Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America explores the tension between despair and transformation in a world collapsing under the weight of illness, politics, and fear. Taken place at the height of conservative revolution in America\u2019s politics and culture under Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidency, the irony is that, conservatism is to resist changes, and preserved traditional ideas and values, but Angels in America also taught us that changes is inevitable. Through a variety of characters who aren\u2019t entirely \u201cgood\u201d or entirely \u201cbad\u201d: a drug-addict wife, a gay man dying of AIDS, a closeted Mormon lawyer, etc., who struggle to find meaning amid chaos. The \u201cso what?\u201d of Kushner\u2019s vision is that the \u201chuman thing\u201d is our resilience, not about overcoming suffering, but about learning to live through it and finding meaning within that. For however painful, imperfect, or incomplete someone is, change is both inevitable and necessary for survival. What matters is really the willingness to confront loss and uncertainty rather than retreat from them.
What\u2019s striking about Angels in America is that even characters who seem \u201cliberal,\u201d people we tend to think aren\u2019t afraid of changes, like Louis and Prior, are also deeply afraid of change. Prior, when facing death, admits that \u201ceven drag is a drag now,\u201d expressing exhaustion and fear in the face of his own change. And Louis, overwhelmed by his partner\u2019s illness, abandons him rather than confront mortality and change directly. On the other hand, characters who initially resist change, like Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon lawyer, eventually accept truths about himself that he can no longer suppress. And Harper, too, evolves from a frightened, drug-dependent woman into someone who ultimately embraces motion and possibility, saying \u201cThe world only spins forward.\u201d
Because change is inevitable, Kushner shows it as one of humanity\u2019s greatest powers of survival. In the motif of migration, we see changes as the unstoppable force of human movement which brought Prior’s family to America as well as Belize’s slave ancestors and Louis’s immigrant ones, and even carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah. All embody an inerasable drive toward progress and transformation. Change, Kushner suggests, is not only inevitable but the essence of human history.
One dialouge that resonates with me the most that captures this idea, was when Harper talks to her Mormon Mother:
\u201cHarper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That’s how people change.\u201d
Change is painful. Change is violent and excruciating, yet necessary. Through pain, through chaos, through persistence, the fragile hope of Angels in America is that the world, and the people within it, must keep moving forward.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America explores the tension between despair and transformation in a world collapsing under the weight of illness, politics, and fear. Taken place at the height of conservative revolution in America\u2019s politics and culture under Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidency, the irony is that, conservatism is to resist changes, and preserved traditional ideas and … Continue reading Stasis vs. Change: Why the World Only Spins Forward<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5697,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5697"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1570"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}