Category: Fall 2022

Struggle is a common factor in The Angels in America, whether it comes in the form of being a minority, power struggles or even a disease crisis. Throughout this play, there are funerals, broken relationships, identity struggles and dealing with certain death. The play covers the personal lives of multiple characters that have vastly different views and ways of life but is all connected through different aspects of every person’s life and journey as they progress.

 

The important factor of this play is the time it’s based in, the 80s was difficult for many minorities that differed from the “social norm” or religion. The 80s was a time when unless you were straight, white, and male you didn’t have power or respect in the workplace, so when someone from the queer community had to live in that society how can they feel accepted. The AIDs epidemic was a thing of mass panic, a disease that at the time felt like it could end the world; But who did the media blame it on, the already hated gay community. AIDs was portrayed as a disease that only was spread in the gay community and not what it really was and could be spread by anyone. Joe is a character that struggles with religion and his place in the world, as a devoted Christian he later finds out that he himself is homosexual and he consistently struggles with what side he must take. In act 2 scene 8 Joe calls his mother Hannah to tell her he is gay and asks if his father loves him and rather than respond she just says, “Don’t be ridiculous”. It’s easy to see where his families priorities are and that the religious life doesn’t accept the idea of homosexuality and if Joe himself is homophobic he would lose his family.

Although Angels in America by Tony Kushner hones in on the tragedy of the AIDS crisis, the play’s absurdism makes the text more accessible while simultaneously creating a binary between fantasy and tragedy.  

One of the reoccurring symbols in the play, the angel, invites camp discussions into the text. For example, when the angel first visits Prior as The Voice, it says, “Soon I will return, I will reveal myself to you; I am glorious, glorious; my heart, my countenance and my message. You must prepare” (Kushner 65). At first, the angel’s voice seems like it will present an outstanding spiritual message that will act as a guiding light for Prior. However, the Angel presents itself in a camp way, speaking elaborately in metaphors, and in Part II addressing Prior as a Prophet, saying wild phrases like, “Am the Bird of America, the Bald Eagle” that don’t make much sense to the reader (Kushner 160). With pieces like this, the angel is reduced to its camp form, as a being inside Prior’s mind that makes the play more accessible and pulls away from the tragedy of AIDS. 

The angel’s camp and sometimes outlandish actions bring balance to the play. Without humor from the angel, Prior’s narrative could be reduced to “another story about the tragedy of AIDS”, however the play refuses to simplify its characters, and the angel aids in that process. 

Even just the word “angel” brings a duality to the play. For example, when Prior tells Louis he has AIDS, he says “K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine dark kiss of the angel of death” (Kushner 21). Prior’s description of this angel contradicts itself in its beautiful “kiss”, but ultimate death sentence.  

Additionally, although an angel is a holy, godly figure, it visits Prior, a gay man with AIDS. This detail demonstrates that the lines of good and evil aren’t clean cut, which is vital to the story of the AIDS crisis. For years, society viewed people with AIDS as subhuman, as lesser-than, even seeming dangerous to touch, in addition to the homophobia of the time. 

Overall, the angel is necessary in order for the play to interest watchers/readers as well as speak truthfully on the impact of the AIDS crisis. 

The idealistic nature of religion is the barrier that forces people away from their personal beliefs, thus, consequently, blocking them away from their pursuit of happiness instead of helping them to achieve it. This, of course, does not exactly apply to everybody who practices religion but rather points out the idealistic nature of religion which abides practitioners to follow a certain set of rules while forfeiting aspects that the religions deem to be taboos. In this context of Angels of America, the greatest example we could potentially investigate is the character Joe – a Christian who sets the example for what it’s like to be a “good man”. When others look at Joe, they see a true Christian who had been working diligently and doing all the “right” things he possibly could to where he is now. However, it is obvious that in the play, Joe is one of the unhappiest characters in the story due to his obedience to the idealistic nature of Christianity, which caused him to be missing a huge part of his life. To be specific, his struggle is shown in this line: “Does it make any difference?…., with everything I have, to kill it.” (Kushner, 40-41). “It” here implies Joe’s past and things that he aspired to, but according to the Christian doctrine, Joe’s “it” is wrong, and Kushner’s word use heavily suggests that Joe was and still is battling the wrongs in him. At this point it comes to the question for us: is homosexuality wrong? The answer, for people with common sense, is no; however, in the context of Joe, homosexuality is wrong even when it is hinted that he himself is also a homosexual, and this is only wrong due solely to the fact that the idealistic nature of religion dictated so.

