sentimental about the ability of identity to connect people automatically, since characters like Roy do their best to deny their membership in oppressed groups (though that denial is erased by his death). But one lesson of Angels is that identity need not be discarded for communities to form—the melting pot need not melt. Despite Prior's misgivings, for instance, Hannah accepts him as a gay man even though she is a Mormon. In the epilogue, the characters are not required to paper over their differences. Quite the contrary: those differences serve as a kind of glue that welds them together. They are diverse yet mutually dependent. Stasis versus change
From the first scene of the play, the opposition between stasis and change is Kushner's favorite theme. In a world filled with despair, the desire to halt change—to preserve the past and ignore or suppress the future—is a natural reaction. This anti-migratory impulse is voiced by Rabbi Chemelwitz, Emily the nurse and Sister Ella Chapter, and most spectacularly by the Angels,
who order Prior to make humanity stop its ceaseless motion. The Angel chooses Prior as her prophet because of the ancient, rooted history of his family and because (as Belize detects) he secretly shares their reaction. But as events make abundantly clear, that desire is literally reactionary—destructive, and at odds with the progressive values of the play. Migration, which brought Prior's family to America as well as Belize's slave ancestors and Louis's immigrant ones, and which carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah, is an inevitable and inerasable human drive. More broadly speaking, Kushner implies that our democracy and our national politics must resist this reactive impulse. Rather than seeking a haven in an idealized 1950s past, America needs to embrace even those changes that frighten some people— especially the growth of a politically active and culturally accepted gay and lesbian minority. Motifs Biblical references
In addition to its overarching story about angels, God and Heaven, Angels in America is studded with specific references to the Bible. Louis asks Rabbi Chemelwitz what the Scriptures say about someone who abandons a loved one; Joe tells the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel; Louis compares a wound on his forehead to the Mark of Cain; Roy mentions the story of Isaac and Jacob and the Book of Isaiah. Partly, these references help establish a sacred atmosphere— by linking modern America to the world of the Bible, they help convince us that prophecy is indeed feasible in secular times. The skeptical audience member is like Prior listening to Hannah describe the appearance of an angel to Joseph Smith: disbelieving but gradually convincible. Moreover, the Biblical allusions foreshadow the real events of the play, so that Joe's description of Jacob's encounter with the angel lays the groundwork for Prior's—like Jacob, he wrestles the Angel into submission and discovers a ladder leading to Heaven. In another instance, Roy tells Joe that unlike Isaac, he gives his blessing freely—but the comparison proves more apt a moment later when Joe reveals he is living with a man, and Roy feels the pang of a father at what he perceives as the missteps of a wayward son. Politics
In as opinionated a profession as writing, Tony Kushner stands out for the vehemence with which he voices his politics and the directness with which he incorporates them into his work. One early play, A Bright Room Called Day, stirred controversy with its direct comparisons between the Ronald Reagan and the Nazi Party. Although it is always dangerous to equate a writer with the opinions expressed in his or her works, in the case of Angels the play's (if not Kushner's) political platform is unmistakable. The most villainous characters are conservative Republicans, the heroes tolerant and left-wing; and throughout figures like Reagan, George Bush and Newt Gingrich are subjected to continuous rhetorical assault, only incompletely parried by Joe—who is himself discredited near the play's end. The intention of these political interjections does not seem to be the advocacy of a particular party or candidate, or even broader ideological persuasion—merely promoting Democrats over Republicans would be far too parochial an aim for a work of literature, and besides, it is safe to assume that most of the play's audiences shared Kushner's point of view. The larger purpose is to exhort well-meaning liberals like Louis to shed their blinders and work more fervently for political change. Beyond exhortation, though, the politics of Angels remain inseparable from its morality, philosophy
and vision of community. Religion, especially Mormonism and Judaism
In some ways, the two religions that recur again and again in Angels seem irreconcilably different—Jews and Mormons, after all, are rarely linked in the popular imagination or indeed in real life. Jews tend to be leftist urbanites, while Mormons are concentrated in the conservative precincts of Utah; Judaism is one of the world's oldest religions while Mormonism is even younger than the United States. Louis's shock at encountering a Mormon in New York and his unconcealed derision for the church—he calls it a "cult"—reflect this apparent incongruity. But the play symbolically joins Mormons and Jews with one another and with America itself. Both religions are separated from the wider society by their own inward focus as well as by prejudice and lack of understanding. That prejudice compelled both peoples to make epic migrations, which Rabbi Chemelwitz calls the world's Great Voyages. And both faiths make moral demands on their adherents, legitimate and illegitimate. The religious commandment to loyalty overshadows both Louis and Joe after they leave their partners, and their beliefs add to their feelings of guilt. More problematically, the two religions traditionally frown on homosexuality, adding to the characters' lack of self-esteem. The play values Mormonism and Judaism for their cultural connotations, the way in which they are separate from the mainstream yet entirely and distinctively American. At their best, they are both caring and valuable communities. But their particular religious doctrines are rarely invoked or examined, except as literary allusions. For all the visibility of religion, this is not a particularly religious play—the secular faith of democracy and civic idealism is ultimately what binds the characters together in the utopian epilogue. Symbols San Francisco
The city of San Francisco symbolizes both the failed society that the Angels try to perpetuate as well as the promise of an ideal, gay-inflected community that the play's ending promises. Heaven resembles San Francisco after the huge earthquake of 1906, the day on which God abandoned his people forever. His departure is as devastating to the Angels as the quake was to the city. But while Heaven remains in a state of permanent rubble and decay, the real San Francisco was almost immediately rebuilt, becoming, as Prior tells Harper, a place of "unspeakable" beauty. The San Francisco metaphor thus contrasts the untenable stasis of the Angels with the ceaseless energy and determination of human beings. The city also represents the longed-for ideal society the characters attempt to build in the epilogue. Westward migration has always represented hope in America, but earlier migrations like that of the Mormons only replicated the emptiness and isolation they sought to leave behind. Now, in the last scene, Harper is migrating even farther west, as far west as she can go in America, to a place famous for its tolerance, loveliness, and left-wing politics, a city that is not coincidentally America's gay capital. The gathering on the rim of the Bethesda Fountain could have easily been staged in San Francisco's Castro District—both locations represent voluntary community, inclusion, civic participation, and personal promise.
Millennium Approaches, Act One, Scenes 1–5 (Act One is subtitled "Bad News") Summary
Scene 1 The play opens with Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz alone onstage with a small wooden coffin. He is preaching the funeral of Sarah Ironson, the grandmother of a large, assimilated Jewish family. Rabbi Chemelwitz admits he did not know Sarah, whose later years in the Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews were sad and quiet, but that he knows her type: the strong, uncomplaining peasant women of Eastern Europe who immigrated to America to build authentic homes for their children. Her kind soon will no longer exist, he says. Scene 1 Meanwhile, Joe Pitt is waiting in Roy Cohn's office while Roy nimbly manipulates several blinking phone lines. Roy switches between arguing with a client whose court date he missed, arranging theater tickets for the wife of a visiting judge, and cursing out an underling. Joe watches him uncomfortably. As Roy uses swear words, Joe asks him not to take the Lord's name in vain, explaining that he is a Mormon. Roy praises Joe's work as a judicial clerk—he writes decisions for his boss to sign—and then offers him a powerful job in the Justice Department. Joe, pleased but surprised, says he needs to talk to his wife. Scene 3 Joe's wife Harper is sitting alone in their apartment talking to herself and worrying—she imagines the ozone layer disappearing. Mr. Lies, a travel agent who Harper imagines, suddenly appears. Harper asks for a guided tour of Antarctica to see the hole in the ozone layer. She confesses her terrible fears about the world and the state of her marriage. Joe returns home and Mr. Lies vanishes; he asks her if she would like to move to Washington. Scene 4 The scene cuts to Louis Ironson, Sarah's grandson, and his lover Prior Walter. They are sitting on a bench outside the funeral home and Louis is about to leave for the cemetery. He remembers his grandmother and apologizes to Prior for not introducing him, saying that family events make him feel closeted. Louis asks why Prior is in a bad mood, assuming it is because their cat, Little Sheba, is missing. Instead, Prior rolls up his sleeve and reveals a Kaposi's sarcoma lesion, an infectious disease that accompanies AIDS. Prior is glib but Louis panics, grabbing him; Prior admits he did not tell him earlier because he is afraid Louis will leave him. Louis says he needs to go to the cemetery but promises he will come back afterwards. Scene 5 Joe asks Harper if she is willing to move to Washington, but she asks him to turn the job down,
offering a series of lame, unconvincing excuses and ridiculous fears. Joe asks her how many Valium pills she has taken today; after first denying it, she admits she has had three. At first he tries to calm her, promising that things are changing for good in the world, but then gets angry at her obstinacy and accuses her of having emotional problems. When they make up, Harper suggests they try oral sex, but Joe is shocked and unnerved. Meanwhile, across the stage, Louis asks Rabbi Chemelwitz what the Bible says about someone who abandons a loved one in a time of need, confessing that he is afraid of disease and death. The rabbi has no satisfying answer for him. Analysis
Although the beginning of Act One only gives brief glimpses of the play's central characters, it nevertheless reveals the conflicts that will confront them for the rest of the play. Louis and Prior experience a terrible shock—Prior's revelation that he has AIDS—and that awful moment signals the inevitable destruction of their relationship. Prior tells Louis he is afraid he will leave him, but rather than comforting him or telling him he loves him, Louis just says "Oh," then says he has to go. Only with prompting does Louis say he will come home. From that queasy beginning we can predict the downward arc of their relationship and Louis's agonized questions to the rabbi only confirm our suspicions. Similarly, the brief pause with which Joe says he was "just…out" and that Harper has nothing to get anxious about indicates the opposite —she has something significant indeed to make her anxious, the state of her marriage, as she confesses to Mr. Lies. These seemingly tiny moments and phrases are miniature versions of larger, future patterns. The beginning of the play also presages some of the most important recurring themes in Angels in America. In particular, Rabbi Chemelwitz's opening monologue introduces an idea that becomes especially critical after the Angel's appearance in Perestroika: the opposition between continuity and change. Sarah Ironson's journey to the New World is emblematic of the human tendency and the necessity to migrate, the necessity that so troubles the Angels in Part Two of the play. Her migration was literally motivated by survival, an escape from oppression, yet it is symbolic of every person's need to move. As the rabbi says, "In you that journey is"—"you" being both the audience members and the other characters in the play, including Louis and Prior, as yet unseen in the crowd at Sarah's funeral. Yet even within the context of Sarah's migration an anti-migratory impulse is also present. The rabbi points out that Sarah Ironson and her kind tried to recreate the Old World in the New, to stave off the disruptive influence of a completely new society and, in particular, that of America, the world's most famously changing and changeable country. That this reactionary impulse is ultimately thwarted can be detected in the very un-Jewish names of Sarah's descendants. But the desire to prevent change moves Sarah and people like her to take on a heavy burden, one which she metaphorically carries "on her back" and which eventually distances her from the fully assimilated grandchildren on whose behalf she sacrifices. The rabbi is wrong on one count, when he says that "such Great Voyages…do not any more exist." The entire play, of course, is the story of many Great Voyages: Louis's transgression and his attempt to overcome it, Joe's emergence from the closet, Roy's journey to what Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country," Harper's growing self-confidence and assurance, culminating in her night flight to San Francisco; and most importantly, Prior's voyage to
Heaven and back, his painful decision that he does indeed want more life. The play is a voyage in the political sense, too, documenting the struggle for full citizenship by gays and lesbians and by people with AIDS. In real life, Kushner argues for a politics of solidarity, in which different people's fights against oppression overlap and reinforce one another. In that light, it would be odd for him to endorse the idea that the immigrant experience is a unique Great Voyage that cannot be repeated. In Kushner's universe, it is repeated constantly, by members of different groups who share the same dream of democratic inclusion.
