Angels on Broadway
Kramer, Yale
F rom the love that dare not speak its name to the love that can't shut up—in barely twenty-five years. Gays march on Washington. Gays want to come out in the military. Gays parley with the...
...By being "bad," or, really, naughty (gay men don't want to do really bad things like murder or rape or rob) they can feel, in their heart of hearts, powerful, even a little triumphant over their oppressors—straight America...
...There are so many laws...
...Prior is at a fantastic makeup table, having a dream, applying the face...
...The humor is mocking and self-mocking, some of it clever...
...And bless us all...
...Fidelity became an issue now not only for the sake of safe sex, but to deal with survivor guilt...
...Where La Cage aux folles had no message and was about human feeling, Angels in America has more messages than Western Union and only bogus feelings that remain unshared by the straight audience...
...And the coming-out-of-thecloset dramas like March of the Falsettos all face similar issues of betrayal: Should I leave my wife and children, whom I love, and finally realize my true self, or do my duty to them and go on living a lie...
...Both the responsibility for and the truth value of the revelation can remain in doubt...
...The post-Freudian homosexual ideal is to not go against your nature—to be true to your instincts...
...Louis struggles against but loses out to his fear of AIDS and leaves Prior to die alone...
...Every so-called AIDS play—Robert Chesley's Jerker, William Hoffman's As Is, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart—focuses on the issues of loyalty and fear of abandonment: Will you still love me and stay with me when I'm diseased, ugly, and dying...
...The ones that make you feel dead inside if you're a character in Angels in America...
...And now forget everything else...
...The people that make it run have up and abandoned it...
...A most brilliant play," proclaimed Sir Ian McKellen to the Tony Awards audience last spring...
...hat becomes clear from these plays is the degree of disingenuousness in press reports of testimony at congressional hearings to the effect that what is involved in the issue of gays in the military is sexual orientation and only sexual orientation...
...It was a victory for Kushner, for theatre, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty...
...Frank Rich, guru of cultural New York, pronounced on the occasion of its opening in Los Angeles that Tony Kushner's two-part, seven-hour Angels in America had "created an original theatrical world" that "once entered 1)51 an open-minded viewer of any sexual or political persuasion, simply cannot be escaped...
...What Kushner/Louis cannot accept about the world is the reality of human nature, and therefore they must deny its existence...
...Commitment...
...You go from bar to bar looking for the right dimensions, the right color, the right predilections...
...Gays want this...
...Did gay love, sexual partnership (in men) imply permanence...
...Though there is much hand-wringing, shouting, and weeping among the players, most of this is strangely unmoving...
...Subplot number two, which by now everyone in America knows, consists of the infamous Roy Cohn trying to persuade the decent and honest Joe Pitt, for whom he has a soft spot, to leave his wife and go to Washington to work as a "Roy Boy" in Ed Meese's Department of Justice...
...There is no one with whom we can empathize as we could with Albin, the drag queen in the film of La Cage aux folles, in his poignant moments of self-revelation...
...Free...
...Kushner uses these abstract allusions skillfully to conceal the more shocking meaning of freedom...
...These men know that sex can have many meanings, can be used for self-punishment, revenge, hostility, humiliation, love, degradation, and for other psychological purposes as well...
...It would be...
...This is not immediately apparent because of Kushner's clever use of ambivalence to make his allegorical symbols appear more realistic and human than they really are...
...It is probably rooted in our biology, having served adaptational needs throughout the evolutionary process...
...Children of the new morning, criminal minds...
...JOE: It just flashed through my mind: the whole Hall of Justice, it's empty, it's deserted, it's gone out of business...
...The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, one of the gay plays running off-Broadway, has a terrifying scene called "12 Inches, Single" that depicts what it means to be free "to do whatever...
...It was as though life and art had become indistinguishable...
...This is because the play is not about real people and the motives that drive the characters are not human motives, but the invented motives of an allegorist...
...Patrick's Day parade...
...and Prior, a WASP...
...A ctually, if you avoid the media hyperbole and keep a clear head about it, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes turns out to be more interesting and more flawed than the official gatekeepers of our culture can acknowledge at the moment...
