How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  It is for this reason above all that the Angels that members of the thirty million households that subscribe to HBO have been able to see since December 2003 and the Angels that Broadway audiences first saw late in 1993 seem to be two vastly different works. To be sure, there are other reasons that the new Angels looks and feels different: not least, the difference between the stage, with its self-conscious acknowledgment of itself as illusion, and TV and movies, which if anything try to seduce us into forgetting that what we are seeing isn’t, in fact, real. This is a difference that has particular import for a work whose author has elsewhere written with gusto of his “deep distaste” for screenplays and teleplays (“I love movies, but somebody else should write them”), and insists that Angels should retain its theatricality. The play, Kushner writes in the published edition,

  benefits from a pared-down style of presentation, with minimal scenery and scene shifts done rapidly (no blackouts!)…. The moments of magic—the appearance and disappearance of Mr. Lies and the ghosts, the Book hallucination, and the ending—are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion—which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.

  “Opening out” any work of theater for film is a risky business, but it would be hard to think of a riskier enterprise than opening out a play like Angels, with its over-the-top theatricality, its ghosts and angels, its hallucinatory fantasies (some scenes are set in an imaginary “Antarctica” to which the pill-popping Mormon housewife, Harper, flees in her hallucinations), its frequent use of split scenes to emphasize parallels in its various plotlines, and above all its Jonsonian verbal grandiosity. (An early play of Kushner’s, typically overstuffed with action and ideas and much better than its original audiences or critics gave it credit for being, was a farce set in seventeenth-century England entitled Hydriotaphia or the Death of Doctor Browne, first written in 1985 and hugely unpopular when it premièred in 1997, even after Kushner had become famous.) It’s true that Mike Nichols made a name for himself translating works for the theater into films, starting with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, but Nichols’s smoothly naturalistic style of late seems antithetical to the rough, angular, hypertheatrical spirit of Angels. There’s a glossiness to the HBO Angels that saps it of its original, seething vigor.

  But the real reason why Nichols’s Angels feels so different from the Broadway version has less to do with the difference between stage and screen than with the difference between 1993 and 2003. The AIDS crisis is certainly far from over, but no one can deny that it’s a much different kind of crisis now from the kind it was ten years ago. (A friend remarked to me recently that if Kushner were writing his play today, he’d have to call it Angels in Africa.) The paranoia and outrage of 1993 have largely evaporated, thanks in no small part to the activism that galvanized the gay community as a result of the crisis. The culture has shifted profoundly, too—again, because of the empowerment and newfound visibility that were by-products of the original crisis. When, in 1985, a prime-time drama called An Early Frost, about an American family’s reaction to a gay son’s illness, aired on network television, it was a daring entertainment “event”: the first time the subject had been given major treatment on television. Today, gay characters are not only common on numerous television shows, but there are gay-themed prime-time sitcoms, gay reality shows, and hit series like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy whose premise is that most straight men could, in fact, stand to be a bit more gay.

  Because of all this, you experience Angels in an entirely different way today than you did ten years ago. Not least of the advantages afforded by this shift is that much of what seemed crucial about the play then seems artificial or even dated now—you realize how much the play depends on a cozy kind of politically correct goodwill and the easy prejudices of its audience, and so you realize, too, how often it makes its points not through dramatic logic or motivational coherence, but by means of emotional gimmicks and dramatic fudging. (Some of these wires shouldn’t be showing.) But a re-viewing of Angels now also, and somewhat frustratingly, reveals—partly because of a new cultural setting, and partly because of decisions on Nichols’s and Kushner’s part (emphases, cuts, new material)—the bones of a much grander and more important work than the one that the trumpets of the press corps and Sunday cultural supplements have been heralding.

  Structurally, the TV Angels is similar enough to its predecessor to obviate the need for lengthy comparisons between the two versions. The first part, “Millennium Approaches,” is almost identical to the stage version; you can follow the dialogue almost verbatim from the printed text of the play, as I did. The second part, “Perestroika,” has, on the other hand, undergone more serious revision: the five acts of this play have become three “chapters” in the TV version, mostly by means of welcome cuts and judicious rearrangement of certain scenes. (Part Two, which includes among other things the play’s vision of Heaven and its explication of an elaborate Kushnerian cosmology, always felt bloated, and it still does.) In very few cases lines have been added.

  Kushner, an unabashedly old-fashioned Upper West Side Socialist Jewish intellectual, has more in common with the politically motivated dramatists of the 1930s (Odets comes to mind) than with any of his contemporaries, and Angels is a work that hangs a great deal of ideological freight on what looks, at first, like a particularly overstuffed domestic drama. The action of “Millennium Approaches” is organized around a series of abandonments and escapes, which are meant to make us think about the issues of responsibility and love and freedom; the second part, which is organized around a series of unexpected scenes of forgiveness, shows the consequences of those flights, and is meant to make us think about change, and about redemption.

