Kushner started to write Angels in America, his best-known play, in the late 1980s, a few years after the period in which it is set. It took him five years to complete. The two parts of this seven-hour drama are usually played on separate evenings, although sometimes in matinée and evening performances on the same day. Part One is entitled “Millennium Approaches”, Part Two “Perestroika”. The full two-part play was first staged in 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, under the direction of Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone. Then, in November 1993, it took London by storm in Declan Donellan’s acclaimed production at the National Theatre of Great Britain. John Heilpern, in the New York Observer, describes the play as the finest drama of our time and as one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century (December 7, 2003).

First, some background. Ronald Reagan was elected the fortieth president of the USA in 1981, the year that the first cases of a then mysterious disease, later known as AIDS, came to the attention of puzzled physicians. These early indications of the epidemic presaged a new era not only in gay history but also in American history, for the sheer scale of the tragedy that engulfed the USA during the 1980s had profound effects that are still being felt worldwide. In the epicentres of New York and San Francisco whole communities of gay men suffered devastating losses, and the horror was compounded in the early years by the fact that so little was known about the disease. It was not until the link between HIV and AIDS was established in 1984 that the hysteria began to abate to some extent, because now people could be tested to discover whether or not they were positive.

But AIDS also brought a backlash against the advances of the gay movement, both in the USA and in Britain. Margaret Thatcher became the British Prime Minister in 1979, and went on to consolidate her victory after the Falklands War in 1982. Between them, Reagan and Thatcher formed a new right-wing alliance. In Britain, this resulted in the passing by Parliament in 1987 of the infamous Section 28, which made it illegal for municipal councils to “intentionally promote homosexuality” or take steps that might recognise homosexual relationships as “pretended families”. In the USA, it resulted in the scandalous response of the Reagan Administration to the emergency of the AIDS crisis. In the middle of 1985, for instance, at around the beginning of the period covered by Kushner’s play, approximately 9,000 people in the USA had been infected with the virus, of which half had already died. But gays were not part of Reagan’s agenda, and it was not until 1987 that he finally addressed the crisis in public. At that point, six years after the first reported cases and three years after the identification of HIV as the cause, 24,000 people had died of the disease. The significance of Kushner’s play, then, is that, unlike any previous play, it treats AIDS not as the concern of a minority but as a profound rupture in American life. “Angels in America,” as one reviewer has written, “came as an enraged, seethingly articulate, intellectually ambitious, high-flown response to that stultifying and smug atmosphere of denial, silence and wilful ignorance” (Mendelsohn 42).

The play is set during a five-month period between October 1985 and February 1986: that is, in the early years of the epidemic when panic and paranoia were still rife in the gay community, which at that point felt cruelly singled out by the virus and also deserted by the rest of the world. It focuses on the intersecting lives of a number of characters, but principally on two couples who are at crisis point in their relationship: a gay couple, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, and a married pair, Joe and Harper Pitt. The tensions of the play spring from Louis’s inability to cope with the news that Prior is HIV positive, and the growing estrangement between Harper and Joe as the latter grapples with his repressed homosexuality. Nevertheless, within this narrow focus it manages to be vast in scope: its theme is nothing less than the history, condition and destiny of America. By examining individuals at moments of significant personal crisis, Kushner probes deep into the national conscience. He also manages to encompass the full spectrum of the American experience through his wide reading and the rich allusiveness of his language.

The play’s basic theatrical model is Brechtian epic. Aristotelian concentration and the classical unities are thus discarded in favour of a broad temporal and geographical sweep, a succession of brief scenes that range in setting from the East Coast to the West Coast of the USA and eventually to Heaven itself, which, in a typically Kushnerian joke, is described as looking “mostly like San Francisco after the Great 1906 Quake” (252). All this is movingly captured in the opening credits of the HBO film of the play, directed by Mike Nichols, during which the camera traverses the entire North American continent, starting at the Golden Gate Bridge, then hovering briefly above Salt Lake City, St. Louis and Chicago, and coming to settle finally beside the Bethesda Fountain in New York’s Central Park, a monument that takes the form of an angel. Moreover, this vast setting is filled with an equally wide-ranging cast of characters, which includes not only gays but also Jews, Mormons, blacks and Mayflower WASPS. The play focuses at various moments on pill addiction, loneliness, mental illness, homelessness and sexual repression. It contains references to the westward migration of the Jews to America and of Mormons to Utah, to the Bayeux tapestry, to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to the McCarthy hearings and the decisions of Reagan’s appointees. There are invented characters – rabbis, drag queens, housewives, nurses, doctors, angels – as well as imaginatively recreated historical figures, such as Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, whose ghost, in a scene of theatrical boldness typical of Kushner, returns to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, over the body of one of the men responsible for her execution.

