ANGELS IN AMERICA
Steven M.L. Aronson: Is there anything you’re still afraid of, aside from the things we’re all afraid of like death?
Written, like the books of the Bible, in response to a sense of apocalyptic political and spiritual upheaval, Angels in America is a prayer for more life in a world overrun by death. From his own perspective as a gay man who’s seen extraordinary suffering–and who knows many others around the globe have seen and endured far worse–Kushner casts a visionary gaze on a “ruined paradise” beset by AIDS, plague, war, genocide, and environmental destruction. His epic tragicomedy, two three-and-a-half-hour plays distinct from but dependent on each other, portrays a collection of individuals wrestling with ambiguous angels: guardians, messengers, and bringers of death all at once. Brandishing the words “divine” and “fabulous” in both their campy and majestic meanings, Kushner poses a set of conflicts between his heroes and the larger-than-life forces sent to test them. And from his characters’ struggles, Kushner finds hope in human beings’ strength, humor, imagination, and “addiction to being alive.”
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The political and mythic resonances in the simultaneously ribald and rhapsodic script make the main plot rise above soap opera. Intersecting that story is Joe’s friendship with Roy Cohn, a “saint of the right” who experiences supernatural visitations from the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the communist spy he manipulated into the electric chair through unethical dealings in the judge’s chambers. Neither man knows the other is gay (Joe is so square he doesn’t even recognize a reference to the Beatles’ White Album). Epitomizing the malevolent hypocrisy of Reaganism (whose imminent comeback, with Ollie North’s Senate race and Ed Meese’s reemergence as a gay-rights foe, makes Angels a timely offering this fall), Cohn is linked to Prior by his nurse Belize, the angel of mercy whose devotion to Prior is sorely tested by Prior’s assertion that he’s been named a prophet. (Prior’s angelic encounter, like Jacob’s, has left him lame: is it just coincidence that five of the play’s central characters are a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple, just like the notorious joke told by Reagan’s interior secretary James Watt?) Prior’s research into angelology brings him into contact with Joe’s flinty mother, Hannah, another angel, who moves to New York to save her gay son and ends up nurturing the abandoned Harper.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joan Marcus.