Millennium Approaches, Act One, Scenes 6–9 Summary
Scene 6 Joe stumbles upon Louis a week later crying in the bathroom in the courthouse where they both work. Joe asks him if he is all right and offers him a tissue. Louis complains bitterly about the other lawyers who saw him crying and fled the room, calling them heartless Reaganites. When Joe protests that he voted for Reagan, Louis mutters, "A Gay Republican." Joe awkwardly replies that he isn't gay, stammering and confused. Louis teases him, suddenly kisses him on the cheek and leaves. Scene 7 In a dream, Prior is doing drag and trying to cheer himself up with makeup, but his depression over his health overwhelms him. Suddenly, Harper appears, bewildered that Prior has appeared in her hallucination; Prior replies that it is actually his dream. In the revelatory atmosphere of the hallucination, she immediately recognizes that Prior is very sick; Prior, in turn, tells her that Joe is gay. Harper denies it, but then in an instant of bonding understands it is true. She leaves, shattered. As Prior smears the makeup off his face, a gray feather falls from above, and a mysterious voice calls to him to "prepare the way." Scene 8 The two couples lie in bed that night. Harper, screaming, demands to know where Joe has been and what is going on with him. He thinks she is talking about his job, but she is talking about him—he terrifies her, she says. They fight, and without warning she demands to know if he is "a homo." Joe says he is not, but adds that it makes no difference if he has inwardly struggled with something he knows is wrong. Harper has no patience for his pieties and tells him she is going to have a baby. He cannot tell if she is lying, but she replies grimly that they both have a secret now. On the other side of the stage, Louis tells Prior about his vision of the afterlife—it is the weighing of a life that counts, not the verdict. But when Prior tells him about the progress of his disease, Louis becomes very upset. He asks Prior if he would hate him forever if he walked out on him; Prior says yes. Scene 9 Roy goes to visit his doctor Henry; when the scene begins Henry is describing the causes of AIDS. Henry tells Roy that a lesion he has just removed from his body is most likely Kaposi's sarcoma, and that he has other symptoms of AIDS as well. Noting that AIDS mostly affects homosexuals and drug addicts, Roy tries to force the doctor to say out loud that he is gay, although he threatens to destroy his career if he does. Roy tells him that labels like "gay" and "AIDS" do not describe real things but simply a person's clout. Homosexuals, he says, are not men who have sex with other men but men who have no power. He is a "heterosexual…who fucks around with guys," and he insists that his disease be described as liver cancer, not AIDS. Henry, disgusted, urges Roy to use his clout to request a supply of AZT, an experimental new
AIDS drug. Analysis
Scene Seven is the first real indication that Angels in America has a supernatural element. Mr. Lies's appearance in Scene Three could be explained away as being a figment of Harper's imagination, but in this scene Prior and Harper exchange information that will bear directly on the plot, information that Harper in particular could not have obtained in any "realistic" way. This scene is only the beginning: in the course of the play Kushner creates ghosts, angels and talking mannequins, allows characters to be conjured "spectrally" by one another, and permits travel between earth and other planes of existence, like Heaven. These devices are not gimmicks, however—the play could not function without them. This is obviously true of major plot elements like Prior's visitation by the Angel or Roy's confrontation with Ethel. But the supernatural also adds to the striking interconnectedness of the principal characters. Nearly all the main characters share links that join them alone and are not routed through the others; but while most of the characters encounter each other in life, fantasy provides the most plausible way for Prior and Harper or Louis and Harper to encounter each other. This fantastical element places Angels in opposition to the long-dominant realist camp of American drama. One need only consider Hamlet or The Tempest to see that unreality, magic, and fantastical apparitions are important elements of Western drama. But many prominent twentieth-century American playwrights have emphasized grittily realistic settings, hyperaccurate dialogue (including dialect and obscenities) and real-time events, often coupled with a depressingly pessimistic or cynical worldview—think of Eugene O'Neill or David Mamet. Part of the hugely positive critical reaction to Kushner's play may have been sparked by the central role of fantasy—the play's very title describes it as a "fantasia." The realist streak in American drama only enhances the playful liveliness of Kushner's vision. Scene Nine presents a darker, all-too-real image—Roy Cohn's cynical view of politics and identity. Here, at the outset of the play, Roy presents the polar opposite of Kushner's own politics of solidarity. Roy not only feels no solidarity with other oppressed groups, like women or racial minorities; he even rejects other gays and lesbians. Since his personal bonds with others are based not on affection or shared ideology but on power, this is not surprising. Roy might desire another man, but desire is irrelevant—he only identifies with other powerful people, like Nancy Reagan, rather than powerless gays. (A gay rights bill was introduced in the New York city council in 1971, the first in the country, but gay activists could not get it passed until 1986, the year after the setting of Act One.) Roy believes his money and status protects him from oppression, can even buy him immunity from AIDS in the form of AZT. But the events of the play will demonstrate how wrong he is: the disbarment committee is so quick to rule in Act Four of Perestroika because Roy is a "little faggot," and AIDS cannot be held at bay no matter how many drugs Roy takes. In real life, too, Kushner has noted that the newspaper coverage after Cohn died seemed to take a gleeful, homophobic pleasure in revealing his sexual orientation and his cause of death. Roy's politics of clout may have benefited him for decades, but they fail in his hour of greatest struggle.
Millennium Approaches, Act Two, Scenes 1–5 (Act Two is subtitled "In Vitro") Summary
Scene 1 Prior lies on the floor of his bedroom, crying for Louis to wake up. Louis runs in, terrified; Prior is in terrible pain but refuses to go to the hospital. Louis runs out to call an ambulance, and while he is gone Prior has an accident that covers him in feces and blood. He faints, and Louis quietly despairs. Scene 2 The same night, Joe comes home to find Harper sitting alone in the dark—she has been having drug-induced terrors. They talk about prayer, and he tells her that as a child he was fascinated with the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Harper admits that she is not sure whether she is going to have a baby, but adds that she thinks he should go to Washington without her. When he protests, she says she is going to leave him. Scene 3 In the hospital, Louis talks to one of Prior's nurses, Emily, while Prior sleeps peacefully. She tries to console Louis, and to make conversation she asks Louis where the name Prior Walter came from. Louis tells her that Prior is descended from an old WASP family that traces its lineage back to the Norman Conquest. He reflects bitterly on his weakness and lack of devotion in the face of Prior's illness, and tells Emily he has to go for a walk in the park to think. Scene 4 Joe and Roy sit in a bar late at night. Joe tells Roy about Harper's addiction, her difficult childhood and the strict standards of the Mormon Church. He says in spite of everything he loves Harper's troubled side best because of his own struggle to pass as a cheerful and upright person. Roy sympathizes but says that Joe belongs in Washington, with or without Harper. He tells Joe that he is prepared to be a father to him, to push him to achieve, in a way that might seem cold or unforgiving but which is really meant to toughen and protect him. Then Roy discloses that he is dying of "cancer"; Joe is stunned. As Joe and Roy talk, Louis cruises a man (played by the same actor who plays Prior) in the Ramble, a deserted region of Central Park where men meet in the night for sex. Louis asks the man to punish him, and they begin to have sex. When the condom breaks, Louis tells the man he doesn't care whether he infects him or not, but the man grows uncomfortable and leaves. Scene 5 Prior is visited in his hospital room by Belize, a black ex-drag queen who is his former lover and a dear friend. Prior wants Louis by his side, but he is nowhere to be found. When he calms
down, he tells Belize he has been hearing voices, but begs Belize not to tell the doctor since he also finds the voice sexually arousing and does not want to give it up. Belize tells Prior that no matter what, he will be by his side. As soon as Belize leaves, Prior resumes an interrupted conversation with the voice; it tells him that it is not a herald of death but a messenger sent to prepare him to perform a great work. Analysis
On first reading, Louis might seem like one of the play's villains, abandoning his lover at the time of his greatest need. But although Louis has human failings and commits an immoral act in leaving Prior, he is no villain, as Act II, Scene One helps us to understand. The depiction of Prior's illness is truly awful. The screams in the night are frightening, and Louis's panic is entirely justified: Prior refuses to go to the hospital, but there is no way Louis can help him. He cannot even perform the simple task of cleaning his body, since Prior's blood is infectious. In addition to this physical and medical helplessness, the scene conveys the emotional difficulties Louis must suffer. The gentle, witty Prior of years past is replaced by a person who screams and cries, shouts at Louis for touching him and faints without warning—he is entirely selfcentered, which is understandable but difficult for his lover. Faced with such a constant nightmare, Louis's actions become more comprehensible. Kushner has said that at a time when an inadequate health care system and longer life expectancy are forcing more and more Americans to care for aging or sick relatives, he wanted to dramatize the simple truth that not everyone is a born healer and caretaker. Louis's eventual abandonment of Prior is extreme and selfish but, as this scene shows, perfectly human. Louis's problem is exacerbated by his tendency towards abstraction and his unreasonably high standards for himself. In Scene Three, he tells Emily about La Reine Mathilde, who supposedly created the Bayeux Tapestry. Louis describes La Reine's unceasing devotion to William the Conqueror and laments his own comparative lack of devotion. But as critic Allen J. Frantzen has pointed out, this popular story about Mathilde and the tapestry is wrong—it was actually created in England decades after the conquest. Louis, then, is holding himself to a mythological standard of loyalty, and he curses himself based on a positively unreal example. This is part of a larger pattern of excessive guilt and harshness toward himself, which, paradoxically, prevents him from judging his own weaknesses accurately and trying to correct them. Because no one could possibly live up to Mathilde's example, Louis initially justifies his moral failure. Later, in Perestroika, he will arrive at a more genuine remorse and an honest understanding of what he has done. Louis's conversation with Emily has another important function: it establishes Prior's ancient and very prestigious lineage. Whereas Louis's ancestors were rootless immigrants, Prior's family is the epitome of stability, so much so that the sons all even bear the same name. What's more, as Mayflower descendants they must be socially prominent and possibly wealthy— especially since, as the notes on the characters reveal, Prior lives off an inherited trust fund. But this unbroken line will come to an end in our Prior: as a gay man, he will have no children, and as a person with AIDS he likely has only a short future left. Since he rarely works, he will not even add to the family's store of capital. The image of the tapestry provides a metaphor for the family line—Prior represents the breaking of the thread. No wonder he might be attracted to the idea of halting the cruel march of history, since more than the other characters, with their
obscure or impoverished immigrant backgrounds, Prior has something to lose.
Millennium Approaches, Act Two, Scenes 6–10 Summary
Scene 6 Joe and Roy are dining in a fancy restaurant with Martin Heller, a friend of Roy's who works in the Justice Department. Martin is trying to sell Joe on the idea of coming to Washington, telling him about the conservative renaissance under Ronald Reagan. To show off to Joe, Roy insults Martin and then asks him to rub his back, in order to demonstrate his absolute loyalty. The two men pressure Joe to accept their job offer. When Joe continues to hesitate, Roy switches tactics, telling Joe that his political opponents are attempting to disbar him. But at the Justice Department, Joe could coerce Roy's enemies into easing up. Joe insists that he could never do something so unethical. Roy explodes, telling him that politics is "the game of being alive." Bitterly, he vows to remain a lawyer until the day he dies. Scene 7 On the steps of the courthouse where they work, Joe comes across Louis eating his lunch, and joins him. True to form, Louis baits him about his unhealthy meal—three hot dogs and a swig of Pepto-Bismol—and his conservatism. He turns philosophical, shuddering at the emptiness and isolation of modern America. Joe, in turn, describes his own private fears, his secret desire for emptiness and freedom. He decides suddenly that he cannot face going to work. Louis invites him to join him for the day instead. Louis's offer, and Joe's acceptance, is fraught with sexual ambiguity. Scene 8 Late that night, from a pay phone in the park, Joe drunkenly telephones his mother, Hannah Pitt, at home in Salt Lake City. She is startled and immediately assumes that Joe is in trouble. Then she begins to get angry and insists that he hang up and go home. Without warning, he tells her that he is a homosexual. She tells him he is being ridiculous; then, suddenly furious, she yells that drinking is a sin and hangs up. Scene 9 On opposite sides of the stage, Harper confronts Joe at home while Louis and Prior argue in Prior's hospital room. The two fights overlap rapidly and confusingly. Louis tells Prior he is moving out, and Prior berates him, calling him a bastard and a criminal. Louis responds that he needs privacy, that he refuses to be judged, that he is doing the best that he can. Shattered, pleading, Prior tries to reason with him, then screams at him to leave, which Louis does. Meanwhile, Joe tells Harper that he still loves her and that he will not abandon her, but that even when they were first married he knew inside that he was different from other men. She tells him to go to Washington, anywhere, but just to leave her alone. As they argue, they both realize that Joe is the same man who terrifies Harper in her hallucinations. Closing her ears, Harper calls Mr. Lies. He appears and they vanish together.