Angels in America is a play that demonstrates the struggle in asking for help when one’s voice is hardly recognized. It’s fitting for a play centered around struggle to begin with a funeral, but the funeral differs from what follows in the rest of the play: it’s final. There’s a sense of completeness to the struggle of Sarah Ironson. Even though her journey lives on in her descendants, they “can never make the crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist,” according to Rabbi Chemelwitz. What she has lived and died for is, largely, secure.

The same can not be said for the main characters in this play. The AIDS crisis in the ’80s presented an open-ended threat to the gay community pushed on by forces of negligence and ignorance. When these characters experience loss over the course of the play–whether a life or a relationship–there’s almost always a notion of social forces at play. Looking at Joe, he struggles deeply with the conflict between his sexuality and the influences of people most important in his life. When he drunkenly confesses his sexuality to his mother, she immediately rejects him and his words as “ridiculous,” asking him to return to his wife. When Joe later confesses the same to Roy, seeking an acceptance beyond a paternal blessing–an acceptance of his authentic self–Roy responds angrily and also orders Joe to reunite with his wife.

Neither Joe’s mother nor the closest person he had to a father were willing to recognize him for who he was. Similarly, the AIDS crisis was able to occur because people willingly failed to recognize a growing problem: a problem that only became recognizable once it began affecting straight men and women. Perhaps this is exactly what Roy recognized when he said “Homosexuals are men… who have zero clout.”

Belize’s decision to help Roy Cohn in the hospital with the double blind mirrors the community unification and division occurring in the real world during the AIDS crisis. During their encounter in Roy’s hospital room, Belize and Roy trade barbs back and forth, from race to competence. However, despite his stated hate for the man, Belize chooses to assist Roy to the best of his capabilities. Of course, his position as Roy’s nurse gives Belize power over Roy. Instead of leaving Roy to die like a number of his friends have, Belize advises Roy to “watch out for the double blind” and to avoid radiation therapy (155). When Roy questions Belize’s decision to help him, Belize tells him that it is “solidarity”, from “one faggot to another” (155).  During the AIDS crisis, the queer community pulled together to support each other when the powers at be left them behind. Lesbian women reached out to gay men, providing them with services like haircuts when no one would touch them for fear of transmission. In telling Roy about which treatments to avoid and what to watch for, Belize plays a similar role by reaching out and providing support. Yet, Belize and Roy also represent the larger divisions in the community as a whole, especially considering access to AZT and other life-saving treatments. As a rich white man in a position of power, Roy is able to demand access to AZT in large quantities and actually receive it, while Belize and his friends are left to fend for themselves. Belize and Roy are foils of each other, representing the communities affected by AIDS and the opposing actions taken by society in support or against them.

In the play “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner, the characters of Louis Ironson and Joe Pitt are parallels to each other. These two characters share a common trait of at their cores being guilty cowards. This parallel between the two of them is shown in Act I Scene 4 in the way they both react poorly to their respective partners, Harper and Prior when they come to them with worries and bad news. In this scene, Prior tells Louis about his AIDS diagnosis, and rather than being comforting Louis keeps telling Prior to “stop” (Kushner 21) and repeatedly saying “fuck you” (Kushner 21) when Prior continues. The moment between Joe and Harper in the next scene mirrors this interaction. Joe is trying to convince Harper they should move to Washington DC for his job, and when Harper expresses her reservations about moving he is continually dismissive of her worries, asking her “how many pills” (Kushner 24) she took that day rather than try to understand and listen to her anxieties. The parallel between Joe and Louis becomes even more obvious in Act I Scene 8, a “split scene: Prior and Louis in their bed. Louis reading, Prior cuddled next to him. Harper in Brooklyn, alone. Joe enters.” (Kushner 36). The scene starts with Harper continuously asking Joe, “where were you?” and alluding to asking him about his sexuality and he responds by once again asking “how many pills?” (Kushner 36), doing everything in his power to change the subject and avoid Harper’s questions. The interaction ends with Joe suggesting to Harper that they “Ask God for help. Ask him together” (Kushner 40) rather than honestly answer her questions. On the other side of the split scene, Prior tries to tell Louis about his worsening condition but Louis just gets upset by the information prompting Prior to say how he always “winds up comforting” (Kushner 39) Louis whenever he tries to tell him about his symptoms. As the exchange continues, Louis eventually asks Prior if he “walked out on this? Would you hate (him) forever?” (Kushner 40) to which Prior responds, “yes” (Kushner 40). These mirroring interactions show Louis and Joe’s shared reluctance to be honest with and genuinely comfort their partners. Overall it is very clear that Kushner is trying to set up these two characters as parallels to each other in the very first few scenes. 

In Angels in America, Harper’s addiction to Valium in order to experience her hallucinations is representative of her desire to escape the truth; however, imagination is finite, and no matter how hard she tries, the truth almost always seems to reveal itself.

In the interaction between Harper and Prior within Harper’s hallucination and Prior’s dream within Act 1 Scene 7, Harper comes to the depressing realization that even the construction of her hallucinations has limitations and that they’re “really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth” (Kushner, 33). This underscores the way in which Harper’s hallucinations may appear to be boundless, when in reality, her imagination can only extend so far. Harper describes this as a “depressing hallucination” (Kushner, 33) because that means that even her Valium won’t allow her to run from the truth and the reality that her marriage will never be what she wants it to be, because it was constructed around the repression of Joe’s true identity as a gay man.

It’s ironic that Harper enters the cyclical nature of her hallucinations as a means to escape from the truth, when it’s one of her hallucinations that forces her to confront her reality and the truth that her “husband’s a homo” (Kushner, 33), as unveiled by Prior. Although this truth was characterized within the play as the “[t]hreshold of revelation” (Kushner, 34), in some ways it seems as if Harper was always aware of Joe’s homosexuality, which contributed to her continual usage of popping Valium pills, because that meant that she did not have to confront this reality.

Harper has such a strong desire to escape the truth that Joe is gay, because she confesses that she can “make up anything but I can’t dream that away” (Kushner, 52), where “that” is referring to the love that she has for Joe. In confronting the truth, Harper would have to come to terms with the fact that the love that she has for Joe is not reciprocated, where her hallucinations don’t even have the power to transform or erase the existence of this love that she has for him.

The complexity of personality, morals, and relationships has been frequently highlighted throughout the play thus far. It has brought unlikely pairs together through friendship, romantic relationships, or simple tolerance, displayed contradictions between religious beliefs and the realities of life, and has skewed the perceptions of common labels. I believe that one of Angels in America‘s main goals is to portray the idea of similarities among differences and differences among similarities in order to combat the feeling of “otherness” that was so strong during this time period and even in today’s current social and political climate. 

One way Kushner achieves this is through the romantic pairing of Joe and Louis. In the last scene of act 3 of Perestroika during a conversation between the two where Louis brings up that Joe is conservative, again, Joe says “You’re obsessed, you know that? If people like you didn’t have president Reagan to demonize, where would you be?

Louis: If he didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?[…]

Joe: I’m not your enemy . Louis.

Louis: I never said you were my-

Joe: Fundamentally, we want the same thing. (203-204)”

In this,  the emphasis on difference, between political stances, and similarity, in their attraction to one another and recently leaving a long term relationship (yet still for different reasons), is clearly stated. I think this scene, and relationship, is important in showing us how crucial it is to look further than surface level differences in order to truly know people and form connections. On the outside, Joe: a “straight”, Mormon, conservative and Louis: an openly gay, Jewish, democrat would not seem to be likely friends, let alone each other’s romantic interests. However, though these issues still do come up at times, they were able to find and bond over their similarities in a more meaningful way.

This theme was so important during the AIDS/HIV epidemic because too many years were wasted and lives were lost because of this idea of “otherness”. With the common perception that the disease was only affecting queer people, or “those people”, there was unfortunately far too little action done to help stop the spread and combat the symptoms. There was so much emphasis put on the differences that the world seemed to forget that these were their friends, family, neighbors, doctors, teachers, servers, and so on. This relates to how Covid, upcoming elections, and other social issues have divided people in the present. However, through this play, we see the potential of relationships among what would seem to be polar opposites, which I believe is a key takeaway that has been repeated many times so far.

In the play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, there are many themes on display. One of these themes is that the past is not dead. One tool that the play uses to implement this is the idea of ghosts. One example of this was the portrayal of Ethel Rosenberg, who was put to death after a trial that was prosecuted by Roy Cohn, who comes back to haunt him when he is close to death. In an almost contradictory manor however, She doesn’t seem overtly hostile to Cohn, as she even calls an ambulance on his behalf to take him to the hospital (Kushner, 117-116), as it can be argues that Cohn is directly responsible for her death. Another instance of ghosts in the play are the “Prior Priors”. During parts of the play, Prior is visited by two versions of himself who have had their own lives before him. They visit Prior multiple times in the play, not always to interact with Prior, but in ways to help guide him, especially when the Angel appears (Kushner, 118) when they arrive before the Angel and talk with Prior. This shows us yet another instance of ghosts guiding a character along in the narrative. These examples of ghosts in the play highlight that while the past is the past, it is most certainly not dead, as it continues to live on in the form of memories and impacts. This is a particularly telling theme in the context of the AIDS epidemic, where there are many many ghosts, whose lives are not erased by their deaths, but live on in the lives of the people who knew them.