Roy Cohn is the villain of Angels, a Shakespearean dynamo of words and ideas, one of those grand monsters who are a gift to actors and audiences. He talks nonstop and is always thinking, arguing, conniving; he has a wonderfully foul mouth. He is a human monster of selfishness who unembarrassedly eats off other people’s plates in restaurants. He thinks as badly of himself as he does of others—he doesn’t trust Belize until Belize calls him “a greedy kike.” Kushner gives him good arguments for everything he does, including his denials. He famously tells his doctor why he can’t be called a homosexual:
Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?
He turns the poststructuralist arguments of Michel Foucault and others into an airtight case for lying.
Cohn is offset by a kind of countervillain, a figure who’s more antivillain than antihero: Louis. The man who leaves his sick boyfriend is smart and self-aware, weak and conflicted. Kushner has said that Louis is the character most like himself. We shouldn’t take him literally. The playwright is harsher on Louis than he is on any other character, including Cohn, in much the same way that Mart Crowley is harshest with his alter ego, Michael, in Boys in the Band, and Edmund White merciless with his in A Boy’s Own Story. Gay authors are often more self-critical than straight male authors—as hard on their fictional counterparts as many women writers are. I often wish they showed themselves more mercy, but bitter self-doubt can also be transformed into useful self-knowledge. (I’ve heard several gay men dismiss the whole idea of Louis abandoning Prior; they say they know of nobody doing such a terrible thing during the epidemic. One good friend, however, with a sick partner whom he took care of to the end, said he was glad to see abandonment depicted onstage—the play recognized how very hard it was to stay with a dying loved one.)
After Cohn dies, Belize insists that Louis say kaddish over him before they steal his cache of AZT. The Hebrew prayer is an invocation to God that builds to a plea for peace. (“May He who makes peace in His high places, grant peace for us and all Israel. And say amen.”) It’s one of the strongest scenes in the play. Louis, the very secular Jew, delivers the prayer in Hebrew, prompted by, of all people, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. In the eyes of God, even the worst of us must be—not forgiven, exactly, but noticed, attended to, acknowledged. Ethel Rosenberg closes the prayer with a bit of English, “You sonofabitch,” which Louis instantly repeats.
News of the play began to go out in the world even before Kushner finished writing it. My own first encounter was in May 1990 when the first part was presented in a workshop at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Oskar Eustis had left San Francisco but he took the play with him to his new theater. My boyfriend knew an actress who was appearing in it. When she heard we were coming to town, she said we should come see this new show. “You might find it interesting.” We didn’t know what to expect. When we arrived and saw the title and elaborate subtitle and the fact it was only part one of a two-part play, our hearts sank. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Part One: Millennium Approaches. Out of our friendships with actors we’d seen a lot of bad theater.
By the time we stepped outside at the first intermission, however, we were dumbstruck, intoxicated. We’d never experienced anything like this play. We were even more excited at the end. We couldn’t wait for it to come to New York, nor could we wait for Part Two and find out how the story ended. We had to wait a long time.
Part One had its world premiere in 1991 at the Mark Taper. It opened in January 1992 in London. Word continued to spread that something very exciting was on its way, like the angel itself. Part One didn’t reach New York until May 1993, directed by George Wolfe and with a cast that included Stephen Spinella as Prior, future director Joe Mantello as Louis, Ron Leibman as Roy Cohn, and Kathleen Chalfant (the Nancy Reagan of Just Say No), playing Hannah Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg. It opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street—not off-Broadway like so many other gay plays, but in an actual Broadway house, one named after the critic who’d revised his rave of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? after he learned its author was a homosexual.
Frank Rich was still lead critic for the Times. He saw the play repeatedly, the first part in London, then with Part Two: Perestroika, at the Mark Taper in November 1992, a week after Bill Clinton was elected president. Rich saw the play often enough to understand and appreciate it. When Part One opened on Broadway, he gave it a complete rave, calling it “the most thrilling American play in years.” More praise followed, from all the major newspapers and magazines. “The most ambitious American play of our time,” wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek. “A victory for theater,” wrote John Lahr in the New Yorker, “for the transformative power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty.” Part One won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. (During the Tony broadcast, Kushner’s thank-you speech inevitably ran over the time limit; the orchestra tried to cut him off. “This is one scary orchestra,” he said with a giddy laugh and kept going.) Part Two opened simultaneously in New York and London that November. There was still more praise—Variety called it “a monumental achievement,” and New York Newsday said it was “playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty and compassionate”—yet with occasional notes of uncertainty.
Angels was genuinely exciting theater, but people weren’t always sure what it meant. It is full of characters but even more full of ideas. Kushner juggles ideas the way a symphonic composer juggles musical phrases, adding even more ideas as the play progresses. It’s an idea-driven drama as much as it is one driven by character or plot. No wonder he had trouble finishing Part Two. At one point he considered putting all his characters on top of the Empire State Building and setting off a nuclear bomb.