...You get power by cheating and conniving and manipulating—you get things on people or you fix their parking tickets and then they owe you something and that's clout...
...In Part Two, Prior, who was on his deathbed at the end of Part One, has a miraculous remission for dramatic rather than medical reasons so that at the end of the play he can assume the role of a Lazarus/Christ-like prophet, step up to the footlights and speak directly to the audience...
...These facts of human nature may be unfortunate but they are incontrovertible and inescapable, and the only solutions that mankind has found to deal with people we don't like or who make us uncomfortable are the essential tricks of civilization: hypocrisy and self-restraint...
...The people onstage are symbols, or stereotypes—The Cold Strict Mother...
...Larry cynically asserts, "The ones who swear their undying fidelity are lying...
...groups have been identified as because of their Roman persecutors, workers because of the grinding conditions imposed on them by the owners of the means of production, Jews because of the anti-Semitism of Christians, blacks because of the racism of whites, youth because of the oppressive values of adults...
...I won't accept anything less than that...
...The trouble is that between all the razzle-dazzle, the ambivalence, and the pseudo-madness it is hard to know what the characters, the playwright, and we ourselves believe by the end of the evening...
...Kushner's Cohn is driven by the same basic sense of impotence that drives Louis and Prior and Joe and Harper—the feeling that if he had to go up against real men in legitimate combat he would have no hope of winning, that it is only through illegitimate means that he can win...
...What's going on...
...This long curtain speech, in which Prior talks about Community, for all its verbosity sounds suspiciously like Forgive us our trespasses and love us for them and we will forgive your trespasses even if you're a Republican as long as you are gay...
...Subplot number three is about two gay men in New York: Louis, a Jew...
...What is important is the uncertainty and equivocation created by the pseudo-madness and ambivalence in the play...
...Much of it is gay-oriented...
...Part I ends on an indeterminate note: Harper is left in an hallucinatory Antarctica hoping for an Eskimo to come by...
...There are probably many not an unlimited number, but at least several...
...n "Perestroika," Part Two of the play, which was produced in Los Angeles last year but will not appear in New York until next fall, Kushner raises the yearning for innocence and rebirth to a more mystical level...
...Hank now wants the rules of marriage to prevail, "till death do us part," but Larry, with a long history of sexual promiscuity, asserts his right to sexual freedom...
...To do whatever...
...This is what Kushner—who will not settle for anything less than unqualified love and forgiveness not only from his parents but from us—cannot accept...
...There are three loosely connected subplots...
...RICH: Not "promiscuous," Saul, nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthoritarianSAUL: Free, wild, rampant RICH: Hot, sweaty, steamy, smellySAUL: Juicy, funky, hanky RICH: Sex...
...On the surface, the play seems to be about the conflict between love and loyalty on the one hand and self-gratification on the other, between selflessness and doing your own thing...
...More Life...
...The razzledazzle is created by a combination of...
...We'll skip the rapid, overlapping speech, and the excessive length that prolongs the evening well past 11:30 (by which time our critical faculties have long since gone to bed...
...He stands for ruthlessness, lawlessness, raw power, and unbridled self...
...A 'though the play is not profound, it is understandable that audiences find it dazzling...
...The problem is not Kushner's homosexuality but his provinciality: what is arguably the most perfectly constructed play in the English language—The Importance of Being Earnest—was written by a gay man, but it wasn't about gays, it was about all of us...
...Throughout the play images of alienation abound in the form of craziness, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia...
...Cohn is certainly the most compelling character in the play...
...What Kushner cannot acknowledge—because his Broadway audience includes straights as well—other gay coterie plays can acknowledge because they don't worry about straight sensibilities...
...The more shocking, the greater the dividend of personal power...
...I personally would dissolve if anyone ever looked me in the eye and said `Feh.'" This gets a very big laugh because of the intonation and exaggeration of the performance...
...And despite his best intentions Kushner never really comes to grips with the dilemmas he invents...
...JOE: Well it is unethical, I can't...
...Hank has left his wife and children for a relationship with Larry...
...At the funeral of Louis's grandmother that begins the play, Prior tells Louis that he has AIDS...
...They have been living together for four years and apparently love each other...