Scene 10 Hannah Pitt discusses her house with Sister Ella Chapter, a Salt Lake City real estate agent— she is selling it to move to New York. Ella begins to rhapsodize about the property, but Hannah bitingly cuts her short. Ella tells her she likes her because she is the only unfriendly Mormon she knows, and urges her to stay put and not venture out into the sinful world. But Hannah replies that Salt Lake has worn her out; she plans to take her chances in New York. Analysis
Joe and Louis's encounter in Scene Seven plays on the multiple connotations of "free" and "freedom," which are important concepts for the play as a whole. After Louis riffs on the problems of Ronald Reagan's children, Joe remarks on how uninhibited Louis is. He does not use the word "free," but that is what Louis clearly is—free with language, free with innuendo, a free spirit compared to the stuffiness and repression Joe is accustomed to. But freedom is also a political concept, one of the cherished ideals of America. Louis makes the link explicit—"Land of the free," he says, referring not just to political liberty but to his own "irresponsible" nature. This concept of freedom as liberation, both personal and political, is repeated when Joe describes the empty Hall of Justice, and muses about what it would be like "if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free." Justice and love are valuable ideals, but to Joe they are encumbrances—his commitment to justice keeps him from accepting Roy's offer, and his love for Harper traps him in an unhappy marriage. Freedom is frightening to him because it means abandoning his value system, but he still finds the idea attractive, exciting and even erotic. But Louis understands how costly that kind of freedom can be. Although it will not stop him from leaving Prior, his decision is truly agonizing, and he has a sense, still unformed but real, of the personal and social costs he will endure for his choice. Thus to Louis, freedom is as "heartless" as he himself is; it means the chance "to do whatever," to be "greedy and loveless and blind." His use of the plural and his reference to Americans as Reagan's children links this negative vision of "free" to political freedom just as he earlier connected it with the positive vision. Thus in this one scene the play offers a complicated understanding of freedom: it is thrilling, adventurous, vital, but also terrifying and lonely, and it has unimaginable costs. Despite these costs, though, both men will pursue their freedom—as they must, for the rejection of freedom leads to stasis and death. Just as Louis's ancestors pursued personal freedom over a dangerous ocean, or Joe's endured a harsh trek westward to find freedom of belief, so must their descendants continue to seek out freedom—forward motion—despite the painful, even immoral choices it requires. Sister Ella Chapter, more than any of the other human characters, rejects this idea of freedom. For her, freedom—as symbolized by travel—leads inevitably to evil. She would prefer that her friend Hannah remain in Salt Lake City, where she thinks she will be safe from danger. But the experience of the Mormon characters shows that mere lack of movement cannot save people. Joe and Harper were just as unhappy in Utah as they are in New York; the only difference is that, there, a conformist society prevented them from finding a better way, requiring them to
seem cheerful, uncomplicated, and strong. Salt Lake was not enough to give Hannah a satisfying marriage or make Joe's father love him. In Scene Four, Joe tells Roy that Mormons come from dysfunctional families even though they are not supposed to—stasis is no cure for dysfunction.
Millennium Approaches, Act Three, Scenes 1–4 (Act Three is subtitled "Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning") Summary
Scene 1 A sleeping Prior is awakened by a man dressed as a 13th-century British squire. After the initial shock, the man tells him that his name is also Prior Walter—he is an ancestor, the fifth to carry the name (the modern Prior corrects him, telling him that he is the thirty-fourth). The man, whom the play designates as Prior I, tells him that he, too, died in a plague even worse than AIDS, the Black Death of the 1200s. Then a second ghost-ancestor appears—Prior II, an elegant Londoner, who died in the plague outbreak of the 1660s. The two ghosts tell Prior they have been sent to prepare the way for the unseen messenger. They chant a mysterious chorus in Hebrew and English, similar to the voice's repeated refrain. Scene 2 The scene opens with Louis and Belize debating politics in a coffee shop. Across the stage, Prior lies helpless in his hospital bed. Louis delivers a lengthy monologue on democracy, liberalism and race. It is hilariously wordy, ambivalent and contradictory: he grandly proclaims the success of democracy in America, then immediately spews out a host of exceptions and counter-arguments; a moment later, he insists that the United States has no monolithic, dominant culture, until Belize acidly points out that the monolith of straight white men is "not unimpressive." Finally Belize cracks, and calls Louis on his passive- aggressive, borderlineracist liberalism. Hurt, Louis claims that Belize hates him because he is Jewish. Their comical bickering continues, but the subject inevitably turns to Prior. Across the stage, Prior lists the progress of his symptoms for Emily. In the middle of her reply, Prior begins hearing her words in Hebrew, but when he questions her about it, she does not know what he is talking about. Then, in a blaze of light, a flaming book with a Hebrew aleph on its pages rises from the floor. Prior is terrified but Emily cannot see it. Prior flees. Meanwhile, a suddenly serious Louis begs for Belize's help and asks him to tell Prior he loves him. Belize tries to be sympathetic but tells him he cannot help him. As he leaves, snow begins to fall. Scene 3 Mr. Lies takes Harper, dressed in a snowsuit, to a snowy wonderland she believes is Antarctica. She wants to stay in her fantasy forever, but Mr. Lies tells her it cannot last. He also points out that she invented her pregnancy, but Harper replies that her entire fantasy is imaginary. She finds an "Eskimo" who she hopes will be her companion. Scene 4 In the wasteland of the South Bronx, Hannah, newly arrived in New York, asks a homeless woman for directions, but the woman is deranged—she talks nonsense and screams at no one.
Hannah grows angry and finally shouts at the woman to pull herself together. To Hannah's surprise, the woman manages to tell her the location of the Mormon Visitor's Center in Manhattan, where she often goes for shelter. Analysis
Louis and Belize's political argument is useful for understanding Louis's character and the characters' attitude towards identity politics and race. Louis is a stereotypical example of a white, Jewish liberal, who is appalled by the conservative views of someone like Joe—not to mention the Reagan administration—but is flat-footed and insensitive when it comes to race. He holds a persistently optimistic view of America: he believes that power really has been decentralized by radical democracy, that America is different from and better than any other nation and that racism can be overcome. Unfortunately, he readily admits a host of exceptions to his sweeping statements, and he is incredibly naive, as Belize's dry interjections make clear. That naiveté stems from his inability to consider others' points of view. Louis shouts, "Fuck assimilation," not realizing that as an already- assimilated white man he has little or nothing at stake in proclaiming a separatist agenda; he condemns liberal, "bourgeois tolerance" when it is exactly what he espouses, and he sees anti-Semitism everywhere, to the brink of paranoia, while appearing to minimize the lingering residue of racism. This speech is a comical illustration of Louis's character—his perpetual ambivalence, guilt and self-centeredness as well as his optimism and generous tolerance. It is also directed at the audience, the overwhelming majority of whom are probably well-off white liberals like Louis. Straight audience-goers congratulating themselves for their tolerance at going to see a "gay play" will find Belize's retorts striking close to home. The speech also helps to answer two possible objections that critics from the left might raise. First, there is the idea that Kushner's politics of solidarity tend to obscure the real differences between different classes of people. The play encourages people of all backgrounds to join together in common struggle, but might end up convincing wealthy whites (especially Jews like Louis) that they are as deeply oppressed as a working-class, black gay man like Belize. Belize reminds us that even within the coalition of the left, some kinds of oppression, particularly economic and racial ones, still cut very deeply. Secondly, Belize's anger helps defuse the criticism that the play focuses too much on a middle-class, white gay perspective. Some critics have complained that the play's main black character is a stereotypical nurse with little background or personal history, who is not distinguished as an individual but only speaks as a representative for an oppressed class, who spends all his time attending to the problems of his white friends. But this scene proves that Belize is unwilling to be consumed altogether by the white world—he is no motherly mammy figure. He is a proud, intelligent black man. The scene also proposes an interesting parallel between race and AIDS infection. Belize retells a novel called In Love with the Night Mysterious, about a white woman named Margaret and her slave lover Thaddeus in the years before the Civil War. Thaddeus does not accept Margaret's idea that real love is not ambivalent, and we can imagine, as he likely does, that the couple will not remain together once the war is over. As sincerely as Margaret may love Thaddeus, her pie-eyed romanticism is absurd, because the reassertion of racism after the war will inevitably drive them apart. In this way, she resembles Louis, who loves Prior but whose love is not powerful enough to overcome the tremendous divisive power of AIDS. Louis
understands the link, since his first question after Belize stops speaking is about Prior's condition. As critic Framji Minwalla points out, the K.S. lesions on Prior's body makes AIDS an "unerasable biological stigma"—he can no more pass as "normal" than Belize can. Just as race separates Louis from the Jamaican man in Britain despite the unifying force of their common sexual orientation, AIDS keeps Louis and Prior apart, subjects Prior and Roy to prejudice and disenfranchisement even within the gay community. While solidarity may be an ideal, it cannot be achieved solely by the power of an idealized gay brotherhood.
Millennium Approaches, Act Three, Scenes 5–7 Summary
Scene 5 Joe tells Roy he cannot accept his offer. Roy tries to be calm, but he quickly blows up at Joe, violently telling him that nothing matters more than the call of Washington and power. Joe tries to explain that his ethics forbid him to break the law, but Roy calls him a sissy. Then he tells him about his proudest achievement—illegally intervening in the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed as a Soviet spy in 1953. Even though he was an attorney on the case, Roy secretly talked with the judge every day to ensure a verdict of death. Joe, reeling, assumes Roy's illness is talking. But Roy tells Joe he is tough on him because he loves him, and then tells him to leave. The two men nearly come to blows. As soon as Joe leaves, Roy doubles over in pain, which he has been hiding. He calls for a nurse, but looks up to see the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg herself watching him. Roy tells Ethel she does not frighten him, even when she says he is close to death. The nurse cannot hear Roy's cries, so Ethel calls an ambulance for him. Scene 6 Prior I and Prior II have returned to Prior's bedroom to tell him that the messenger will arrive tonight. The ancestors chant and insist that Prior join them in a dance. He resists, frightened and in pain, so they conjure Louis's spectral form to dance with him. As Louis and Prior dance, the ghosts say they have performed their duty and vanish. After a moment, Louis does also. The sound of loudly beating wings fills the room. Scene 7 The sound of wings continues, as Prior gibbers in terror, alone in his apartment. On the other side of the stage, Joe approaches Louis on a bench in the park. Joe admits that he followed him from work. Tentative but earnest, he asks if he can touch Louis's face, muttering that he will probably go to hell for what he is about to do. Louis asks Joe to come home with him, and when Joe resists, he kisses him. After a moment's more hesitation, Joe leaves with him. Meanwhile, the sound of wings resumes in Prior's room. He is filled with fear but also with an unexplainable sexual desire. The sound reaches a crescendo, blazing light fills the room, and a magnificent Angel crashes through the ceiling. She greets Prior as "Prophet" and announces, "The Great Work begins." Analysis
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's execution for treason came at the height of anti- Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Although anti-Communism had been building ever since the end of World War Two, Sen. Joseph McCarthy touched off the biggest furor in 1950 by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the State Department—charges never substantiated with proof. The same year, the Rosenbergs, a working-class Jewish couple in New York who had been longtime political radicals, were arrested for allegedly passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. They were convicted, and despite charges that the trial was biased and appeals for clemency
from the Pope and other prominent figures, both Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Roy Cohn's intervention in their case thus positions him at the center of McCarthyism, the most visible assault on civil liberties in America in the twentieth century. Roy claims he hates Ethel because she is a traitor and a Communist, but his attitude towards her is obviously informed by other factors. For one, his reference to "little Jewish mamas" underscores her Judaism, and emphasizes the fact that Roy feels no connection to her on that ground. As a Jew, she reminds him of his own traces of marginalization from the white AngloSaxon establishment, which makes him loathe her more. For all his accomplishments, Roy knows that the WASP elite sees Roy and Ethel as alike. What's more, Roy's crack about Ms. magazine is deeply sexist and anti-feminist. Roy never mentions Julius Rosenberg—his hatred is reserved for Ethel in part because she is a woman, a woman who dares to enter the political arena. In fact, Ethel is the only female character in the play who does so, an especially striking omission when contrasted to the vehement political involvement of Roy, Joe, Louis and Belize. The most remarkable event in Millennium Approaches, from a theatergoer's perspective at least, is the extraordinary image of the Angel crashing through Prior's ceiling in the final scene. It is the culmination of Part One in the sense that it is the moment of greatest chaos and destruction—the emotional wreckage that the characters have been creating is made literal. In his Playwright's Notes, Kushner writes that the two parts of Angels are very different plays, that Perestroika is essentially a comedy that "proceeds forward from the wreckage" of the Angel's entrance. Part One describes the destruction of an essentially stable network of relationships and individuals, while Part Two works at rebuilding that network into a changed but ultimately recreated whole. The end of Millennium, then, is like the most distant point in the orbit of a comet that will begin hurtling back to familiar regions in Perestroika. The Angel's entrance is a fittingly magnificent image to mark this key transitional moment. Yet, even at the height of the drama, Kushner refuses to be bowled over into sentimentality or maudlin excess. "Very Steven Spielberg," Prior whispers, humorously undercutting the grandeur of the moment and ensuring that it remains tethered to the mundane, human world of daily life.