Angels is so full of ideas that not only do different readers have different readings, but the same reader can have different readings at different times. Here is how I understand the play—this year, anyway:
There are two significant thematic strands. First, there is the more earthbound theme built around a simple moral question: what does an individual owe to others?
The question affects not just one plotline but all: What does Louis owe Prior? What does Joe owe his wife, Harper? What does Joe owe the Mormon church? And so on. It’s a question that transcends positions of left and right, gay and straight, believer and agnostic. We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It’s why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.) But the freedom that enables a man to be gay can also enable him to abandon his sick lover. It can help a Mormon leave his church and at the same time put him on the same political page as Roy Cohn. Even the angel goes, “I I I I!” Roy Cohn is the gold standard of self-empowerment here, and it’s not a pretty ideal. Kushner swings back and forth between the extremes of self and selflessness; he gives no final, simple answer—there is no final answer. He offers instead what he elsewhere calls “a dialectically shaped truth.” We must all spend our lives moving back and forth between these two absolutes.
The second theme is the more famous one, the theme of prophecy. It is bigger, stranger, more original and more elusive. It drives the first play, Millennium Approaches, like an engine. At the end Prior and the audience are promised a revelation that will explain everything.
Angel: Greetings, Prophet;
The Great Work begins:
The Messenger has arrived.
(Blackout.)
It’s one of the great curtain speeches of all time.
The second play, Perestroika (Russian for “rebuilding”), opens with a long speech from A
leksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the world’s oldest living Bolshevik, who complains that people no longer have any “Theeeery” (in Kathleen Chalfant’s unforgettable mad Russian accent) and they are like a snake with no skin without “the next Beautiful Theeeery.” The audience assumes the angel will give Prior a new theory.
But in the next act, after much angel talk (“Open me Prophet. I I I I am/The Book”) and an ecstatic celestial orgasm, the angel offers only a shockingly blunt message: “STOP MOVING!” Change is bad, stasis is good. Motion is the enemy—activities like immigration only get us in trouble. The world must remain the same. When Prior describes his vision to Belize, his friend immediately understands that it’s a fantasy built around Louis, the man who got away. Prior only wants life to go back to what it was. We see where the message comes from and patiently wait to see where it will take us.
Three acts later, Prior climbs up to Heaven. He finds no God there—God has fled—only little gods, ineffectual angels who don’t know how to operate the world. Not even their radio works. The angels offer Prior the gift of eternal sameness. But Prior recognizes that without change there is only paralysis, and paralysis is death. Change is life. He tells them:
I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.
I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much worse, but… I want more life.
He wakes up from his dream, like Dorothy Gale in Kansas surrounded by friends. “I had the most remarkable dream. And you were there, and you… And you… And some of it was terrible, and some of it was wonderful, but all the same I kept saying I want to go home.”
The first time I saw Part Two, the Wizard of Oz echoes produced laughter of relief from the audience. Heaven had been so confusing, and people were pleased to be on familiar ground again, even if they didn’t know what it meant.
So what does this thematic plotline mean? I think it’s primarily a shaggy dog story or, more appropriately, a shaggy God story. There is no “beautiful theory,” which might be for the best since we know from the Soviet Union where beautiful theories can lead. It’s a deliberate letdown, a carefully crafted anticlimax.
The answer that there is no answer disappoints many people. Yet it works for me. It provides a home chord where this polyphonic drama of characters, ideas, and history can stop—for now, anyway. And it connects up with the “dialectically shaped truth” I mentioned earlier. There are no final, simple answers. But a work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.
Angels in America was phenomenally successful, not only winning prizes and audiences in New York but touring the entire country. Later it was staged by colleges and universities, with religious conservatives protesting school productions in North Carolina and elsewhere. It was performed in translation as well, with major productions in Germany, Spain, Japan, and even Poland. From the start there was talk of turning this highly cinematic play into a movie. After several near misses, including a deal with Robert Altman, it finally became a two-part TV movie on HBO in 2003, directed by Mike Nichols with a cast that included Al Pacino as Roy Cohn and Meryl Streep in the Kathleen Chalfant parts.
One would like to think the critical success of Angels showed that the literary world had finally outgrown its old bigotry. But a few hobgoblins survived. Roger Shattuck, a professor in French literature, seemed to hate homosexuality so much he couldn’t see what was actually onstage. He believed “the play advocates the extinction of moral restraints” and that the angel at the end of Part One was there to bless everyone for behaving so badly. He never saw Part Two. Lee Siegel, reviewing the TV movie in the New Republic, said Angels was “a second-rate play written by a second-rate playwright who happens to be gay, and because he has written a play about being gay, and about AIDS, no one—and I mean no one—is going to call Angels in America the overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess that it is.” He must not have read Shattuck or the play’s gay critics. The only real specific Siegel offers on why the play is bad is that the characters always talk about their feelings, analyzing and describing them like a director working with actors, rather than simply expressing them—but that’s how people talk in modern life.