...results] in some unsatisfying little decision...
...It is bewildering...
...techniques serving no other function than to inspire awe and alienation...
...What he means when he says "give love" in this case is have sex...
...It also makes it possible for the author to both accept and reject responsibility for some important truth that each of the characters utters...
...Or Harper has appeared in Prior's dream...
...But his grief and guilt are not too great to prevent him from finding and seducing honest and decent Joe Pitt...
...The sign above him read: HAPPY EASTER BE BAD BUT BE SAFE In front of the theater itself a sign announced: THURSDAY NIGHT IS SINGLES NIGHT YES I'M AVAILABLE MAYBE, LET'S TALK SORRY, I'M TAKEN ASK FOR YOUR "SIGNAL TAG" AT THE TICKET BOOTH Next to each choice on the sign was a colored circular adhesive "signal tag"—green for "Yes," yellow for "Maybe," red for "Sorry...
...All of the protagonists are deeply flawed and yet embody some redeeming quality that makes it possible for the audience to identify with them...
...He engages in much weeping and breast-beating over his faithlessness, but these have no apparent effect on his behavior...
...Such a simple definition may be useful propaganda in the media or in congressional testimony but hardly even touches the more complex aspects of male homosexuality and its relationship to social and political forces...
...This is what makes it possible for civilized men and women who do not have intimate relationships with each other to interact without killing one another...
...Transgression is one of the most persistent themes in Angels...
...He ends his paean to the play in the mellifluous and reverential tones of an Addison DeWitt—that deliciously hypocritical maker-and-shaker of the theatrical world in All About Eve: Kushner and the excellent Taper ensemble had made a little piece of American theatre history on that cloudless California night...
...n fact, the moral dilemmas of Louis and Joe are clichés in the world of gay drama...
...What does being naughty mean...
...For Kushner, the choice is between the freedom to be sexually unbridled or to submit to the Oppressors: the Mormon Saints and Republican Fathers and their suffocating conventional values...
...Hypocrisy, tact, tolerance on the one hand and self-restraint, good manners, consideration, on the other, are within the compass of human nature, because they consist of behavior, of actions, and actions can be learned—whereas matters of the heart, feelings, cannot...
...The gay lifestyle is as important to some gay men, like Kushner, as sexual orientation is, or perhaps more important...
...Having sex is the thing we have in common with all mammalian species...
...Though Prior and Harper have never met and don't even know of each other's existence, we perceive that they are both rejected lovers, victims of spiritual betrayal, she by her husband, he by his boyfriend...
...He rejects as unacceptable the view that it is possible for gays and straights to live together peacefully if gays exercise more self-restraint and straights exercise more tolerance...
...By turning to a vague mystical philosophy (which may seem profound to some) Kushner tries to resolve an irreconcilable psychological conflict...
...And to refer to having sex as "profoundly human" is a little baffling...
...Many homosexuals like to define homosexuality publicly as the inherent need to love somebody of the same sex...
...You will have to wait until next winter to find out the fate of its characters...
...Despite the popular view of male homosexuality, sexual orientation is not the only socially relevant issue, or perhaps even the most important one...
...It is foolish to suggest that there is only one set of gay values, one gay lifestyle...
...Above that...
...Gays parley with the president...
...Louis and Prior are both effeminate, and so do and say a lot of campy things that get laughs because some in the audience will recognize them as gay and thus get pleasure from seeing them onstage—the schlock of recognition, so to speak...
...For Kushner, being a Jew is a metaphor for being gay...
...And later Joe and Louis sit in front of the Hall of Justice...
...Intimidated, confused, impotent, and alienated from what is going on onstage—the way, Kushner wants us to believe, the gay man feels in America today...
...Okay, we get the idea...
...Selfish and greedyand loveless and blind...
...His suffering serves only to arouse him to betray Prior even more by seducing young Joe Pitt, who is wandering around looking to be seduced...
...Before you realize what is happening you are off to the next scene/subplot...
...There are some who want to lead discreet sexual lives, like many heterosexual men...
...Joe is going off to Louis's apartment to taste gay sex for the first time...
...Two of the major figures in the play—Louis, the ambivalent Jewish intellectual...
...And that is what is meant by the gay lifestyle...
...In The Boys in the Band, by Mart Crowley, produced in 1968 and now considered to be politically incorrect by some younger gays, the issue is clearly defined but ambiguously resolved...
...And Kushner is very good at this kind of ambiguous "truth" telling...
...Forever...
...we're not complete hicks...
...We know an analogical relationship when we see one...
...Apparently the problem is that Joe, a shy man, avoids sleeping with Harper and is struggling with homosexual inclinations and deeply conflicted about them...
...A little later in the play Roy Cohn's parting words to his loved/hated protégé are, "Transgress a little, Joseph...
...Joe is timid, passive, and confused, but decent, kind, and good...
...It means sexual transgression of any and all sorts...
...SAUL: Sex...
...Prior's ancestors from past centuries appearing to him for some hard-to-understand purpose...
...In the clouds...
...These thirty-two scenes are, moreover, often played as split scenes—two scenes at either end of the stage going on at once or alternately...
...God, I used to love promiscuous sex...
...For Kushner, more than anything, freedom means freedom to transgress, to be naughty...
...Fidelity...
...and finally the pseudo-apocalyptic appearance of the Angel of Death in the final moments—the theater of the Fabulous, as Kushner calls it—make it easy to disguise the basically familiar plot structure...
...If gay men can't help their feelings, neither can straight men...
...Or rather, the less impotent, the less dead the shocker feels...
...MAN: What do you want...
...God I miss it...
...The following issue of the New Yorker published a puff piece on Kushner himself that takes the words out of Kushner's mouth and turns them into the usual simplex New Yorker sociopolitical hash...
...Prior says: T he recognition of a sense of alienation as a social phenomenon goes back to Marx and Durkheim, and has been ascribed to many economic and political causes since then...
...Most of them anyway—ninety percent of them...
...Even Roy Cohn, who is meant to be demonic—which in Kushner's scheme is the same as Republican—demonstrates flashes of redeeming tenderness...
...It's quite another to try to understand the messages that come out of the mouths of Harper and Louis and Joe, whose concerns are with Justice and Love and Good and Bad and Politics and Society, and who are characters in a play whose subtitle is "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes...
...And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred...
...Joe would be there, Cohn explains, to help protect Cohn against the enemies he believes he has in the white-shoe law firms trying to disbar him...
...The Weak, Effeminate, Charming Gay...
...The plot of Part I, though, is not difficult...
...That's just liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance, and what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's not enough to be tolerated, because when the s--- hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth...
...She has these from time to time...
...BELIZE: Oh come on . . . LOUIS: So maybe I am a racist but . . . Of course modern audiences have come to expect ambivalence...
...The first scene, in which the old rabbi makes a funeral speech, sounds the tonic note of alienation—"how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so, that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted...
...Outing is part of that style, mockery and self-mockery is part of that style, and so, in some cases, is the provocation of punishment, as in Edward Albee's "Zoo Story," in which the gay man, Jerry, provokes an innocent bystander, Peter, to kill him...
...The metaphor for AIDS and homosexuality is always the same—impotent, passive victims controlled, persecuted, and doomed by powerful men unsympathetic to their needs...
...LOUIS: I want you to f--- me, hurt me, make me bleed...
...He redefines the essence of homosexuality, in one of the most interesting moments of the play, as impotence in the real world rather than sexual preference...
...It has to be in-your-face, by definition...
...Plant a foot, stay awhile...
...the Book of Life suddenly appearing and disappearing in someone's vision...
...In fact he wants Hank to be unfaithful, so that he can be free to follow his,own impulses...
...Despite its ambiguity and the world-class ambivalence of its characters, Angels in America is shallow...
...The Ruthless Power-Mad Egomaniac...
...Many of the scenes are dream scenes, or frank hallucinations...
...Should I stay with him when he's dangerous and no fun to be with...
...His lifestyle or theirs...
...Later in the play a black ex–drag queen accuses Louis of being a racist: LOUIS: I am not a racist...
...Whatever is unusual, abnormal, odd, shocking, scandalous, even frightful becomes desirable, and the more the better...
...After all, one human primate could never be sure about whether a stranger primate was dangerous or not...
...damnation which...
...He knows that audiences don't like to be lectured, as they are in some other plays about homosexuals currently running in New York...
...Kushner went on: I said to them, "You can't love me without understanding that I'm gay...
...The scene is a bravura piece of performance art that illuminates this aspect of the gay life...
...Gays protest the St...
...Gays boycott Colorado...
...To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning...
...The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you...
...My being gay is central to the person you pretend to care about...
...Producers nearly shed blood amongst themselves over which of them would bankroll the play on Broadway...
...we listen to his blasphemies, his sophistries with fascination, half-believing them and admiring him...
...Roy Cohn is left writhing in pain on his living room rug as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt him...
...Despite its magnitude, despite its pretentious language and pyrotechnics, Angels in America lacks the prerequisite for greatness—the transformation of universal experience into art—and what it substitutes for universal experience is messages...
...What fascinates Kushner about his reinvention of the myth of Roy Cohn is the equation of illegitimacy and power...
...You comb the sex advertisements for the same attributes as though you were buying a piece of livestock...
...What Louis wants is not the kind of freedom that we talk about in Poli-Sci 101...
...This spring it won the Pulitzer Prize...
...Louis, pathetically weak, childish, and cowardly, is also witty, and charmingly self-reproachful...
...It is that the essence of alienation for gay men, or at least for the gay men who write plays, comes from the inner conflict they feel between what they really want and what the straight world can realistically give them...
...I felt they had to acknowledge a parental failure...
...I don't want to be tolerated...
...Instead of looking at me and seeing what I was all about and trying to make a world in which I would be athome being who I was, they had chosen to make things comfortable for themselves...
...Contributing to the confusion is the gratuitous and unexplained androgyny...
...There are thirty-two scenes in "Part I: Millennium Approaches," alternating back and forth between the three plots, thus allowing logical and chronological gaps and discontinuities to occur without the author having to account for them, and leaving us doubtful, on occasion, about what exactly is going on...
...Angels in America" was now officially in the world, covered more or less in glory...
...Badness" is—or rather transgression...
...What he means by "the idea with blood in it" is the freedom to transgress without consequences...
...Alas, tact, good manners, conventions, may sound awfully subversive to some gay men—positively Republican perhaps...
...Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he has all the best lines...
...The New Yorker's John Lahr practically swooned in ecstasy...
...ROY: Boy you really are something, what the f--- do you think this is, Sunday School...
...Now the spotlight has focused on homosexuals and their persecutors, the so-called homophobes...
...It is a propaganda play, and likely to become as dated as Odets's Waiting for Lefty, Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, or even Hair, for that matter...
...find one you can break...
...When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being...
...You are fabulous, each and every one, and I love you all...
...Ever again...
...On the evening of Good Friday, a few steps from the Perry Street Theatre in Greenwich Village where The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me is playing, you could see in the window of a gay sex shop a malemannequin wearing a pair of bulging jockey shorts and holding in one hand a couple of carrots and in the other a tube of K-Y jelly and a box of condoms...
...I just wondered what a thing it would be . . . if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away...
...There are some gay men who don't want to march in parades or protest...
...If gay men are uncomfortable in the straight world, straight men are just as uncomfortable in the gay world, and a gay man's discomfort is no more valid than a straight man's...
...Joe's moral dilemma is whether to leave his helpless wife and come out of the closet—transgressing against the laws of his God and his parents but being true to his homosexual inclinations—or continue to be a good man "and learn to live dead, just numb...
...They have been lovers for two years, squabbling all of that time over the issue of fidelity...
...you have Bush talking about human rights, and so what are these people talking about...
...And all those mystical moments—feathers falling out of nowhere inexplicably...
...That is why the need to transgress against (straight men's) rules is so powerfully important...
...Louis says to Joe, "Maybe the court won't convene...
...Louis, in a spasm of guilty self-punishment, goes into the park late at night, and finds an anonymous "butch" sadist...
...Louis claims to love Prior, who needs him more than ever now that he is dying of AIDS, yet Louis runs away...
...The opening scene consists of a eulogy spoken by a very old rabbi with a long beard—played by a woman...
...What Kushner is good at besides theatrics is humor...
...And you think you're . . . What...
...It is therefore best to generalize in a very limited way to those gay men who write plays and those gay men who applaud them...
...You're on earth, goddammit...
...Maybe we are free...
...Throughout the play Cohn argues with force and fascination against submitting to the law...
...SAUL: And suddenly it's Sunday night and you're getting f---ed in the second-floor window of the Hotel Christopher and you're being cheered on by a mob of hundreds of men...
...Conventionally what we mean when we use rhetorical phrases like "profoundly human" is the very opposite of having sex—what we usually mean is something that has to do with soul or spirit or mind rather than the genitals...
...And later in the play, Roy Cohn' s physician tells him he has AIDS: the physician, Henry, is played by a woman in drag...
...I And here is Louis expressing the modern gay activist's dismissal of mere tot= erance: I mean it's the really hard thing about being Left in this country, the American Left can't help trip over these petrified little fetishes: freedom, that's the worst...
...In the middle of all this, Cohn discovers that he has AIDS and begins to show signs of mortality...
...Rarely before have we seen the media in such a feeding frenzy...
...Dead...
...Last winter the budget crisis and the Super Bowl took a backseat to The Crying Game at dinner tables in Georgetown and on Manhattan's Upper East Side...
...But more important, what redeems him is his homosexuality—even though he hates homosexuals...
...Millennium Approaches," Part I of Angels in America, which opened in New York on May 4 at one of Broadway's largest theaters, does not—despite what they tell you at the box office—stand alone as a play...
...To be precise, Prior's final words are, "Bye now...
...Get away from me...
...terrible, and . . . very great...
...Nothing...
...Kushner knows the difference between profundity and razzle-dazzle: he knows that a profound work of art results in a sense of illumination and clarity about the human condition, not "Wow, what does all this mean...
...In all of these, the victim's persecutor takes the form of the white male heterosexual Republican Establishmentarian...
...We also know that in the post-Freudian world of the theater, guys like Kushner like to put "higher" truths into the mouths of the insane or into the dreams or hallucinations of their characters, so that they can avow and disavow something at the same time...
...In Act Two, in the process of seducing Joe, Louis says: "Sometimes, even if it scares you to death, you have to be willing to break the law...
...And I bless you...
...A lienation is, indeed, one of the major themes of the play...
...Female homosexuality has vastly different behavioral patterns and psychological dynamics...
...and Joe, the moral, upright lawyer trying to fight off his homosexual feelings—are faced with this conflict...
...It becomes a principle of vitality in the play through Cohn's strength and persuasiveness...
...In Part II of the play, "Perestroika," Cohn is about to blackmail someone in order to get himself some AZT medicine and he says, "I'm no good at tests, Martin, I'd rather cheat...
...Talk about high-sounding ideas like Love and Justice and Good and Evil does not qualify a play for profundity—it's what you do with them that counts...
...These contribute to the "brilliance" and tumult but are not important...
...And it is the discrepancy between the gay lifestyle and the straight lifestyle that is what the sense of alienation in gays is all about—not merely sexual preference...
...The solution for him, as for many of the other current gay playwrights, is a magical solution, one that is wishful and self-serving and denies reality in a significant way...
...In some sense Kushner is saying that no matter what evil Cohn committed in his life, the fact that he was a homosexual makes him worthy of redemption...
...you know Jeane Kirkpatrick for God's sake will go on and on about freedom and so what does that mean, the word freedom, when she talks about it, or human rights...
...Kushner, however, did not set out to record the horror of AIDS alone but the horror of American life during the nineteen-eighties—the triumph of heartlessness and the withering of community...
...From its first beat, 'Angels in America' exhibited a ravishing command of its characters and of the discourse it wanted to have through them with our society...
...Xenophobia is a component of human nature, and is universal...
...Another illustration of what Kushner only alludes to in order to make his hidden agenda more acceptable to his general audiences is to be found in As Is, by William Hoffman, a play produced several seasons ago...
...Here are the stage directions for Scene 7: Mutual dream scene...