The influence of Brecht can also be seen in Kushner’s notes about the staging, where he calls for a pared-down style of presentation, with minimal scenery and scene shifts done rapidly, employing the cast as well as stagehands. But Brecht is not the only influence; indeed, the play draws on the whole panoply of theatrical tradition, from Aeschylus and Euripides to vaudeville and circus, thus dissolving the distinction between popular and high art. In the National Theatre of Great Britain production of 1992, for instance, the Mr Lies character was played by an actor in outlandish costume and make-up, a gigantic fixed grin on his face, gliding effortlessly back and forth across the stage on a pair of roller-blades in precisely one of those moments of magic that Kushner insists is indispensable to theatre.

Angels in America is not addressed to a specifically gay audience; rather, it addresses everyone. Nevertheless, as A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, it invites audiences, whether gay or straight, to see the world through gay eyes. In other words, it attempts to raise our consciousness through the exploration of a number of related issues. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of violent homophobic hatred in the midst of a terrifying and mysterious epidemic? What strategies for survival do gays use in a hostile world? How broad is a community’s embrace? Is identity – as a WASP, a Jew, a Mormon, a black, a gay, a person with AIDS – necessarily divisive, or can society absorb, subsume and celebrate difference?

But although wide open and fluid, the play is structured around some organising principles. So what values and belief systems underpin its cosmic vision? The play’s central theme is the opposition between stasis and change. In a strife-torn world, it is understandable that people resist change, for change involves struggle and conflict, and sometimes brings disaster and despair. But change is inevitable, and to resist it is to be reactionary. This is the play’s principal thrust and driving message. Indeed, the theme is announced right at the start: the play opens with Rabbi Chemelwitz’s burial sermon for Sarah Ironson, Louis’s grandmother, in which he laments the change and assimilation that was the result of the Jews’ westward migration to America: “and how we fought for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted” (16). This lament is echoed in the scene that opens “Perestroika”, Part Two, where the world’s oldest living Bolshevik (Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov) mourns the new chaos, the “mad, swirling planetary disorganisation” that has replaced “Theory” and overturned his vision of creation as a “mountainous, granite order” (147-48). But creation is not order; it is chaos, movement. Kushner and his characters both lament and embrace this chaos, and thus endow the play with a mixture of elegy and celebration.

An ongoing critique runs through the play about the failures of ideology. Harper, in her opening speech, worries about the disintegration of the Old World Order as the new millennium approaches. She talks about “beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiralling apart” (22). These beautiful systems and fixed orders include both the American Dream and Soviet communism. Both of these systems failed, the play suggests, because they attempted to impose on society monolithic fantasies incompatible with human complexity and variety. So Louis’s grandmother came to America like millions of others in search of a dream, but the dream failed her. Likewise, the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik has pursued a “Beautiful Theory”, a system of thought that promised granite order but ultimately imploded. This is the essence of Kushner’s global critique: ideologies of both left and right have failed. The speech by the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik has to be read in the context of the reference to the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl, which the congress of angels are discussing just before Prior’s appearance in Heaven. Parts 1 and 2 of Angels have these points of symmetry, which link and underpin Kushner’s larger intellectual preoccupations.

Somewhat surprisingly, within the cosmology of the play, the angels also represent the failure of systems and ideology. The angels want a return to order, cessation of movement, stasis. They choose Prior as their prophet, and they provide him with a book of heavenly commandments. Prior ultimately returns the book, and, in opposition to the commandments of Heaven, demands more life. Indeed, he calls on Heaven to put an end to AIDS. The angels reply that they have tried, but do not know how. Prior’s role here is full of Biblical echoes: Jonah’s refusal of the role of prophet, and Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel from the Book of Genesis. “Life”, then, is what the play offers in place of systems and stultifying ideology. Life, in all its churning complexity, with all its suffering, change and political turmoil. Life, which will not be bound by systems and will not stand still. “The world,” in a key line of the play, “only spins forward” (178).

The villains in Angels are therefore conservative Republicans: centrally and symbolically Roy Cohn, but also Martin Heller and, somewhat controversially, Joe Pitt. The heroes, in contrast, are left-leaning communitarians: pre-eminently Belize, a black nurse and drag-queen, and Prior, an ex-drag-queen and gay man with AIDS. This stance is reinforced in the way Kushner incorporates historical names and events into his play. It’s not just that Reagan, George Bush and Newt Gingrich are treated to severe censure throughout; Kushner’s political position is also underscored in the way he bases two of his characters on actual historical figures: Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg.

