14 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JULY 9, 1993
ENTERTAINMENT
Theme and dialectics of Angels in America dazzle in a
Reviewed by Barry Daniels Tony Kushner's Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, Part I) has finally arrived on Broadway and is another major event in what seems to have become the Year of the Queer. The play has won numerous awards including the London Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play of 1992 (it was produced by the Royal National Theatre), the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of 1992 (Part II was premiered in the Mark Taper Forum production in Los Angeles), the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and the Tony Award for Best Play.
Kushner has written an epic drama that for all its intelligence, wit and politics is an important statement by a gay author about the complex experience of being a homosexual in America. It has been a long time since there has been writing of such scope and daring on the Broadway stage.
Set in New York, the play's action focuses on a pair of couples: Harper and Joe Pitt, Mormons from Salt Lake City; and Louis
Ironson, a New York Jew and his WASP lover, Prior Walter. Corrupt, right-wing, power-broker lawyer Roy Cohn occupies a position at the center of the plot.
Joe is a staunch, family-values, Republican lawyer-chief clerk in Federal Court of Appeals where Louis works as a word processor-consumed with guilt about his repressed homosexuality. His values and beliefs are threatened as he begins to confront the reality of his sexuality and to face the sleazy corruption of his mentor, Roy Cohn. He is faced with losing both his personal faith and his political idealism. Harper, his Valiumaddicted wife, seems to know the truth but has retreated into a world of drug-induced fantasy. With the help of Mr. Lies, a hallucinatory travel agent, she manages to escape to Antarctica.
The second couple is torn apart by Prior's revelation early in the play that he has the first symptoms of full-blown AIDS. In often graphic detail, the trajectory of the disease is followed, and we watch Louis' utter inability to deal with it. Louis abandons Prior and
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becomes absorbed with guilt and self-hatred.
Like Joe, Roy Cohn is positioned in the right-wing power structure of the nation; like Prior he is dying of AIDS. Like the disease itself, Cohn is extravagant, perverse and almost unstoppable. In the now famous scene at the end of Act I, when his doctor informs him he has AIDS, Cohn denies he has it since it is a "homosexual disease," and he can't be a homosexual because homosexuals don't have power. He says, "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? . . . Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys."
The two actions intersect when Louis begins to seduce Joe. It is an odd moment of grace towards the end of the tortured events of Part I when Joe and Louis embrace and passionately kiss as though there is a hope that these two guilt-ridden men might heal each other through love.
Millennium Approaches, however, is not simply a personal drama about the lives of the principal characters. Kushner has subtitled it "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," and his ability to place the personal dramas in a larger socio-political context is one of the most exhilarating qualities of the play. Cohn is not simply a dying, closeted, gay man in denial, he represents the ruthless politics of self, the logical conclusion of American Republicanism in the age of Reagan and Bush. He stands for the pyramid model of political power that vests as much control as possible in the few at the top.
In opposition to this, the playwright introduces the Marxist idea of power being assumed by the oppressed and being dispersed at the bottom of the pyramid. Louis is the spokesperson for this “neo-Hegelian positivism." The direction the play apparently
takes in Part II, Perestroika, is towards an empowerment of the currently dis-empowered, which, of course, includes the gay community, with a consequent move towards peace and healing.
The principal characters also represent aspects of America as "the melting pot, in which nothing melts." Louis' comes from a family of Old World Jews. Prior represents WASP culture with its long heritage of brutality and colonialism. Joe and Harper, as Mormons, represent the migrations that were characteristic of the development of our country. They also represent a peculiar kind of American religiosity that combines a strong sense of ethics with a repressed sexuality.
Kushner's art is that he manages to write extravagantly on big themes while holding our attention with the central characters. His technique can encompass the real and the fantastic. He can be deadly serious and outrageously funny, often at the same time. An attribute of the play's dazzling dialectics is that characters can embody both negative and positive qualities: Joe's right-wing politics and his strong ethical values; Harper represents frustration and despair but also seems to be a voice for the healing power of the imagination. It is no small feat that Kushner can introduce the ghosts of Prior's ancestors, an angel who announces that Prior will be the next prophet; Ethel Rosenberg's ghost who forgives Cohn; and Belize, a flamboyant nurse, a black drag queen whose humor is used to confront the disease and to undercut Louis' political rhetoric.
Given the importance of this work to the gay community and the meaning of its presence on Broadway, the symbol of American theater, I wish I could like the production as much as I like the play. I would have wanted a more daring production, more European in its intellectuality. The New York producers
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