  “Millennium Approaches” is the tighter, more controlled, and more effective work. When it opens, Louis Ironson, a neurotic, thirty-two-year-old, fast-talking Jewish New Yorker given to grand theoretical pronouncements about history and culture, discovers that his lover, a wisecracking, unabashedly queeny Mayflower descendant named Prior Walter, has been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an early sign of AIDS. (“I’m a lesionnaire,” Prior quips. “The Foreign Lesion…. My troubles are lesion.”) Soon afterward Louis, who doesn’t like it when the messiness of human experience interferes with his pristine theoretical and literary models—he loves quoting Tocqueville, among others—will abandon his lover. This is the first instance of what is intended to be an ongoing critique in the play of the failures of “ideology.” At the beginning of Angels, a phobic character worries about the disintegration, as the new millennium approaches, of the Old World Order: “beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart.” Among these may equally be counted both the American Dream and Soviet Communism, both of which, Kushner seems to be arguing, failed because they imposed on human experience monolithic fantasies incompatible with its complexity and variety. Part One begins with the funeral of Louis’s grandmother, who came to America from Eastern Europe like millions of others in search of a dream, and Part Two begins with a speech by “the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik,” to whom Kushner gives the name Prelapsarianov. (Perhaps because it might now seem stale, the second of these has been cut in the film version, which has the disadvantage—as many of the new cuts do—of destroying certain symmetries in the original play intended to limn Kushner’s larger intellectual preoccupations.) Free-market Capitalism, world Communism: to these “systems”—and one of the surprises of the play is that the angels represent such a system—the drama opposes (approvingly, we feel) what are presented as the churning, complex, ultimately redemptive forces of “life”: suffering, change, emotional evolution, even politics (as distinguished from stultifying ideology).

  At the moment that Louis leaves Prior, another couple falls apart. Joe Pitt is a thirtysomething Mormon lawyer and, more significantly for the first part’s themes of falsehood and moral responsibility, a protégé of
Roy Cohn, with whom Joe turns out to have more in common than the practice of the law and a penchant for power: like Cohn, Joe is secretly gay, and after being made aware of his true nature (following a flirtatious exchange with the sexually avid Louis in the men’s room of the courthouse building in which they both work), he gets up the courage to leave his wife, Harper. Or perhaps it’s Harper who’s left Joe first: sexually frustrated, agoraphobic, fixated on the disappearance of the ozone layer, she spends much of her time in a Valium-induced hallucination in which a celestial travel agent called Mr. Lies offers her blissful escapes to places like Antarctica, which by the end of Part One she happily inhabits in her dreams.

  By the end of the first part of Angels, Joe and Louis end up together—they meet one night in the Ramble in Central Park, a famous gay pickup spot—while their abandoned spouses are left to their increasingly elaborate fantasies. For, like his counterpart Harper, Prior begins to hear and see things, too: there are ever more intimations (visions of flaming books, ward nurses suddenly chattering in biblical tongues, ghostly apparitions) that he will be visited by some kind of celestial messenger—the very angel who crashes through his ceiling at the end of this first part. Prior is, indeed, meant to be a latter-day Joseph Smith; ingeniously, Kushner’s play continually overlaps three outcast groups: gays, Mormons, Jews.

  It’s the figure of Roy Cohn who ties not only the parallel actions but also the themes of “Millennium Approaches” together. Just as Louis represents the cold inhumanity of rigid ideologies that cannot account for the messy realities of human existence, Cohn represents the opposite: the raw, soulless appetite, process for its own sake. Like Prior Walter, Cohn gets a diagnosis of AIDS at the beginning of the play, but instead of lapsing into otherworldly fantasies, which the affectingly weak and passive Prior and Harper do, he’s unable to leave the crude, fervent world of ambition and power behind. As Cohn physically deteriorates before our eyes, we see him nonetheless furiously advancing his worldly interests—trying to pull the necessary strings to get disbarment proceedings against him dismissed, or using his Washington connections to corner a private stash of AZT. Cohn wants to co-opt the idealistic Joe Pitt into helping with these plans, but Joe, whatever his distraught sense of himself as a sinner (“I’m going to hell for doing this,” he cries after merely touching Louis’s face, the night they first have sex), can’t bring himself to participate in an activity he knows to be illegal. “Millennium Approaches” ends by bringing each of its three stories to a conclusion that has the unsentimental inevitability that you associate with classical tragedy: Joe and Louis go home together to enact a consummation that is anything but ecstatic (“I’m a pretty terrible person, Louis.” “See? We already have a lot in common”); the power-mad Cohn, succumbing to his illness at last, collapses on the floor of his town house, where he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (who calls 911 for him, while admiring the push buttons on his phone—to her, a newfangled novelty); and a terrified Prior gets that climactic visit from his heavenly messenger.

  One reason why “Millennium Approaches” is a much more successful play than “Perestroika” is that all it needs to do to be effective dramatically (while being suggestive intellectually) is to convey an unsettling sense of imminence—of a failing world, filled with both individual and ideological deception, weakness, and fatigue, about to crack asunder. (“The twentieth century,” sighs one of Prior’s ghostly ancestors toward the end of the play. “Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old.”) “Perestroika” has the much trickier job of putting something in the place of what “Millennium Approaches” has swept away, and much of the material that Kushner cooks up—from the nature of the angels’ “great work” to the dénouements of the crises he provokes in the first part—feels synthetic, and tends to be sentimental, whereas the first part feels more genuinely like a critique—more brilliantly destructive, more tragic.

