Angels in America.

The drumroll of excitement about Tony Kushner's Angels in America was heard long before part 1 (Millennium Approaches) opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre in early May. Cheers from London, cheers from Los Angeles; publication in two issues of American Theatre; a gaggle of prizes including the Pulitzer. The play arrived in a cloud of expectation and gossip (changed theaters, changed directors, changed designers) and, for the most part, was received with acclaim. I am still trying to sort out my own responses to the play. I watched it--as I had read it--absorbed, fascinated, but oddly uninvolved. A friend of mine, an admirer of Kushner, said that such a reaction would suit the playwright, given his respect for Brecht. "I think that whether or not one believes one's work will change the world, one should always work as though one would hope that his or her work changes the world," Kushner told an interviewer in Columbia ,(Spring 1993). "I think political artists going back to Brecht and beyond always did their best work when they realized that art is both vital and superfluous at the same time."

Kushner is clearly political in the large sense of the word-- concerned with society and its endemic chaos--but he is also a fantasist (the subtitle of Angels is A Gay Fantasia on National Themes), a believer in theater as magic (he adapted Corneille's The Illusion). What am I to make of the stories Angels has to tell--the intermeshing plots--and of its hallucinatory scenes-- the pill-induced fantasies of Harper, the AIDS-produced visions of Prior? And are these scenes inside or outside the characters? Or both? When an angel arrives in Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, it is clearly a stage device, the vision of the playwright not the characters, but what of Kushner's angel, who arrives at the end of part 1 with a portentous but amorphous message to Prior, "Greetings, Prophet;/The Great Work begins:/The Messenger has arrived"? As the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg says in the scene in which Roy Cohn collapses from the AIDS that he refuses to recognize, "History is about to crack wide open. Millennium approaches." Whatever Kushner intended to do to or for me, he sent me back to Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, that fascinating study of the connection between revolutionary messianism in the Middle Ages and modem totalitarian movements. Perhaps it did little to illuminate Kushner, but it is always a pleasure to read Cohn-- Norman, not Roy.

The national themes in Angels, embedded in the the main plots, include the intoxication of power, the strength of selfdelusion, the limitations of love and loyalty. The most flamboyant of the plots is the one centering on Roy Cohn, more caricature than character (but then so was the real Roy Cohn), a vehicle that Ron Leibman makes the most of. For Cohn, life is the getting and wielding of power, which is why he denies his homosexuality, renames his AIDS to the straighter cancer because gays and AIDS victims are powerless. He has made a son of sorts of Joe Pitt, a slightly bent straight arrow, a conservative Mormon lawyer, whom he wants to redesign in his own image, to teach him to "transgress a little, Joseph." The transgressions Roy has in mind are political, legal, professional, but Joe has stifled transgressions of his own. He has spent his life smothering his homosexual longings and, in the process, has helped turn his wife Harper into an hysteric, a woman obsessed by a man threatening her (Joe, of course) whose only escape is dream journeys. "I'm going to hell for doing this," says Joe, the good Mormon, when he finally accepts that he is homosexual and goes off with Louis, a damnation that is certainly more positive than our last sight of Harper, settling into the comfort of an imaginary Antarctica. Louis, whose path has crossed Joe's often in the play, has guilt of his own, having deserted Prior, whom he loves, because he does not have the courage to watch AIDS destroy Prior. This description hardly indicates the texture of the play because the scenes are often very funny, sometimes sentimental, more often simply ruthless. Angels is a serious play which is also a grotesque comedy that brings us back to the angel who crashes through the roof at the end of the play. Norman Cohn writes:

A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating--here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism which subsisted as a perpetual menace to the structure of medieval society. It may be suggested that here, too, lies the source of the giant fanaticisms which in our day have convulsed the world.

Where does that leave the AIDS victim as prophet? Is the angel announcing the end of something or the beginning? Is the angel simply a stage device, perhaps a comic one, looking toward something better than the human losses and failures embedded in the gay fantasia, the national themes? Do we have to wait for part 27? Should I quit asking questions and simply accept that Angels in America is a play almost as impressive as the hoopla surrounding it? As the derelict and perhaps psychotic woman in act 3 says, "In the new century I think we will all be insane."