Perestroika, Act One (Act One is subtitled "Spooj") Summary
Scene 1 Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, addresses the crowd from a podium. He poses a series of philosophical questions: Can people change? And can the world survive without an all- encompassing theory like the one that communism offered? Marxism was grand and sweeping, Aleksii says, but modern America only lives for throwaway things and pygmy ideals. At the end of the scene, Prior appears as he was at the end of Millennium Approaches, cowering on the floor before the Angel. He tells her to go away. Scene 2 Louis shows Joe his new apartment on the Lower East Side. Louis begins to seduce Joe, but Joe holds back, uncomfortable, and moves to leave. But then he goes to hug Louis, who stops and admires his smell. Smell is sexual, Louis says, and the two men inhale deeply, then kiss. Joe finally agrees to stay, and they embrace passionately. Scene 3 As Mr. Lies sits playing the oboe in Harper's imaginary Antarctica, she enters in her snowsuit, dragging a fallen pine tree—she claims to have chewed it down with her teeth. Joe enters, wrapped in Louis's bed sheet—he is the "Eskimo" whom Harper saw last time. He tells her he is having an adventure but that she cannot join him. He disappears, and Harper admits that she is not in Antarctica but in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and that she took the tree from the arboretum nearby. A police car pulls up, lights flashing, and Harper surrenders. Scene 4 Hannah answers the phone in Joe's apartment and learns that the police have picked up Harper with a fallen tree in the park. She reprimands the officer for laughing. She insists that Harper is not insane and promises to come pick her up. Scene 5 Prior wakes up in his apartment, the Angel gone and the ceiling intact. He has had a wet dream. He calls the hospital to talk to Belize, who is working the night shift. Prior tells him about his sexy "dream" about the Angel and asks him to come over—he feels sad and scared yet filled with a mysterious joy. In the hospital, Roy's doctor Henry tries to get Belize's attention, but Belize ignores him long enough to sing a hymn with Prior to cheer him up; Prior chooses "Hark the Herald Angels." Henry gives Roy's chart to Belize and tells him to treat him carefully. Belize protests that if Roy has "liver cancer" he belongs in a different ward. When Henry leaves, he calls Prior back with the gossip: the closeted Roy has just checked in with AIDS.
Scene 6 Belize goes to attend to Roy, who looks very sick. Roy insults him and makes racist remarks, but Belize threatens to mishandle his IV and leave him in terrible pain. Roy quiets down, but he boasts that he is immune to pain, that he can make anyone do anything he wants. Belize turns to leave, but Roy begs him with sudden sincerity not to leave him alone. Roy, a brutal realist, asks Belize if he will die soon, and Belize tells him he probably will. With a great effort at compassion, Belize advises him not to let the doctor perform radiation and not to let the hospital give him placebo drugs for testing purposes. Roy asks him why he is helping him even though Belize hates him. Belize replies he is doing it out of solidarity, implying that Roy is a fellow homosexual. Roy scorns him, but he takes his advice and blackmails Martin Heller into providing a private stash of AZT. Scene 7 Over a period of weeks, Hannah tries to tend to Harper, who refuses to dress or leave the apartment. Disregarding her complaints and her depression, she finally forces Harper to tidy up and come with her to the Mormon Visitor's Center, where Hannah has started volunteering. Meanwhile, Louis and Joe begin a torrid affair. After sex, they talk about themselves and about politics. Joe says he feels suspended from real life but strangely happy. Louis confesses that he does not believe in God. They playfully banter about politics, insulting each other's viewpoints, each finding the other's alien worldview a turn-on. In their tender moments, Joe tries to heal some of Louis's enormous guilt about Prior and finally tells a sleeping Louis he loves him. But then the two scenes come together, and Harper appears in Louis's room. She screams at Joe that he is more tormented than he appears and that he cannot save Louis. Analysis
Scene Six marks the first encounter between Belize and Roy, who, in some ways, are diametrical opposites but who, in other ways, are the most grounded characters in the play. Joe, Harper, Louis and Prior must all struggle with their personal value systems in one way or another—they face internal crises. But while they have difficult lives as a result of external circumstances, Belize and Roy are not in crisis. Roy's syndrome is painful, debilitating and ultimately fatal, but it never prompts him to reevaluate his sense of morality or of ethics; even on his deathbed he will still firmly advocate his concept of winners and losers, the value of power and clout. Belize does not even face an externally-derived challenge like Roy—we know next to nothing about his internal life. Here and there we get glimpses of his life beyond the boundaries of the play: we know he is an ex-drag queen, and later we learn he has a longtime lover in Harlem; but mostly Belize's personal world is unknown. Despite his lack of personal description, Belize is the moral center of the play, the character who is the most continually ethical, reasonable and fair. Framji Minwalla points out that Belize serves as an intermediary who at various times connects or brings together Roy and Prior, Prior and Louis, Louis and Roy, Prior and Joe. Unafraid to confront those in power, like Henry or Roy, he holds his ground in conflicts and brings humor and gentleness to friends like Prior when they are in need. He is the characters' sounding board and confidant, the person who comes closest to articulating Kushner's ideal politics—not the confused liberalism of Louis but
a generous and inclusive yet realistic progressivism. This progressivism highlights another bond between Belize and Roy—just as they are the most stable characters, they also have the most sharply defined, clear-eyed political ideologies in the play. Joe and Louis argue about exalted concepts like law and history, and Louis tells Prior his glorious ideas about justice. Neither Belize nor Roy, however, is taken in by fancy words. They understand what power is and how it is wielded without illusions. Roy's vicious analysis of the "historical liberal coalition" cuts to the heart of one of modern America's cherished ideals, the interracial cooperation of the civil rights movement, and yet Belize has the keenness not to respond with platitudes about freedom and democracy. Belize is humane, Roy monstrous, but both are pragmatists. This harsh honesty is the foundation of a grudging respect that Belize feels for his enemy, Roy. He advises Roy to ignore his expensive doctor and take his medical treatment into his own hands. When Roy, suspicious, asks why he is helping him, Belize is equally puzzled. But perhaps just as Roy learned to admire the tenacity of pubic lice, Roy's refusal to flinch in the face of pain and disease forces Belize to respect him—not to love him or condone his actions, but to respect him, at least grudgingly. Belize's respect and care for Roy is not based entirely on politics but also on the fact that AIDS humanizes Roy. In rare, fleeting moments—when he pleads with Belize not to leave him alone in the dark—the human being can be glimpsed beneath the ugliness and bravado.
Perestroika, Act Two (Act Two is subtitled "The Epistle") Summary
Scene 1 After the funeral of a drag queen friend, Prior bitterly denounces death and the marginalizing of gay men. He is dressed strangely, in a black, prophet-like coat and hood. When Belize questions his moodiness, Prior tells him that the Angel was not a dream: he has been given a prophecy in the form of a book. Scene 2 Scene Two begins in a flashback, to the angelic visitation three weeks earlier. In piercing, monumental tones, the Angel announces herself as the Angel of America and proclaims that Prior is a prophet. She directs Prior to remove the Sacred Prophetic Implements from their hiding place, which was supposed to have been revealed in a dream. Prior, terrified, says he has no idea what she means. She coughs, puzzled, and consults with an unseen figure, then tells Prior he will find them under the kitchen tiles. He resists, until in a fierce outburst she commands him to submit to the will of heaven. They go into the kitchen and return with a leather suitcase containing a pair of spectacles with rocks for lenses. Prior puts them on briefly, then rips them off, appalled at the vision. Then he removes a bright steel book from the suitcase. Before he reads it, he asks why her presence always turns him on sexually. She replies that "Not Physics but Ecstatics" makes the engine of creation run. They are both increasingly aroused. They have an intense sexual coupling and a ferocious climax. Prior, in an aside, explains that angelic sexual couplings fuel creation, and that the Angels are incredibly powerful but have no ability to create. But by creating humans, God set in motion the potential for randomness and change. The Angels were disturbed by humanity's migratory instinct, which manifested as tremors in Heaven, a city like San Francisco. Finally, on April eighteen, 1906, the day of the San Francisco earthquake, God abandoned Heaven, never to return. The Angels, believing that human beings' energy drove God away, insist that humankind must stop moving and mingling. Prior, disturbed, tries to reject the prophecy, but the Angel tells him he has no way to hide. She takes the book and ascends into Heaven. When Belize has heard the full story, he refuses to believe it is real, and accuses Prior of imagining the Angel as a metaphor for wanting his disease to stop and Louis to come back. Prior admits that he might well be going crazy, but that he might also really be a prophet. Analysis
Act Two is unique in Part Two for being comparatively brief—only two scenes, one a minor prelude to the other, and the scene's entirety less than half the length of other acts. In this act, of course, the appearance of the Angel is finally played out, an event that has begun twice before (at the end of Millennium Approaches and in the first scene of Perestroika). It is in
Scene Two that the Angel first speaks at length and in which her deluded cosmology is finally revealed. The distinctive speaking style of the Angel deserves closer analysis. Kushner's characters adopt a range of speech patterns, from the girl-talk and bantering of Belize and Prior to Joe's legalese to the endless sentences of Louis's hyper- intellectual diatribes. But all the characters are capable of taking on an unconsciously poetic sound when their thoughts transcend the everyday —when Harper meditates on the end of the world, for instance, or when Belize detects in the snowfall in Millennium the promise of "softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace." This poetry is taken to an even higher pitch in the Angel's speeches—it is consciously poetic, grandiosely poetic, arranged on the page with the short lines and metrical structure of verse. (This sometimes makes her speeches difficult to understand, particularly for audience-goers who do not have the benefit of referring to the printed page—there would be no way to tell whether "Lumen Phosphor Fluor Candle" are the four "divine emanations" of her persona, as Kushner explains mysteriously in his notes on characters.) The Angel's poetry is at its grandest when she is speaking officially—proclaiming Prior's prophet-hood, relating the history of Heaven, and so on. But when she is confused or distracted, a more casual speech peeks through—when Prior says he has never dreamed of the Sacred Prophetic Implements, the Angel stammers, "No… dreams, you…Are you sure?" It is a glimpse of vulnerability behind her imposing facade. The Angel's poetry is self-confident and impressive, and—fitting for the Angel of America— redolent of the greatest American poet, Walt Whitman. Sometimes the connection is direct: The Angel's warning to Prior that he cannot escape—"Hiding from Me one place you will find me in another./ I I I I stop down the road, waiting for you"—parallels Whitman's epic poem "Song of Myself," which concludes with the lines, "Missing me one place search another,/ I stop somewhere waiting for you." Earlier in "Song of Myself," Whitman writes, "I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul," a duality which the Angel echoes in her post- coital statement to Prior and later to Hannah. Even when she is not reciting specific lines of Whitman, though, the Angel's words are clearly indebted to him—sweeping and impressive, lavishly erotic and sensual, specifically American, studded with the word "I." At the end of the play, in fact, Kushner acknowledges his debt to his nineteenth-century predecessor, writing in his afterward that "we are all children of 'Song of Myself.'" It is easy to understand why Whitman appeals to Kushner. Whitman is universally acknowledged to have been gay, and his poems are filled with homoerotic images and tender depictions of same-sex friendships. He was also a passionate democrat, filled with affection and optimism for the American experiment. Louis's dream of radical democracy in America, which Belize challenges but does not altogether overturn, could have come straight from Whitman. Angels in America is a darker vision of this country than Whitman ever created, but the darkness comes from what Kushner would see as deviations from the ideal Whitman path. Even though the Angel sounds like Walt Whitman, however, her theory of the universe and her instructions to Prior would have been antithetical to him. Like Sister Ella Chapter in Millennium, the Angel's message to humanity is, "Stay put." She mistakenly believes that halting the perpetual motion of human beings will convince God to return to Heaven. It is a seductive philosophy but a dreadful one, for it would spell death for humanity. Moreover, the entire play works to convince us that stasis is no solution to loss and that forward motion,
however painful or alarming, is the only thing people can do to survive. Belize occupies the same position as the audience, a skeptical witness to Prior's tale. His verdict—that the Angel's proposition is "malevolent"—is the same as the play's.
Perestroika, Act Three (Act Three is subtitled "Borborygmi, The Squirming Facts Exceed the Squamous Mind") Summary
Scene 1 In his hospital room, Roy argues with someone on the phone, refusing to turn over his records to the disbarment committee. Ethel enters and watches him silently. Belize comes in and tries to give him pills, but Roy refuses to hang up the phone, then throws Belize's pills on the ground —he has his own supply now, he says. He periodically talks to Ethel, whom Belize cannot see. Belize is impressed by Roy's AZT stash, and then demands ten bottles of him. Even though Roy could spare them, he refuses, saying he hates Belize and hates his sense of entitlement. They fight, insulting each other bitterly. When Belize calls Roy a "greedy kike," Roy agrees to give him a bottle. When Belize leaves, Ethel tells Roy she is going to watch his disbarment hearing tomorrow. Scene 2 Hannah enters the Diorama Room of the Mormon Visitor's Center with Prior—he is conducting research on angels, he says. Prior and Harper talk before the diorama show begins. They both almost recognize the other. The lights dim and the show begins—the story of a Mormon family migrating west. In the show, only the father, who is played by Joe, moves; the two sons have off-stage voices, while the mother and daughter are silent. Harper greets "Joe" and makes catty comments during the presentation. Louis suddenly appears in the diorama, and he and "Joe" argue about how Joe, a serious lawyer, can be a Mormon. When he sees Louis, Prior naturally thinks he is losing his mind. Harper says casually that "the little creep" is in and out of the diorama every day, but she cannot figure out what he has to do with the story. Louis and Joe keep arguing about Mormonism, and then they leave together. Harper closes the curtains of the diorama, and Prior starts to cry. Hannah hears the noise and storms in, but when she opens the curtains the father-mannequin is a real dummy—Harper and Prior have imagined everything. They stare at each other, very close to recognizing one another from their dreams. Finally, Prior leaves, and Harper begs the Mormon mother dummy to give her advice. The dummy comes to life, and the two women leave together. Scene 3 Sitting on the beach together, Louis tells Joe about how gay men used to cruise each other in the sand dunes even in wintertime. Their talk turns to Joe's Mormonism, at which Louis is still shocked. Joe tells Louis he loves him, but Louis brushes him off, and says he wants to see Prior again. Joe is crushed. To prove his love for Louis, he begins to remove his temple garment, special underclothes he wears as an observant Mormon. He regains his composure and tells Louis he needs to leave Louis in order to obey his self-interest, and that after he does so, he will come back to Louis. Scene 4
Belize wakes up Roy to take his pills. Drugged on morphine, Roy is delusional, and tries to seduce Belize, begging him at the same time to squeeze the life out of him. Roy asks him what the afterlife is like, and Belize says it is a city like San Francisco, full of vacant lots, streamers and dances and racial impurity. Roy thinks he is talking about Hell. When Belize replies that it was Heaven, Roy is suddenly suspicious and scared. Belize leaves him to his paranoia. Scene 5 Harper and the Mormon mother walk on the harbor promenade in Brooklyn. Harper asks her how people change, and the mother describes a filthy, painful, difficult process. Meanwhile, Louis leaves Joe alone at the beach. He calls Prior at home and asks to see him. Analysis
Even in his weakened state, Roy is still powerful and dangerous. Scene One averts the possibility that the audience might come to see Roy as a lovable grump or as rascally but essentially harmless. His assaults on Belize cannot be explained away as the ravings of a sick man—they are brutal, merciless and cruelly intelligent. The word "nigger" leaps off the page. So does Roy's refusal to part with even the smallest portion of his drug horde, his implicit equation of Belize with stereotypes about African-Americans and welfare. Worst of all, he succeeds in baiting Belize to sink, even briefly, to his level. It is only when Belize calls him a "greedy kike" that he parts with a bottle, a precious reward that only partially compensates for the loss Belize sustains of even more precious dignity and goodness. After this scene Roy can only be considered genuinely hateful. This is important for it helps explain Ethel's fixation on Roy more than thirty years after her death, and adds to Roy's own complexity—the sincere feeling of rejection he voices to Ethel at the end of the scene is more interesting and surprising when contrasted with his demonic potential. Most of all, it raises the stakes for the following act, making Belize's ultimate forgiveness of Roy all the more impressive and morally resounding. For all its seriousness, Scene One has a strand of dark humor that becomes full- bodied comedy in Scene Two. As Prior and Harper watch the show, Louis appears suddenly in the diorama scene and carries on a seemingly private conversation with Joe, but their ex-lovers can both overhear them. The scene has several individually humorous elements that combine for intense effect: Harper's sarcastic asides during the show (which is ironically funny even on its own); her bland disregard for "the little creep" coupled with Prior's hysteria, which echoes the audience's own surprise at Louis's appearance; Louis and Joe's conversation, especially Louis's overreaction to Joe's Mormonism; and Hannah's perennial curtness all combine to riotous effect. But this scene and others like it are not designed simply for comic relief. For a "serious" Broadway play, Angels in America is refreshingly funny—Louis's teasing of Joe in their first encounters, his political debate with Belize, Harper's mystified dialogue with Prior in their mutual dream sequence are all written to get big laughs. The humor, however, does not rely on comic staples like slapstick, put-downs and throwaway one-liners. It is character-based humor: Louis and Hannah are only funny in this scene because their actions provide such exaggerated
confirmation of their personalities as we have come to know them. More importantly, it is a humor laced with a bitter realism. Prior's hysteria makes us smile, but to him it is genuinely painful. Harper drifts in and out of near-madness. The humor is linked to profound emotions, making it both funnier and integral to those emotions' portrayal. When the audience laughs at something that is genuinely painful for the character on the stage, the audience's relation to the material deepens significantly. At the end of the scene, Harper leaves with the Mormon mother, whose character underlines the difficult lot of women and the sexism of Mormon (and American) society. As Harper points out, she and her daughter have no voices, and only the father dummy has moving parts. It is a literal, uncomfortable depiction of Mormonism's rigid hierarchy, helping us to understand the considerable pressure Harper herself must have faced in Salt Lake City. The women are imagined as cheerful, self-effacing, and silent. It is a cultural fantasy that appeals strongly to Harper: she sits briefly in the mother's seat, longing for the comforts of a "perfect" family, but it is only a diorama, not even a particularly realistic-looking one. When the Mormon mother speaks, particularly in Scene Five, her words illustrate the unimaginably painful reality of real pioneer women's lives. By allowing her to speak, Kushner metaphorically empowers all silenced women—although the technique is transparently obvious and un- subtle.
Perestroika, Act Four, Scenes 1–5 (Act Four is subtitled "John Brown's Body") Summary
Scene 1 Joe visits Roy in his hospital room, afraid at first that Roy would not have forgiven him for refusing the job in Washington. Instead, Roy asks Joe to kneel before him and gives him a father's blessing, likening it to Jacob's in the Old Testament. Then Joe tells Roy he has left Harper and has been living with a man. Roy climbs out of his hospital bed, pulls the IV out of his arm and walks away, bleeding. When Joe goes to help him, Roy grabs him by the shirt and orders him to go back to his wife and never think of men again. Joe is confused, but Roy cuts him off and insists that he leave—he is furious, and he does not want Joe to witness the humiliation of Belize attending to him. After Joe leaves, Ethel comes to see Roy in his misery. Meanwhile, Prior reluctantly meets Louis on a bench in the park. Louis says he would like to make up—though not to move back in. Prior confronts him about Joe, attributing his knowledge to his "threshold of revelation." Then he tears into Louis for deserting him, telling him not to return until he has visible proof of the bruises he claims to feel inside. Scene 2 Prior and Belize sneak down the corridor outside Joe's office in the Hall of Justice—they have come to spy on him. Prior walks boldly into the office and tells Joe that he looks just like the dummy in the diorama. When Joe asks what he is talking about, Prior mentions Harper, and then repeatedly insults him. Returning to Belize, Prior despairs at how attractive Joe is. A madcap scene ensues: Joe recognizes Belize as Roy's nurse and corners him and Prior, and Prior pretends to be a mental patient. Scene 3 Belize meets Louis in front of the Bethesda Fountain, a huge statue of an angel in Central Park. Louis tells Belize he is worried for Prior, since he seemed delusional when they last met. In addition, Louis wants Prior to understand that he is no longer seeing Joe. Belize, unimpressed, tells Louis that Joe is an intimate of Roy Cohn's. Louis refuses to believe it, calling Roy "the polestar of human evil." He accuses Belize of making it up because he hates him. Belize angrily retorts that Louis has no idea what he is talking about, because he loves nothing but big ideas, like "America." By contrast, Belize says he knows America firsthand, and America is just like Roy, he says: "Terminal, crazy and mean." Scene 4 Joe finally comes to see his mother Hannah at the Mormon Visitor's Center—she is angry that he has not returned her calls, at what she sees as his typical male insensitivity. He is looking for Harper, but she is nowhere to be found. Upset, Joe tells his mother he never should have called her, and leaves. Prior comes in, asking Hannah if Joe is her son—he says he wants to warn Joe
about Louis's limitations. Then he starts to cry, and his health begins to collapse again. He asks Hannah to take him to the hospital. Scene 5 Joe finds Harper on the harbor promenade in Brooklyn. She is barefoot and is wearing a thin dress in the driving rain—she threw her shoes in the river, she says, because Judgment Day is at hand. Joe tells her that he wants to come back to her. Analysis
Roy's blessing of Joe in Scene One sets up a definition of the word that becomes particularly important in Act Five. "Life. That's what they're supposed to bless. Life," Roy tells Joe. In other words, to bless is to give more life. Kushner attributes this definition to a Hebrew translation proposed by Harold Bloom, a Yale professor and literary critic. In Act Five, when Prior ascends to Heaven to confront the Angels, he demands a blessing of life from them. Roy's blessing, by contrast, is freely given. It is an appropriate gift for him to offer, since Roy values survival above all else: he admires the pubic lice because they are hard to kill, and he is determined to remain a lawyer until the day he dies not because he hopes to accomplish anything specific but simply for the value of lasting. And yet life is the one thing Roy does not have—he dies at the end of the act, only two days later. Because it is so precious to him and because he possesses so little, his gift of life to Joe is heartfelt and moving, a tribute to the love he feels for him. Roy's love for Joe is complicated, a father's love for a son with an undercurrent of a lover's jealousy and lust. Roy repeatedly states his paternal affection for Joe, and his blessing is here offered as a substitute for that of Joe's real father. Yet Roy allows his hands to linger on Joe's forehead, hushing him when he threatens to interrupt the moment. It is undeniably sexual. Nor is it atypical: Roy is constantly grabbing Joe, pulling him close, roughing him up, even at one point tenderly smoothing his jacket. Roy is also repeatedly dismissive of Harper, offering to help Joe get a divorce or urging him to leave her behind and move to Washington, where he will be snugly fitted into Roy's world. These sexual undertones help us make sense of Roy's reaction to Joe's disclosure that he has moved in with a man. Partly he is afraid: afraid that Joe's homosexuality will leave him vulnerable and powerless (considering the low regard Roy himself has for openly gay men), and perhaps afraid too that his own homosexuality might somehow be spotlighted by the presence of a gay man in his inner circle. (This latter explanation is less likely, though, since Roy knows he is on the verge of death and realizes that the fact he has died of AIDS will be widely discussed.) As a symbolic father to Joe, his lineage is endangered—just as Prior marks the end of the Walter line, Joe will not be able to father children of his own. "Cut it dead," Roy exclaims, an unconscious allusion to the image of the family thread. But jealousy is a significant explanation for the passion and rage that Roy feels. Harper was never an obstacle between him and Joe, but a man is different, especially since Joe obviously felt no attraction to his wife. After Joe's disclosure, Roy is simultaneously a lover spurned and a father disobeyed, made irrelevant and weak by his son's choice.
Perestroika, Act Four, Scenes 6–9 Summary
Scene 6 Emily, Prior's nurse, berates him for endangering his health, but he is well aware that he is in trouble. He introduces Hannah as "my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother." When Emily leaves, Prior tells Hannah that he must be insane for having seen an angel; she replies that her religion is based on the idea that Joseph Smith encountered an angel of God. Prior asks her whether any prophets in the Bible ever refused their prophecies—he has tried to run from the Angel but has failed. He senses the Angel's approach, and asks Hannah to stay with him and keep watch. Scene 7 At home in bed, Harper asks Joe why he always closes his eyes during sex. She then answers her own question, saying that he imagines men. But the irony is that her time with him is the only time she does not have to imagine. Joe says he needs to go out to get some of his things. Harper demands that he look at her and asks him to tell her what he sees. "Nothing, I-" he stammers, and then stops. She thanks him for the truth. Scene 8 When Joe enters Louis's apartment, Louis confronts him with a stack of Xeroxed articles— copies of the court decisions Joe has written. He is appalled by what he sees as the heartlessness and insensitivity of Joe's legal reasoning, especially a homophobic ruling in the case of a soldier discharged for being gay. Louis asks Joe, "Have you no decency?"—the same question that halted the career of Joseph McCarthy, a mentor of Roy's, in 1954. Louis demands to know whether Joe ever slept with Roy. As he berates Joe, Joe starts punching him repeatedly. Suddenly Joe stops, horrified at what he has done. Louis refuses help, saying that a little bleeding will do him good. Scene 9 Ethel appears in Roy's hospital room. Roy is grinning because even though he is about to die he is still a lawyer. Ethel tells him he is wrong—the committee voted to disbar him and the recommendation was immediately accepted. She says she came to see if she could forgive him, but that all she can do is take pleasure in his misery. Roy falls silent, then calls out, "Ma?"—in his delusion he seems to think Ethel is his mother. In childlike tones, he says he feels bad and asks her to sing to him. Uncertain for a moment, she decides to sing softly to him in Yiddish. Just when she thinks he has died, he sits bolt upright—he was fooling her just to see if he could make her sing, exulting that he has finally won. He is gleeful for a moment, but then falls backward and dies. Analysis
Scene Eight is Louis's final repudiation of Joe—they will not see each other again in the play.
Having learned that Joe is an intimate of Roy's, Louis decides to examine Joe's morality for himself, reading his court decisions. Appalled, he casts Joe out of his life with a towering selfrighteousness. Louis, who once claimed he prefers the weighing of a life to the final verdict, has delivered a walloping verdict of his own. The implications of the moment are disturbing. For one, it seems inconsistent on Louis's part: he has known Joe's politics since the day they met. That Joe takes a conservative position on judicial issues like environmental protection can hardly come as a surprise; even Joe's gay rights ruling, while lamentable, ought to be understandable to Louis. But Louis makes no further attempts to understand—even Joe's impassioned cries that he loves him fall on deaf ears. Joe's attempts to justify himself—his snide reference to Louis as "the guy who changes the coffee filters in the secretaries' lounge," his defensive retort that the children were not really blinded or that law is different from justice, and most especially, his physical assault on Louis —seem intended to turn the audience against Joe, to make us take Louis's side once and for all. Certainly Kushner does not present Joe in a sympathetic light or offer him the chance to defend himself—he only reappears briefly in two scenes, mostly pleading ineffectually with Harper, and he is excluded from the triumphant epilogue at the Bethesda Fountain. All the other characters are forgiven to some degree, even Roy; Joe alone is unceremoniously booted from the play's society. And yet his only "crime" is that he is personally and politically conservative. This disconnect has led some critics to ask whether Kushner is fair to Joe. John M. Clum writes, "Kushner drops Joe off the face of the earth shortly before the end of Perestroika, as if he is unredeemable or simply not very interesting…Yet in every production of Angels in America I have seen, Joe is the character I care about, anguish over." Joe's struggle to come out of the closet with dignity, to contribute to society or to maintain what seems to be a sincere spirituality count for nothing, with Louis or with the playwright. His apparently heartfelt love for Louis is disregarded and unlamented. In the end, he cannot escape that most dreadful label possible, "Republican." It is an aberration in Kushner's otherwise sympathetic and generous vision, but, perhaps for this reason, it is all the more provocative. By contrast, Kushner's handling of Roy's death scene is deft and moving. With grim pleasure, Ethel informs him that he has lost the battle he has staked the most on, his desire to remain a lawyer until the day of his death. It is a staggering blow for Roy, which seems to push him over the edge into dementia—he appears to mistake Ethel for his long-dead mother. With this last defeat, the years of defensiveness and bile seem to melt away, and Roy is once again a vulnerable child; Ethel sings him a sweet Yiddish tune. It is a sentimental, three-handkerchief moment, an emotional resolution to Roy's death struggle. On its own, however, it would also be highly problematic: overly melodramatic and stereotypical (with her song, Ethel inhabits the Jewish mother stereotype more fully than ever), it could even be taken as excusing Roy's evil, a farewell lullaby for a murderer. Thankfully, the syrupy-sad tableau is punctured by Roy's springing back to life—to the very end he remains as petty and venal as he was in life. With this outrageously contrived two-step, Kushner allows us to have our teary deathbed scene and still retain the sharpness and vigor that characterizes the rest of the play. He acknowledges the tragedy of death without whitewashing Roy's failings.
Perestroika, Act Five, Scenes 1–5 (Act Five is subtitled "Heaven, I'm in Heaven") Summary
Scene 1 Prior wakes Hannah, who is asleep in his hospital room. Prior is certain the Angel is near. A trumpet peals, flaming Hebrew letters writhe on the walls and the Angel appears. Hannah screams. Prior tells the Angel he rejects his prophecy, and t hen he begs the trembling Hannah to tell him what to do. Hannah says he must wrestle the Angel. They wrestle, the Angel trying desperately to escape. Finally, a ladder to Heaven descends from the sky. Hesitantly, Prior ascends the ladder. The Angel turns to Hannah, who is petrified, but instead of hurting her the Angel kisses her passionately, and Hannah experiences a tremendous orgasm. Scene 2 Heaven resembles San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Prior encounters Harper playing with Little Sheba, his missing cat. Harper says she is not dead—though she took so much Valium that she thinks she might have overdosed. Prior asks her to stay with him in Heaven, but she tells him that all the devastation in her life has left her feeling more alive than ever. Harper vanishes, and the Angel greets Prior. Scene 3 Louis arrives in Roy's hospital room. Belize has called him for an emergency—he cannot remove Roy's AZT by himself, so he needs Louis to carry them. He has called Louis, he says, because he needed a Jew—he wants to say the Kaddish , the Jewish prayer for the dead, to thank Roy for the pills. Louis resists, but Belize tells him that forgiveness matters because it is difficult. Louis finally consents, but he does not know the words of the Kaddish. But Ethel prompts him, and they say the prayer together, adding at the end, "You sonofabitch." Scene 4 Joe returns home to find the ghost of Roy waiting for him. Roy tells him not to feel bad for beating Louis, and then kisses him fondly. Roy vanishes, and Harper enters. She tells him she has been out with a friend, in Paradise. Scene 5 In a council room in Heaven, the Continental Principalities—six Angels, of whom the Angel of America is the seventh—sit around a table that holds a bulky old radio. They are listening to a report of the disaster at Chernobyl, which will occur in sixty-two days. The Angel called Antarctica says he will rejoice to see it. The others argue about how best to monitor humanity and how to proceed in God's absence. Then, in a thunderclap, the Angel of America appears with Prior. Prior tries to hand ba ck the book, explaining that it is the essence of human life to
progress and migrate, to change. He adds that rather than praying for God's return, they should sue God for walking out. Prior says he wants to live and for the plague to end. But the Angels do not know how to stop it. Despite their warnings of the terrors to come in the future, he demands that they bless him with "more life." As Prior turns to leave, the Angels make a mystical sign over him. Analysis
If any reader doubts that the Angels' cosmology is deeply flawed, that doubt is dispelled by the image of Heaven presented in Act Five. It is a depressing, decaying place, trapped in the past— like a San Francisco that never rebuilt from its terrible earthquake. Without the creative force of God to lead them, the Angels live amid rubble and cracked buildings and listen to a creaky 1940s radio, as if existing on humanity's hand-me-downs. Even entertainment is deadly dull, an endless succession of card games. In Heaven, everything is known but nothing decided or settled: sitting around their junk-covered table, the Angels can recite facts about the physics and history of cathodes but cannot fix a vacuum tube. They can discuss humanity's plight but cann ot stop the destruction at Chernobyl. Their "lawsuit" against God (admittedly more of a sight gag than a seriously developed theme) can only be initiated after Prior suggests it. They embody the limited imagination that Harper bemoans in the first act of Millennium: "Nothing unknown is knowable." Faced with such lackluster opposition, Prior's confident rejection of his prophecy loses some of its force—the Angels' philosophy is not viable or even slightly compelling. He declares that he wants more life, a decision he seems to come to almost r eluctantly; but who could possibly make a different choice when the alternative is an eternity playing Hearts with Rabbi Chemelwitz? Still, Prior's speeches in Scene Five encapsulate one of the play's key morals: Life persists and forward motion continue s despite impossible, even unbearable conditions. The Angels never change their plea, but as he leaves Heaven they make a "mystical sign" which we are free to imagine is responsible for his continuing survival in the epilogue—the guarantee of "more life" which he asks for. If this is indeed the meaning of the mystical sign, it is a tacit admission by the Angels that they have been defeated, out-reasoned by their would-be prophet. A more impressive candidate for the play's climax is the taut, harrowing scene in which Louis and Ethel Rosenberg recite the Kaddish for Roy. The concept of forgiveness, even more than that of progress, lies at the heart of the play's moral vision. Throug hout the play, the characters have been struggling to define both love and justice—what they are, how they can be achieved, what obligations they require; now, Belize suggests that forgiveness "is maybe where love and justice finally meet." We remem ber with a shudder all the hurt that Roy tried to inflict on Belize, and yet Belize, the most ethical character in Angels, is willing to set aside his hatred. So too is Ethel, who has a lifetime's (and more) worth of reasons to despise Roy. They fo rgive, but they do not forget his sins—when the prayer is finished Louis and Ethel add, "You sonofabitch." In the same vein, Prior will forgive Louis for deserting him without letting him move back in, and Harper will signal understanding for Joe's plight while setting off to build a new life for herself alone. Forgiveness is what allows the characters finally to rebuild the society that was shattered by the betrayals and crises of Millennium. In life, Roy angrily disavowed his homosexuality; in death it will be splashed on the front
pages of the newspapers, the irony savored by those like the lawyer on the disbarment committee who always thought of him as "that little faggot." The real-life R oy Cohn is commemorated by a square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt that reads, "Coward/Bully/Victim." AIDS activists teach that all people with AIDS are innocent, even someone as flawed as Roy Cohn. In the same spirit, Belize recognizes that AIDS has brought Roy back, against his will, into connection with the gay community. And by reciting the Kaddish, Louis and Ethel also rejoin him to Judaism, another community Roy strenuously rejected. Belize, and the play itself, challenge us to expand our definition of community to include even those whom we find alien or uncomfortable.
Perestroika, Act Five, Scenes 6–10 & Epilogue Summary
Scene 6 Walking the streets of Heaven, Prior encounters Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz and Sarah Ironson playing cards. In Heaven, where everything is known, the rabbi says, the only pleasure comes from the indeterminacy found in games of chance. The rabbi c alls forth a ladder to descend. Sarah asks Prior to tell Louis that she forgives him, and that he must always struggle with the Almighty. Scene 7 As Prior descends from Heaven, he sees Roy far in the distance, in what seems to be the pit of Hell. Roy is talking to an unseen client, the King of the Universe, promising to defend him against a lawsuit for abandonment. Roy tells his client he is cl early guilty but that he will make something up. Scene 8 Prior slips back into bed and wakes the next morning, exhausted. His fever has broken, Emily says. Prior thanks Hannah for saving his life, but she denies it, and comments on her "peculiar" dream. Louis enters, cut and bruised from his fight with Joe. Hannah and Belize say their goodbyes, Belize handing Prior the bag full of AZT. Alone, Louis asks Prior if he can come back. Scene 9 At home in Brooklyn, Harper asks Joe for his credit card—it is the only thing of his she needs, she says. He pleads with her not to go, but she only slaps him. He will never hear from her again, she says. She hands him two Valium pills and tells him to go exploring, then leaves. Meanwhile, Louis repeats his desire to come back to Prior. Prior tells him he loves him, but that he cannot ever come back. Scene 10 Harper is on a flight to San Francisco to begin a new life. She describes a dream of the ozone layer: it was torn and ragged until the souls of the dead, rising from the earth, joined it and made it whole again. Epilogue (subtitled "Bethesda") Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah sit on the rim of the Bethesda Fountain. Louis and Belize are arguing about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Prior tunes them out. He tells the audience that five years have passed, longer than the time he lived with Louis. Louis tells the story of the angel Bethesda, who touched down in Jerusalem and left a healing fountain where she walked.
When the Millennium comes—not the year 2000, but the "Capital M Millennium"—they will all bathe themselves clean there, P rior says. He plans to live to see it again in the summer, he says. No matter what, the struggle for life and full citizenship—"the Great Work"—will continue. Analysis
The play's denouement begins in earnest in Scene Eight, when Prior awakens in the morning to find his temperature has broken in the night. His tumult with the Angels has passed as surely as his bout of fever, and it is literally and figuratively a new day . With the action of the play resolved, a new society can be constituted on the ruins of old relationships. The characters who appear in Scene Eight—Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah—are the same ones who will be members of the new society in it s refined form in the Epilogue. Since the play presents it as an ideal form of community and family, this society of four deserves close examination, especially who is and is not allowed to be a member. The group is multiracial and pointedly diverse: a black man, a WASP, a Mormon woman, and a Jew. However, to belong to this society, it seems one must be gay and comfortable with one's gayness, or at least not an "avowed" heterosexual. Prior and Belize are the only fully uncloseted characters (and the only gay men in the play who are full y ethical and good); Louis, who was nervous about disclosing his homosexuality back at his grandmother's funeral, still lives his life essentially as an openly gay man. Hannah's sexual orientation is never discussed, but her difficult marriage, her impati ence with "lumpish" men and her gigantic sexual encounter with the Angel all point toward her potential lesbianism. Kushner does not specify what he means by the direction, "Hannah is noticeably different—she looks like a New Yorker," but it is safe to assume she is not wearing a dress and pearls. Meanwhile, Roy is excluded from the scene, of course—he would not be a member even if he were alive—but so is Joe. His right-wing politics, upper-middle-class profession and conservative person ality prevent him from entering this idealized gay society. Even though Angels in America proclaims itself "A Gay Fantasia," a considerable segment of the gay community has no place in its world. The play's final messages are delivered first by Harper and then by Prior, the two characters who were linked spiritually by their dream/hallucination scene in Millennium. Their optimistic pronouncements are virtually the same: "In this world, ther e is a kind of painful progress," Harper says, while Prior concludes, "The world only spins forward." It is an upbeat, sentimental ending: even intractable problems like the destruction of the ozone layer can be healed by togetherness and community, which are symbolized by the linked hands and ankles of the rising souls. In his last words Prior bridges an even more fundamental divide, that between characters and audience, turning to the theater and addressing the listeners directly. His blessing includes us in the play's spirit of forgiveness. It also seems to join us to a specific political program—the defeat of AIDS and the struggle for gay civil rights. In the background, Louis and Belize keep arguing about the fate of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, suggesting that politics cannot and should not be avoided. Prior's remark that "we won't die secret deaths anymore" invests the audience in the concept of coming out; our conversion to the cause of gay rights is part of the world's inexorable forward motion. It is a fitting end to this democratic, optimistic play.
Important Quotations Explained Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. In this quote from Act One, Scene Seven of Millennium Approaches, Harper is describing to Prior that it ought to be impossible for him to appear in her hallucination, since she should only be able to hallucinate that which she has already experienced. The audience knows the answer —it is no hallucination but a real encounter. But even if it were not, Harper's theory could not possibly be correct since it is contradicted by Prior's very presence. In Part Two, however, the Angel faces a similar problem to the one Harper describes: she and her colleagues cannot create but must rely on God, or on Prior, to invent things for them. Although Harper does not realize it, human beings are more imaginative and thus more powerful than the Angels, providing support for Prior's decision not to obey them. Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? Roy's tirade to his doctor Henry in Act One, Scene Nine of Millennium is a succinct example of his view of the world. Roy imagines that he has no connection to other homosexual men because he sits at the right hand of Nancy Reagan. In Roy's deluded world, values like love, honor and trust are irrelevant, and all human relationships can be tallied up by favors granted or seconds needed to return a phone call. This point of view contrasts unfavorably with the charity and generosity of Belize, who cares for Prior not because he thinks he will get something in return but because he is a friend. Roy's rant signals his moral unworthiness, the evil he is capable of. Ironically, as much as he believes himself to be distinct from the gay community, his opponents on the disbarment committee see him as just another "faggot." And while his clout secures him a private stash of AZT, it is ultimately worthless since it cannot protect him from disease and death. there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics
Louis's comical monologue in Act Three, Scene Two of Millennium concludes with the quotation above—immediately afterward he is interrupted by Belize. He contends that because of the nation's newness and its recent settlement (except for the Indians, as he admits), America is less racially polarized than Europe, more centered on political debate. But he is wrong, as Belize deftly proves and as the play re-confirms. In calling attention to this passage the play's title refutes it—there is very much an Angel in America, one who is in fact the Angel of America. Politics is critically important, but it must be informed by history and identity. By deflating Louis's secular claim, Kushner seems to be connecting his populist optimism with a sense of spirituality. The America the characters are striving for is as transcendent as it is democratic. Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change? Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, h e insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then get up. And walk around. Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending. This dialogue between Harper and the Mormon mother appears in Act Three, Scene Five of Perestroika. The Mormon mother's description of how people change is one of the most unforgettable passages in the play. The question of change and how it affects people is one of the central themes of Angels in America, pitting the Angel, who believes all change is destructive and should be avoided, against the characters who do change dramatically over time: Harper, Hannah, Prior. The Mormon mother's description seems to fuse elements of both positions. She would certainly agree with the Angel that change is threatening and destructive —so much so that her words sear us with their painful intensity. But for the Mormon mother change cannot be avoided, can only be endured—the question is not whether people should change but how we must live afterwards. What's more, this description of change is particularly realistic since nothing is added or taken away. People are not magically transformed by gifts from without; we must make do instead with what we were born with, rearranged and restitched, but very much our own. He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe. A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at last. Isn't that what the Kaddish asks for? Throughout the play characters grapple with questions of love and justice—whether it is just to abandon a loved one, how to care for others, whether to incorporate villains and enemies into the communities they disavow. Belize's call for Louis to join him in forgiving Roy, which appears in Act Five, Scene Three of Perestroika, resolves some of these questions by pointing
out a way to unify people while accepting their limitations. Belize acknowledges that Roy was terrible, and so his sins are not excused. But as Belize notes, forgiveness is only valuable because people are flawed—if Roy had been loving and kind there would be no need to forgive him. Forgiveness drives the final events of the play: it is what allows the characters to rebuild their community in the play's epilogue (Prior must forgive Louis in order to love him and remain friends with him), what permits Ethel to return to the afterworld in peace, what enables Harper to put Joe out of her mind and begin her life anew. It mends the calamities of Millennium and allows relationships and societies to be strengthened.