  Another way of saying this is that Part Two belongs more to the world of dashboard angels, with their fuzzy feel-good slogans, than to the world of the stark and urgent messenger of Part One, with her tidings of destruction and collapse. At one point late in this second part, Hannah Pitt, the mother of the gay Mormon, who has sold her house in Utah and come to New York in order to straighten out her son’s life, tells Prior—she’s explaining to him why, as a Mormon, she’s particularly inclined not to disbelieve his tales of angelic visions—that “angels are beliefs with wings.” This seems to be not only false to the spirit of the play as a whole but false to what Hannah ought to believe. What the young Joseph Smith saw, all those years ago in upstate New York, was not a glib metaphor. We are told, in a recent Times profile of Kushner published to coincide with the new HBO Angels, that Kushner takes his Judaism very seriously, but stuff like this suggests that he’s not quite as serious about other people’s religions.

  As its title suggests, “Perestroika” is about revisions and changes, and its aim, indeed, is to work out solutions to the blockages and failures so strongly conveyed in “Millennium Approaches.” As flight and abandonment are the motifs of Part One, so forgiveness is the motif of Part Two. In his introduction to the printed version of the second part, Kushner describes how he wants the audience to react:

  Perestroika is essentially a comedy, in that issues are resolved, mostly peaceably, growth takes place and loss is, to a certain degree, countenanced. But it’s not a farce; all this happens only through a terrific amount of struggle, and the stakes are high…. There is also a danger in easy sentiment. Eschew sentiment! Particularly in the final act—metaphorical though it may at times be (or maybe not), the problems the characters face are finally among the hardest problems—how to let go of the past, how to change and lose with grace, how to keep going in the face of overwhelming suffering. It shouldn’t be easy.

  To my mind, there isn’t enough struggle, and sentiment runs rather high. Many of these forgivenesses are artificial: it’s as if, like Louis, Kushner wants to force the actions of his characters to fit a prefabricated template, in order to demonstrate the “theme” of his play. (To wit: that humanity, with all its messiness, always trumps the systems we try to impose on it. “Justice is simple,” a wise, gay, black AIDS-ward nurse, Belize, who’s a former lover of Prior, lectures Louis at one point. “Democracy is simple. Those things are unambiguous. But love is hard.”) And so we see characters go through some rather forced changes. The brittle Hannah Pitt, who in the first part of the work hangs up on her son Joe when, during an anguished phone call, he tells her he’s gay, ends up befriending the now desperately ill Prior, and stays by his side in the hospital; Belize, despite his loathing for Roy Cohn, gives the shrieking, abusive patient some important tips about which treatments to follow; and—even more striking, a famous moment in the play—the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears after Cohn finally dies to say Kaddish for him. Louis, too, is forgiven at the end of the play, once he comes back to Prior after abandoning Joe Pitt. (After a month in bed with his new lover, Louis discovers that Joe is not only Cohn’s protégé, but the author of antigay legal opinions that he, Louis, finds loathsome—“an important bit of legal fag-bashing,” Louis shrieks at a dumbfounded Joe, whom he goes on to call “fascist hypocrite lying filthy….” You can only assume that the two didn’t talk much during their four weeks together.)

  The ability of human beings to evolve and change in time stands in stark contrast to the world of Prior’s angels, whom he (and we) at last get to see in this second part. Why has the angel come to Prior, and what is the “great work” announced at the end of Part One? It’s here that Kushner’s need to tie up all the big themes of his work starts to feel forced; the cosmology that he invents to account for the situations and characters he’s created feels at once imaginatively overblown and intellectually undernourished. It would seem that the angels are in turmoil because God, bored by the sempiternal stasis that was life in Heaven, and “bewitched” by man’s ever-evolving ingenuity, curiosity, and forward-moving aspirat
ions, abandoned Heaven early in the twentieth century, and hasn’t come back. (He left, in fact, on the day of the San Francisco earthquake: perhaps only a gay man of a certain age could equate the demise of the Divine Order itself with the razing of San Francisco.) The angels want to turn back the clock, to reverse the “virus of TIME.”

  So what the heavenly apparition whom Belize rightly dubs a “cosmic reactionary” wants is—as the Angel cries in a climactic utterance—“STASIS!” Kushner, in other words, has created a cosmic model for the conflict between beautiful abstract systems and the unruly, illogical energies of lived life, and there’s no doubt about which side we must be on. “This is the Tome of Immobility, of respite, of cessation,” the Angel intones, pointing to the otherworldly text that has been given to Prior; to which Prior feistily replies, “I still want…my blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive.” This is a perfectly understandable and human sentiment, but as a payoff for the lofty and grandiose machinations that have set up this climactic utterance, it comes off as tinny. You wanted, not unreasonably, something more…Miltonian, perhaps; but all Kushner can fall back on here is high sentiment—and some Borscht Belt wisecracking. As Prior turns his back on Heaven, he rouses himself for his, and the play’s, culminating cry against Heaven: