About book Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes (2003)
"We have reached a verdict, your honor. This man's heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.""Angels in America" is a two-part play written by Tony Kushner based around the lives of numerous homosexual men, the ladies in their lives and their brushes with celestial beings, ghosts of the past and parallel realms. The first part, titled Millennium Approaches, was deemed so superb by the Pulitzer committee that they did not even wait until the debut of the second part for them to award it their top prize.The second part, Perestroika, named after the movement that led to the dissolution of the Communist Soviet Union, completes each character arc, whether leading to downfall or redemption. The title is appropriate, as the McCarthy Witch Hunts play a major role with many of the characters, along with comparing Communist discrimination to homosexuals and HIV-stricken people.Our characters include:1. A young HIV stricken man named Prior Walter, who begins seeing divine visions during his trips to the doctor and while lying sick in bed. For example, he is visited by the ghosts of two ancestors in one scene, who make parallels to the AIDS epidemic and the bubonic plague of their day.2. Prior's boyfriend, Louis Ironson, who struggles with the prospect of staying with and caring for a dying man, especially having developed a crush on another man.3. Louis' crush, Joe Pitt, who is homosexual but highly repressed due to his conservative Reagan-ite Mormon upbringing and the fact that he is married. His wife, Harper Pitt, has been driven to pill-popping due to a stagnant, sexless marriage. When Joe disappears from home one day, Joe's strict but rational mother, Hannah Pitt, moves in with Harper.4. Roy Cohn, the real-life lawyer who played a substantial role in McCarthy's political career and especially the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Jewish couple who were executed because of a Communist conspiracy. The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg frequently torments Roy in the hospital. Roy Cohn describes himself as not a homosexual, but simply a "guy who fucks guys", as he believes the word 'homosexual' is a label for degenerates and those who dwell at the bottom of the food chain. It is revealed in Roy's first scene that he has contracted HIV.5. Belize, the transsexual nurse who 'cares' for Roy in the hospital. The word 'cares' here is used sparingly as Belize is aware of every malicious circumstance that Roy has been affiliated with. Belize and Roy spend a great deal of time insulting and berating each other and make for some of the best dialogue in the play. Belize is also friends with Louis and Prior.Angels in America has the most poignant and biting dialogue I have heard since Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" One of the most affecting lines is when Belize disregards a tearful jingoistic Louis but telling him, "I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate."Some may describe Angels in America as overwritten and its dialogue unrealistic and uncharacteristic of its respective speakers, especially that of Harper Pitt, who is drugged up and delusional for the majority of the story, being transported to the inner realms of her own imagination, of which philosophical coherence is remarkable for such emotional instability noted in her character. Each character here is 'levelled' by their own instability. No character here is weak. They all dwindle and ignite on the acidic red corner of the spectrum, whether they are hurting another or being hurt by another. It is through their hard times and selfishness that the story is driven and when the rain falls, it pours. When the ground starts shaking, it splits.
I begin this review with a quote: "Things fall apart / the center cannot hold." A colleague pointed out the resonances of Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming' in Kushner's 'Angels,' and I had to agree with his fantastic observation. This is a drama set in Reaganite America that images a world seemingly coming to an implosive and horrifying end. God has literally abandoned us (evidently, during the great San Francisco earthquake), and the national and historical crises alluded to--the onset of the AIDS epidemic being the most present, but also the fall of the Soviet Union, the infection of Reagan-era individualism, the legacy of the Cold War, the Rosenberg trial--profoundly intersect with the personal crises that provide the play's sometimes overwhelming sense of trauma.Roy & Prior are each wrecked by AIDS; Harper is a pill-popping agoraphobe; there are closets galore; there are pervasive narratives of abandonment (emblematized in the one committed by God) and of comings-home; of religious doubt & the terror of change--with its corollary, the terror of stasis. There's also, as evidenced by figures like Harper, Joe, Louis, and Prior, the terror of being with--and being isolated from--other people. Roy Cohn is both a historical figure and a kind of literary master narrative--as my professor remarked, Roy reads almost as analogous to Milton's Satan. He's the most despicable character, ostensibly the villain of the play, but ultimately also becomes an intensely compelling one to follow. With all of this said, I simply have to remark that this is, first and foremost, an absolutely magnificent work of literature. It's beautifully written, refreshingly literary (without being as pretentious as I've been in this review), often laugh-out-loud hilarious, and emotionally affecting in a way I haven't experienced with a fictional work in a long time. Read it. Seriously, READ. IT. For your betterment as a human being, give the play a shot. It's just radiant.
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When I first read the summary of this book I will admit I wasn't interested at all but seeing as how I had to read it for my college class I really had no choice and now I am glad I did. The characters are very dynamic and the events are sporadic but it does get pretty slow in a few places. The overall theme of hardship and life is very well produced and inspiring at times. I would have liked to see a little more character development and this book definitely would be more engaging to someone who was around during this time but I followed it easily enough. Would suggest it as a good read for any audience.
—Spencer Sheehan
this comment isn't necessarily related to this play specifically, but my roommate and i were having a discussion about why angels resonated so much. her somewhat abrupt response was, "well, because we fetishize that time period." to which i say, yes, perhaps; perhaps my love for this text comes out of my fetishization of queer, coalition politics in the 80s, politics that came out of the clarity of death, when the political lines were (more) clearly drawn, when race was powerfully asserted within organizing, when authenticity of experience and justice were defined in such startling colour...at the same time, how does this queer genealogy move alongside or drape over my life, my experience, as someone who renounced queerness for so much of his life, who didn't even know what AIDS was until his teens? why is it assumed that i am accountable to certain histories presented in angels? what is at work affectively (not "just" emotionally, but also in the deleuzian sense of the word) that such a text, exploring queerness, jewishness, religion, america, set in the late 80s, written and performed in the early 90s, televised in the 2000s, read (and fawned over) by a 20-something chinese gay guy in the 2010s, speaks so intimately and piercingly? and why did harold bloom include angels in his list of the best hits of the western canon?i guess this book, along with other provocative sources, inspires for me questions about queer genealogies, and about how we relate to history and histories of death...
—Matt
I had to read the play Angels in America for my ENGL 380 class. I had put off buying the book til the last minute and it got to be that the only place I could get it was at Barnes and Noble. I had no idea what it was about, I had heard there was an HBO film even version because it was up for awards awhile back, but I really didn’t know much about it. Now that I have read it I can say it is 100% worth the $18 I had to pay for the book.For one, it’s refreshing to read a play that is from this century. I can actually understand exactly what is going on, even when what is going on is strange and unusual. The language is modern and that makes it a quicker read than say, Shakespeare. Haha. ANd by quick read, I mean quick. I bought it Sunday morning at like 11am, twelve hours later of splotchy reading, I had blown through 160 pages. And if I wasn’t exhausted and if I didn’t have to get up to go to class the next morning, it was so captivating that I could have stayed up all night to read it to the end (something I haven’t done since Deathly Hallows came out).Angels in America is set in the mid 80s when the nation was in the midst of the AIDS crisis. The two plays that make up Angels in America, center around characters from three groups of people: gays, Mormons, and Jews. While you may be hard pressed to find a similarity between the three, once you’ve followed the characters through their struggles, you can see that there are things which tie these three groups of people together. While they appear so vastly different, they can find similarities in each other to which they can relate to each other through. My 380 instructor says she would classify this play as a comedy, and while Angels in America deals with serious subject matter and is politically driven, I am inclined to agree with her. If you look at the typical conventions and structures of a dramatic comedy, Angels in America follows quite a few of them. But the classification of the play was far from my mind while actually reading it. I was too deeply immersed in the story to even think of anything but finding out what happened next.And, what reading it really accomplished was me wanting to see it performed live as it was meant to be seen. I can read the words, and I can vividly visualize it in my head, but I kept thinking, “God, how amazing would it be to actually see it.” And I don’t mean the HBO minit series (though I would love to see that as well), but actually live and embodied on a theater stage. I can’t imagine what that experience would be like. While I loved the experience of reading the play, I bet it would pale in comparison to seeing it live (in the way listening to a CD is satisfying, but it isn’t the same as the energy and rush of going to a concert).Can you tell I loved it? One of the few assigned readings that I could possibly have picked up on my own and read for fun. That doesn’t happen very often. Not often at all.
—Mikella Etchegoyen