A few gay writers criticized the play, but with their own curious agendas. Leo Bersani, yet another professor of French literature, author of the provocative essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” claimed, “The enormous success of this muddled and pretentious play is a sign… of how ready and anxious America is to see and hear about gays—provided we reassure America how familiar, how morally sincere, and particularly in the case of Kushner’s work, how innocuously full of significance we can be.” It’s odd hearing anyone complain about the moral sincerity of gay people, but odder still when it’s a tenured professor in his sixties, hardly a model of anarchic nihilism. But I believe he’s right about one of the reasons for the success of Angels: it showed that gay people were morally serious, which the general population—at least those who went to the theater—was finally ready to hear.
The strangest enemy of the play was Andrew Sullivan, the young, openly gay, British-born editor of the New Republic. Sullivan had never shown much interest in theater but he became fixated with Angels. “Gay life—and gay death—surely awaits something grander and subtler than this.” His criticisms were incoherent. First he complained the play was too funny, that it “never ascended… above a West Village version of Neil Simon.” Then he complained that it was nothing but “political agitprop,” appealing only to “the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer.” I don’t know which is more comical, the idea of a Communist Neil Simon play or the picture of the Pulitzer Prize committee as a hotbed of Marxists.
Kushner responded in passing to Sullivan’s attack on Angels when he wrote an essay on gay liberation for the Nation on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, “A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation, Honey!)” This smart, well-considered, often funny, ultimately serious piece was written partly in response to an article by Sullivan published a year earlier, “The Politics of Homosexuality.” Kushner adds a playful nelliness to his repertoire of voices. He admits, “I used to have a crush on Andrew, neo-con or neo-liberal (or whatever the hell they’re called these days) though he be. I would never have married him, but he’s cute! Then he called me a ‘West Village Neil Simon,’ in print, and I retired the crush. This by way of background for what follows, to prove that I am, despite my wounded affections, capable of the ‘restraint and reason’ he calls for at the opening of his article.” Kushner proceeds to examine the article seriously and respectfully. Sullivan argued that gay activists were wrong to connect gay issues with issues of race, class, and gender; gay issues should be kept separate in order to gain broader support. Kushner disagrees, believing a narrower focus won’t win additional voters and, more important, that minority groups are all in the same boat. “Our suffering teaches us solidarity; or it should.” Kushner was totally dismissive of a recent essay by gay conservative Bruce Bawer, author of A Place at the Table (“Bruce doesn’t like it when gay men get dishy and bitchy and talk sissy about boys…. He’s also, and I mean this politely, a little slow. It took him five years to figure out that maybe a gay man shouldn’t be writing movie reviews for the viciously homophobic American Spectator”). But he addressed Sullivan as an equal, respecting his motives and some of his points, even as he argued that gay rights must be part of a bigger picture. It’s a very strong—and persuasive—piece of prose.
Sullivan was able to respond soon afterward, face-to-face, when he and Kushner met on TV on Charlie Rose.
The old days when novelists and playwrights were occasional guests on late-night talk shows were long gone. Gore Vidal and Truman Capote had been replaced first by the likes of Burt Reynolds and Charo, then by lesser celebrities. PBS took up some of the slack, but they rarely
featured gay or lesbian figures. Bill Moyers, a good liberal who could talk to philosophers and physicists, never interviewed anyone about gay issues on any of his major TV series. Charlie Rose, however, who had five hours to fill every week, now and then included a gay man or woman. He first invited Kushner on his show after Angels broke the record for Tony nominations for a nonmusical play. A year later he invited Kushner back when, on the night of June 24, 1994, in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall, Rose devoted his entire hour to gay talking heads.
The show began with historian Martin Duberman, activist Jim Fouratt, and publisher Barbara Smith talking about the riots. They were followed by Kushner, Village Voice journalist Donna Minkowitz, and the two men whom Kushner had just criticized in the Nation: Sullivan and Bawer. It was one of those controversial combinations that sounds lively on paper but is usually only messy in fact.
Rose began the segment by admitting that heated words had already been exchanged before the cameras were turned on. What followed must’ve made most viewers feel they had walked in on the middle of a family quarrel. There was much talk of single-issue gay rights versus broad-issue human rights, politics versus culture, and the left versus the right. Rose never mentioned Kushner’s recent Nation piece, but much of what Sullivan said was in response to it. Bawer, in a coat and tie that brought out his unfortunate resemblance to young Roy Cohn, complained steadily about “a certain left politics,” “the Left-leaning agenda,” and “a handful of leftists.” Sullivan maintained a boyish grin as he interrupted again and again, refusing to let anyone else finish. Kushner often winced in pain over what was said—he had no room to be playful or funny. Minkowitz held her own in the debate, making good points about the myth of gay wealth and the differences between lesbian identity and gay male identity. More than once, all four spoke simultaneously, sounding like a pack of birds. Rose was overwhelmed. Famous for interrupting guests, he spent much of the segment with his chin in his hand, just listening. He was in calmer waters in the last segment, a one-on-one conversation with actor Ian McKellen, who was in town to perform his one-man show, A Knight Out, and to march in the international Stonewall 25 parade.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 32