Angels in America

Faithful readers, 

I'm incredibly eager to talk about this particular book, so I'm getting straight to the point.  Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a two-part Pulitzer prize-winning play by Tony Kushner.  It was published in 1993, and it takes place in New York City in 1985.  In 2003, Angels in America was adapted into an HBO miniseries, which turned out to be a critically acclaimed masterpiece.  I'm pretty sure you can find it on YouTube, but I really think you should read the book first.  

Angels in America examines the lives of two troubled couples, one homosexual and the other heterosexual.  The first couple, Louis and his lover Prior, end their relationship when Louis finds out that Prior has contracted AIDS.  The second couple, Joe and his wife Harper, are separated when Joe leaves Harper because he admits to being gay and he cannot deal with her painkiller addiction, which prevents them from moving to Washington D.C. where Joe has been offered a prestigious job.  The most pivotal scene in the first act depicts the collapse of the two relationships.  The writing is extraordinary, and the scene is powerfully portrayed in the miniseries, and you can watch it here (explicit language).  

The two couples' tumultuous lives collide when Joe and Louis begin a clandestine relationship.  At this point, the reader is introduced to several different characters, each of whom carries a terrible burden of his own.  Roy Cohn, Joe's bigoted mentor, is in the hospital dying of AIDS.  He refuses to acknowledge that he has AIDS; instead, he refers to his disease as "liver cancer," in an effort to conceal that he is a closeted homosexual (being openly gay was scandalous for anyone in 1985; for Roy Cohn, a prominent right-wing Republican, it was unthinkable).  The reader encounters the nurse Belize, a black ex-drag queen who befriends Prior in the hospital.  Belize also works with Roy Cohn, who he finds repulsive because of his cruel, prejudiced attitude. 

Angels in America is a deeply spiritual story, filled with biblical symbols and allusions.  The play has multiple instances of prophecies, dreams, and visions, mostly occurring to ordinary, broken people (in a way, this connects the biblical world with modern America).  Many of the characters converse and interact with angels.  A major premise of the story is that God abandoned the world in 1906 (evidenced by the San Francisco earthquake), and his angels have struggled to cope with his absence.  In a climactic scene towards the end of the play, Joe demands that the angels take divine legal action and sue God for abandonment: "If he ever dared come back... if after all this destruction, after all the terrible days of this terrible century, he returned to see how much suffering his abandonment had created, if all he has to offer is death, then you should sue the bastard.  Sue him for walking out.  How dare he."  (5.4.47)

Stylistically, this play has a distinct American flavor.  I think that's what makes it so brilliant.  The language is grandiose and magnificent.  The characters are constantly longing for innocence and new life.  Basically, the entire story is facing to The West, towards the beautiful unknown, and desperately hoping for a new beginning.  The play's central conflict is found within the characters' inability to be completely free of the past.  Kushner reveals that the American community is horribly afflicted by the disease of individuality (to a greater extent than AIDS, even), and that only through communal bonds are Americans able to find the hope that they so desperately long for.

The play ends on a hopeful note.  Harper gets on a plane headed West, and her monologue is one of the most beautiful passages ever written: 

"Night flight to San Francisco.  Chase the moon across America... The ozone was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.  But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.  And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired.  Nothing's lost forever.  In this world, there's a kind of painful progress.  Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.  At least I think that's so."

Tony Kushner presents to us a potent, distinctly American-yet-completely-universal challenge in Angels in America.  I was hesitant to write about this play because I still don't feel that I've completely grasped it.  This work is raw and real to the point of being harsh and terrifying.  This is one of the few books I've ever encountered that attempts to tell the uncensored story of mankind and actually succeeds.   

I've been talking for a while, and I still feel like I haven't said enough.  I really hope you read Angels in America.  It's bold and truthful and magnificent.  You will never be the same.  

~Spence