Key Facts full title · Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Part One is entitled Millennium Approaches; Part Two is entitled Perestroika author · Tony Kushner type of work · Play, in two parts genre · Political drama (preoccupied with themes of democracy, community and personal responsibility) language · English (although some characters intermittently speak in French) time and place written · Begun in 1989; Part One was first presented in workshop form in 1990 and had its world premiere in 1991, while Part Two was workshopped in 1991 and premiered in 1992, though Kushner continued to tinker with both scripts; written primarily in New York City date of first publication · 1992 publisher · Theatre Communications Group narrator · None climax · The main climaxes come late in Perestroika, with Louis's confrontation of Joe in Act Four and Belize and Louis's recitation of the Kaddish for Roy in Act Five. Other, lesser climaxes include Joe and Louis's abandonment of their lovers in Act Two, Scene Nine of Millennium; the Angel's first appearance at the end of Part One; and Prior's visit to Heaven and his rejection of his prophecy at the end of Part Two. protagonist · Four main characters can be considered the protagonists: Louis and Joe, who abandon their partners and then repent, and Prior and Harper, who are abandoned and learn to assert themselves antagonist · Most importantly, Roy Cohn and the Angel; more generally, homophobia and intolerance, lack of community, and the ravages of AIDS setting (time) · October 1985 to February 1986, with an epilogue in February 1990 setting (place) · Mostly New York City, with a few scenes in Salt Lake City, Moscow and an airliner flying to San Francisco, along with others in Heaven, Hell, dream sequences and places imagined by the characters point of view · The play focuses equally on all the main characters (Joe, Harper, Louis, Prior, Roy), giving us access to their thoughts in the form of lengthy speeches to others and sometimes monologues; some scenes focus on other characters who seem unrelated to the plot
(e.g. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov) falling action · Prior returns from Heaven to his hospital room, where his friends are asleep; Louis asks Prior if he can come back to him, but Prior says no; Harper leaves Joe forever, and boards a flight to San Francisco; Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah reconvene at the Bethesda Fountain four years later, as Prior defiantly proclaims his desire to keep living tense · Mostly present—action unfolds before our eyes; a few flashbacks, as when Prior recounts the story of the Angel's visit to Belize foreshadowing · The play does not rely heavily on foreshadowing, although certain early passages evoke later ones, like Joe's memory of Jacob wrestling the Angel and Prior's literal wrestling in Part Two tone · Often heavily dramatic, poetic and theatrical mixed with frequent humor, allusions to pop culture and references to contemporary politics and events themes · Community; the politics, demands and viewpoints of identity, especially ethnicity, race and homosexuality; stasis versus change; truth, lying and coming out of the closet; tradition and heritage; the aftereffects of history; death and disease; prejudice and stigma; forgiveness; sexuality motifs · Biblical references; politics; religion, particularly Judaism and Mormonism; humor, especially gay camp humor; medicine and the body; travel; imagination, hallucination and dreams; fantasy; debate and argument symbols · Few direct symbols, but some suggestive images include the city of San Francisco; the Sacred Prophetic Implements; God's flaming Aleph; angels of different kinds
Study Questions and Essay Topics Study Questions Many of the gay characters struggle with the question of how public their sexuality should be, and several come out in different ways over the course of the play. Discuss the meaning of the closet—are closeted characters different from uncloseted ones? What implications does coming out have for self and community? The first part of this question—how closeted and uncloseted characters differ—requires us to compare two sets of characters, so we will first have to consider what traits each group has in common. The only characters who are completely open about their sexuality are Belize and Prior. Roy and Joe represent the other extreme, but Louis should also be included in this category, since the first scene in which he appears emphasizes that he is closeted around his own family. The uncloseted characters, Belize and Prior, are the most morally upright characters in the play: Belize is generous, compassionate and intellectually honest, while Prior courageously endures his illness and has the strength of character to reject his prophecy. Those in the closet, by contrast, tend to be villainous in proportion to the degree they hide their sexuality: Louis flawed but redeemable, Joe ultimately weak-willed and self-centered, Roy the play's representation of true evil. This observation should lead us to consider further questions and implications: Is Kushner's closeted-uncloseted dichotomy too simplistic? Does he accept the righteousness of openly gay men too unquestioningly? Is there a stigma associated with being in the closet? Asking these additional questions will strengthen your answer and give it depth. The second part of the question focuses on those characters who change from the beginning of the play to the end—Joe, and to a degree, Roy. Joe begins the play all but unaware of his homosexuality but ends it having experienced a blissful gay relationship. His personality seems to blossom during those weeks with Louis, but his supposed self-absorption continues unabated. At the play's end, Joe is not applauded simply for having come out but criticized for his continuing conservatism and his abandonment of Harper. The play seems to suggest that the act of disclosing one's homosexuality is not in itself sufficient to be virtuous—gay people must re-examine their values along with their sexuality. Roy presents a different archetype: the unrepentant homophobe who will be forced out of the closet by the announcement of his cause of death. Roy's coming out is not by choice, so it does not alleviate his sins (as a thoughtful reconsideration of his attitude towards gay people might); nonetheless, the Kaddish scene emphasizes that Roy is reunited with the gay community despite the fact that he has rejected that community in life. Coming out is not altogether a voluntary act—in the end, Roy cannot escape the fact of who he is. "It's law not justice," Joe tells Louis during their final breakup. Discuss the themes of law and justice in the play. Is Joe correct that the two are separate entities? Or does the play encourage us to see a more visionary potential for the law? Law and justice are critically important themes in the play—we need only consider the characters' professions (Roy, Joe and Louis all work in various aspects of the law) or the
courthouse setting of key scenes. But as the question hints, different characters have different views of the relationship between law and justice, ideally and in practice. Roy personifies Joe's idea that law and justice are two separate entities: he says that lawyers are America's high priests and encourages Belize to sue someone simply because "it's good for the soul." But for Roy, the exercise of the law is an end in itself, rather than a tool for achieving justice. He wants to remain a lawyer until his death simply because of the status it confers on him rather than for any positive reason. Not coincidentally, despite this appreciation of the law's power he has little respect for the letter of the law—he borrows money from a client, blackmails a friend and tells Joe, "There are so many laws; find one you can break." Worst of all, he tells Joe he illegally intervened in Ethel's trial to ensure a death sentence. This is law totally divorced from justice. Despite his flaws, Louis offers a different model for the relationship between the two values. Louis is also preoccupied with the law, both earthly and Biblical—he asks Rabbi Chemelwitz for scriptural advice on his predicament with Prior—but his view is more virtuous and humane. In Act One, Scene Eight of Millennium, he tells Prior that in his view the "shaping of the law, not its execution" is most important. For Roy, all that matters is the outcome, the tangible result; Louis cares about the weighing of right and wrong, the morality of a situation, rather than a specific outcome he can manipulate or use. The final fight between Louis and Joe tests the conflict between these two opposing viewpoints. Louis criticizes Joe for his decisions, which cleverly adopt the letter of the law without considering its spirit or the effects on real people. In this clash of views, Louis's is definitely depicted as superior: Joe has no substantial role in the play after this scene, while Louis is allowed to take part in the utopian epilogue. Thus, the play clearly encourages a more visionary potential for the law. By using real court decisions as the models for Joe's decisions, moreover, and by criticizing the real-life Reagan administration, it also insists that that potential be applied to the political world rather than simply everyday moral conundrums. The character of Belize stands out as exceptionally compassionate and good and yet at times seemingly two-dimensional. Which view is correct? Is Belize a virtuous stereotype or a complex moral authority? Belize is the only non-white character in the play; as such, he seems to carry the special burden of representing the point of view of an entire community. This is especially true when contrasted with the wide range of viewpoints presented by members of other minority groups, especially gays, of course, who range from the dismally conservative Roy to the progressive optimist Louis. In the debate scene between Belize and Louis, Belize consistently argues a position that we might consider the "black response" to Louis's unintentional racism. It is less an individual point of view than a generic corrective to a particular white character's excess. Belize's lack of individual distinctiveness is heightened by the fact that he has less of an individual history or a personal life than the other characters: since most of his life is shrouded from view, his only role is as a minority foil. Despite the fact that we might want to know more about Belize's history, however, we should not discredit Kushner for making the decision to make Belize's race a major part of his character. Kushner is speaking realistically about America and as Belize himself wittily puts it, "I am trapped in a world of white people. That's my problem."
At the same time, Belize's moral authority goes beyond generic good works—he elucidates complicated and difficult moral choices. Black characters in mostly white novels and plays are sometimes gentle, self-effacing and super-compassionate helpmates. But Belize's compassion is neither gentle nor self-effacing—he hates Roy with obvious passion, and his call to forgiveness is born less from a sweet Christian charity than from a depth of unfathomable majesty, dignity and confidence. Belize also has a human, flawed side. His humorous, campy banter with Prior saves him from the trap of a dreary rectitude. And his traces of anti-Semitism (which Louis accuses him of having and which glint through in his shouting match with Roy) lend an uncomfortable, authentic tint to his personality. Suggested Essay Topics What could Kushner have meant in subtitling his work "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes"? What national themes might he be referring to? And what is the relationship between "gay" and "national" in the play? One of the play's most interesting techniques is the "split-screen" method, in which two or more sets of characters in different locations appear onstage simultaneously, their words even overlapping at times. Choose a few specific examples of this technique. What is the effect of splitting the stage rather than dividing events into two or more scenes? How does the "splitscreen" contribute to connections between characters and broad themes? Perestroika, a Russian word meaning "reconstruction" or "reorganization," was the term for Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of political and economic reform in the Soviet Union. In what ways does the play represent the possibility of perestroika in America? Is this an appropriate title for Part Two? Choosing at least two examples (the Rosenberg trial, the San Francisco earthquake, Chernobyl, the Reagan administration), analyze the role of history in the play. Does Kushner depict events more or less as they happened? If not, what dramatic and thematic purposes does he serve by shading the facts? As a "fantasia," Angels in America is a major departure from prevailing theatrical realism, with detours into the religious and the supernatural—angels, ghosts, apparitions and visions appear over and over. What effect do these fantastical elements have on the play as a whole? Go beyond a simple analysis of plot to consider the implications for characters, messages and themes. Different characters in the play speak in different, easily recognizable modes—from Louis's elaborate run-on sentences to Belize's campy use of French—yet all are capable of breaking into a stylized, poetic manner of speech. Analyze Kushner's treatment of dialogue in the play: what are the functions of this poetic style versus ordinary prosaic speech? How do speaking styles contribute to meaning and theme? Focus on one or two specific scenes rather than generalizing about the play as a whole.
Quiz What favor does Roy perform for the wife of a visiting judge? (A) He fixes a parking ticket (B) He arranges theater tickets (C) He books a hotel room (D) He offers to meet her bail What is Mr. Lies's profession? (A) Dancer (B) Word processor (C) Travel agent (D) Photographer Where do Joe and Louis first meet? (A) At a party (B) On the steps of the courthouse (C) In the bathroom (D) At a funeral What does Prior reveal to Harper when they meet in their mutual dream/hallucination scene? (A) That her husband is gay (B) That he has AIDS (C) That he is a Mormon (D) That he has been visited by an Angel Which Biblical story does Joe say fascinated him as a child? (A) Moses and the burning bush (B) Paul and the angel on the road to Tarsus (C) The angel visiting Mary (D) Jacob wrestling the angel Where does Louis meet an anonymous stranger for sex? (A) At the St. Marks Baths (B) Under the pier at Jones Beach (C) In Central Park (D) In a movie theater What does Roy make Martin Heller do to prove loyalty to him? (A) Take off his jacket
(B) Name his son after him (C) Give him the dinner off his plate (D) Rub his back Who does Joe drunkenly telephone from a pay phone in the middle of the night? (A) Hannah (B) Harper (C) Louis (D) Roy Why were Prior I and Prior II selected from among Prior's ancestors to prepare the way for the Angel? (A) Because they were gay (B) Because they were bastards (C) Because they were righteous men (D) Because they died of the plague What is the name of Belize's favorite paperback novel? (A) Gone with the Wind (B) In Love with the Night Mysterious (C) The Wings of the Angel (D) I Married a Homosexual Where does the homeless woman in the South Bronx successfully direct Hannah? (A) New Jersey (B) The Mormon Visitor's Center (C) Joe's apartment (D) The Hall of Justice What sense does Louis tell Joe is intimately connected to sex? (A) Smell (B) Touch (C) Hearing (D) Sight How does Harper say she obtained a pine tree in Prospect Park? (A) She chewed it down with her teeth (B) She found it on the ground (C) She purchased it (D) She uprooted it with her hands How does Belize cheer up Prior while Henry waits impatiently?
(A) He shares gossip with him (B) He tells him a joke (C) He sings with him (D) He combs his hair Why does Roy blackmail Martin Heller? (A) To obtain a stash of AIDS drugs (B) To embarrass the administration (C) To get money for his treatment (D) To demonstrate his power to Belize Which of the following is one of the Sacred Prophetic Implements the Angel gives Prior? (A) A bottle of green liquid (B) A pair of spectacles (C) A scepter (D) A tiny locket On what day did God abandon Heaven forever? (A) September 1, 1939 (B) November 22, 1963 (C) June 28, 1914 (D) April 18, 1906 How does Joe attempt to prove his love for Louis while they are sitting on the beach? (A) He gives him a ring (B) He tells him he has turned down the job in Washington (C) He removes his temple garment (D) He kisses him in public How does Prior escape from Joe after their encounter in the courthouse? (A) By pretending to be a mental patient (B) By hiding in a broom closet (C) By telephoning the police (D) By disguising himself as a woman What is Prior's favorite place in New York City? (A) The Empire State Building (B) The War Memorial (C) The Bethesda Fountain (D) The Plaza Hotel Why does Louis ultimately turn against Joe?
(A) He learns he has been sleeping with Roy (B) He sees him at a Republican campaign stop (C) He learns he is a Mormon (D) He reads his court decisions Before he dies, what does Roy deceive Ethel into doing that fills him with glee? (A) Admitting her guilt (B) Singing to him (C) Bursting into tears (D) Breaking into a rage How do Louis and Belize thank Roy for his supply of AZT? (A) They bring him a single rose (B) They advise him not to undergo radiation (C) They close his eyes peacefully (D) They recite a prayer What does Rabbi Chemelwitz say is the principal form of entertainment in Heaven? (A) Sex (B) Storytelling (C) Volleyball (D) Card games Where does Harper depart for at the end of the play? (A) Salt Lake City (B) Antarctica (C) San Francisco (D) Washington
Suggestions for Further Reading Avena, Thomas, ed. Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994. Clum, John M. Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Fisher, James. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2001. Frantzen, Allen J. Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Frontain, Raymond-Jean, ed. Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997. Geis, Deborah R. and Kruger, Steven F., eds. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Kushner, Tony. A Bright Room Called Day. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. ———. Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Vorlicky, Robert, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
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Table of Contents Perestroika, Act Five, Scenes 6–10 & Epilogue in-depth analysis of Louis Ironson. in-depth analysis of Prior Walter. in-depth analysis of Roy Cohn.