Who are – or rather, were – these two characters? As the play makes clear, Roy Cohn intervened illegally in the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed for treason in the McCarthy era (June, 1953). Cohn was part of the prosecution team, and during the trial was noticed by Senator McCarthy, for whom he later worked as an aide. His part in the trial, in other words, greatly assisted his career as a lawyer. McCarthy, of course, became infamous for his accusations of Communist infiltration of the State Department and other high government posts; and Cohn provided him with legal guidance in his witch-hunt, which has become known as McCarthyism. When the Senator’s influence eventually declined, however, Cohn became discredited along with him. Kushner’s position is indicated in the way he has the ghost of Ethel return as Roy’s nemesis, haunting him on his deathbed.

But the play looks at more than just the immediate past; it attempts to encompass the whole of American history. Louis’s grandmother, Sarah Ironson, whose burial service opens the play, is described as “not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania” (16). Likewise Prior, in those encounters with his medieval ancestors, the earlier Priors, looks back and reconnects with the origins of America in the pioneering journeys of the Puritan settlers. Again, at the Mormon Visitor’s Centre in New York, the wagon-train tableau in The Diorama Room reviews the history of the pioneering families who created America in their great migrations westward. Among many other things, this play is a rediscovery of the American past in the service of understanding its present condition and influencing its destiny.

John Clum suggests that the play is structured like a Shakespearean romance:

A seemingly stable world splinters, disintegrates, atomises, to be eventually reconstructed, redeemed. Relationships are quickly brought to crisis point. Destiny or coincidence causes unlikelycollisions. Characters thought dead miraculously reappear. The real and the dream merge. Seemingly disparate actions turn out to be analogous. Comedy and tragedy alternate, and at times coalesce. Kushner takes the multiple plot lines of Shakespeare a step further by using a “split screen” method and playing analogous scenes simultaneously (Clum 249).

This is the basic structure of Shakespearean romance, a pattern well exemplified in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. It may seem odd to link this very contemporary play to Shakespearean romantic comedy, but Clum is surely right: the link is there, and Kushner, as we know, is steeped in theatre and draws eclectically from drama of all periods. Moreover, Kushner’s insistence that “Perestroika” is essentially a comedy suggests that the movement of Angels as a whole is towards resolution of conflict, hope and reconciliation.

As in Shakespearean romance, the plot of Angels is structured around the relationship between the real and the supernatural. There are angels in this play, but God, we are told, left Heaven on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Apparently He got bored with the eternal bliss of paradise and simply wandered off. Hence the chaos of the twentieth century, the most disaster-strewn century in history. At the centre of this chaotic, dangerous universe is Roy Cohn, a lawyer in whose hands the law becomes “not an agent of order, but an expression of the chaos” (Clum 251). Roy believes that you can either make the law or be controlled by it. He chooses to make the law: to seize power rather than be subject to the power of others. A monster of moral blankness, he admits “I know no rules” (72). Louis calls him “the polestar of human evil” (227). However, he attracts even as he repels, and his mad, raw, superhuman energy makes him an image of America itself. As Belize says: “I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean” (228). Always hypnotically at the centre of any action, Roy is morally disgusting yet magnetic with a kind of mesmerising vitality; and significantly, within the overarching structure of the play, even he is finally forgiven. In what some critics have seen as the climax of the play, Ethel and Louis recite the Kaddish over his dead body; and here, the contradictions of Roy dissolve in the mixing of tragedy and comedy. Ethel and Louis cap the original Hebrew chant with a line of American English: “You sonofabitch” (257).

One important theme of the play is “the closet”. What are the benefits and dangers of going public about one’s homosexuality? The dramatic presentation and discussion of this issue again centres on the monstrous figure of Cohn. Throughout the play, Roy notoriously attempts to deny both his homosexuality and the fact that he has AIDS. As the representative of individualism in the play he has no sense of group affiliation or solidarity, no sense of community or minority rights. In Roy’s universe the only right is the right to exploit others in the scramble for personal power and prestige. Why identify as a homosexual, if such identity brings personal disadvantage? For Roy, words such as “gay” and “lesbian” are not terms of positive self-identification; they are labels conferred by others that denote powerlessness. Moreover, his outlook, however morally reprehensible, is actually very astute. Roy understands the power of words as the instruments of discourse through which power is exercised. Gay identity, in his book, is an oppositional stance that ruins your reputation with powerful people and spoils your chances.

So community and identity are strong themes of this play; and they are set against the opposing themes of individualism and isolationism. Part One of Angels

is a picture of dissolution of the social fabric. Old ethnic communities are gone. So are old power structures, old faiths and illusions, and relationships not based on honesty or love. Characters move from the familiar to the unknown. The watchword is not community or relationship, but isolation. (Clum 253)

At the end of Part One, the three storylines are poised on the edge of disaster: Louis deserts and betrays Prior, taking Joe home with him to fulfil a relationship that is already tortured with guilt; the power-mad Roy Cohn collapses on the floor of his study, where he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg; and the abandoned Prior, alone in his apartment, is half-mad with resentment and grief. It’s a moment that suggests that the play is going to end in classical tragedy. That is, until the Angel arrives in the final minutes. In Greek drama a god was sometimes lowered onto the stage by a piece of machinery. Such intervention, or deus ex machina, was sometimes needed to assist the unfolding of the plot. Likewise, this visitation seems to promise the creation of a new order. But when “Perestroika”, Part Two of the play, opens, Prior learns that the Angel calls instead for stasis, death: “On you in you in your blood we write have written: STASIS! The END” (180). Prior, however, wants more life, and will, like Jacob, wrestle with the Angel for it: “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks – progress, migration, motion is . . . modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do” (263-64).

Nevertheless, the key words in “Perestroika” are “blessing” and “forgiveness”. This is Kushner’s answer to the question he claims his play is asking: namely, how broad is a community’s embrace? He has said: “Communities all over the world now are in tremendous crisis over the issue of how you let go of the past without forgetting the crimes that were committed” (quoted in Clum 256). Presumably he has in mind the Middle East, Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, South Africa and countless other trouble spots. But the play does not pretend that forgiveness is easy. “I came to forgive,” Ethel tells Roy, “but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery” (246). And Belize, gazing at Roy’s corpse, says: “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” (256).

The play, then, does not end on a note of sentimental optimism. The final scene, called Epilogue, takes place in 1990, four years after the main action. Prior has survived AIDS – or at least to this point. Louis and Belize are still arguing. Hannah Pitt is still Prior’s companion and caregiver. The four characters sit under the stone angel that stands on the Bethesda Fountain at the southeast corner of Central Park, New York. Prior steps forward and addresses the audience: “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you. More life. And bless us all” (280). John Clum writes that this benediction breaks down the most obvious wall, that between stage and audience, and issues a challenge to all of us about how the move to community that the play calls for, as antidote to the isolation, unhappiness and self-hatred of the characters, is to be achieved (257).

One challenge that immediately confronts us is this. Who is excluded from that community gathered under the fountain? Who, apparently, is the only character who cannot be forgiven? Answer: Joe Pitt. In an interview, Michael Cunningham asks Kushner whether being an obedient Republican is the only unforgivable sin, and Kushner replies by repeating the point about how hard forgiveness is (Vorlicky 62-63). Daniel Mendelsohn also wonders why Kushner goes to such lengths to convince us that Joe is morally deficient, when clearly he is not. Is there really a parallel between Joe and Louis? Louis, after all, abandons Prior out of weakness and fear of AIDS, whereas Joe leaves Harper because he cannot remain in a marriage that has become a lie. Mendelsohn concludes that the only reason Joe cannot be forgiven is that he’s a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. The play, in other words, is too hung up on its PC credentials. But I think Kushner would not necessarily reject this criticism: the play, after all, ends with a challenge to the audience, and Kushner would surely see this challenge as reflecting back on himself.

Some other points to ponder are these. Does Kushner’s apocalyptic vision of the AIDS crisis, as more likely to make the heavens crack open than any of the other disasters of the twentieth century, now seem rather strained? Is the second half of the play as strong as the first? “Perestroika” has the much trickier job of putting something in place of what “Millennium Approaches” has swept away. Does it succeed, or do some of the reconciliations and alliances seem rather forced and unlikely? Does the play adequately show the struggle of the characters, or does sentiment sometimes run too high? As Daniel Mendelsohn points out, we experience Angels very differently today from those audiences in the early 1990s: the paranoia and outrage of the period have passed, the culture has changed profoundly. He concludes that a genuinely great play lurks somewhere inside the more limited, period-bound drama that Kushner has given us: one that reaches out, beyond the goodwill and easy prejudices of marginal groups and liberal New Yorkers, to speak to the “heartland” of America (47).

References

Clum, M. John, Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1992.
Fisher, James, The Theatre of Tony Kushner, New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Kushner, Tony, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.
Mendelsohn, Daniel, “Winged Messages”, New York Review of Books, 12 February 2004: 42-47.
Vorlicky, Robert, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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Citation: Brookes, Les. "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 June 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24827, accessed 22 January 2025.]