...Power, he says, is what defines a heterosexual man, not whether he "f---s around with guys...
...He is also deeply unhappy in his marriage to Harper, a beautiful but flaky young woman addicted to tranquilizers...
...Joe Pitt, a young Mormon lawyer, decent and honest, is working in New York as a law clerk for a federal court judge...
...What Kushner and other gay theorists seem to do when it suits their rhetorical needs is to use the word "love" as a euphemism for sex, since no one considers the emotional component of love between men, such as the love between fathers and sons or close friends, to be perverse or ugly...
...And to be tolerated is not good enough...
...How do you betray your partner and let him die alone and miserable...
...Gays demand that...
...What Louis and Joe actually yearn for is not only freedom to transgress but the freedom to transgress without judgment or guilt: LOUIS: . . . It should be the . . . shape of a life, its total complexity . . . which matters in the end, not some stamp of...
...These moral issues don't seem like clichés in Angels in America because of all the theatrical tumult...
...HARPER: No...
...Kushner's is a gentler soul, but the play is full of mockery, self-mockery, and one or two shockers—the depiction of anal intercourse on a Broadway stage may be a first...
...Once you begin to face that problem you're in big-time moral country...
...In all of the gay plays currently on and off Broadway, the theme of alienation is central—as it is in Angels in America...
...Even though the advent of gay liberation twenty-five or thirty years ago brought with it a demand for and realization of radical sexual freedom—which to this day remains a hallmark of certain gay men, the kind of freedom that Louis in Angels still yearns for—it brought with it, too, conflict even among those it liberated...
...Kushner is nothing if not clever at warding off resistance to his messages, and ambivalence is another technique he uses for this purpose—almost to a fault...
...One of the greatest . . . as funny as it is profound," shouted USA Today...
...Know what I mean...
...These people don't begin to know what, ontologically, freedom is or human rights, like they see these property-based Rights-ofMan type rights but that's not enfranchisement, not democracy, not what's implicit, what's potential within the idea, not the idea with blood in it...
...Don't ask me...
...and Prior is having hallucinatory nightmares in which he is visited by the Angel of Death...
...Above alive is what...
...The gay lifestyle is what gay liberation was all about back in the seventies...
...Harper is having a pill-induced hallucination...
...The laughs depend more on performance or intonation thanverbal wit...
...what he wants is to transgress (sexually) and be accepted despite the transgression, or even loved for it the way Roy Cohn wants to be loved for his monstrousness...
...Honor, Commitment, Fidelity, Loyalty are those same nasty old straight, American, Mormon, conventional values Louis has been running away from...
...I'm sorry, I can't be like that...
...Harper tells Joe she is going to have a baby: JOE: Are you really...
...Rich and Saul, two gay men, are reminiscing about what it was like before AIDS took the liberation out of gay liberation: RICH: Remember Sunday afternoons blitzed on beer...
...For some reason, Prior has appeared in this one...
...In a New Yorker article last fall, Kushner described the revelation to his parents that he was gay: Soon after the phone call to his mother in 1981, Tony wrote his parents an angry letter...
...Unfortunately, universal love is beyond the capacity of human nature...
...This may be self-delusion, but there is a grain of truth in what Cohn says, and Kushner knows it...
...But it's one thing to acknowledge the ambivalence of the characters in the plays of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller, whose issues are personal and human-sized...
...This is . . . this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive...
...We are, as the playwright wished us to be, bewildered...
...Beyond a few nice paradoxes, he ends up in a cloud of mystical, pseudo-religious clichés like Love and Forgiveness Conquer All...
...For example, Prior says, "Jewish curses are the worst...
...The scene describes the frantic, feverish rush from one sexual partner to the next, performing all of the permutations and combinations that are possible with four openings and two penises...
...There may even be some who are not interested in gay theater...
...AIDS, perforce, shifted the balance in the direction of stable monogamous relationships...
...And from the beginning of time many alienated—the Christians People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into the freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown...
...There are some who have had one or very few sexual partners in their lives...
...It was meant to leave the audience bewildered, to make us feel, at the end of it, like dumb hicks—straight, three-piece-suited, permanent-waved goyim...
...It must be very deep...
...They cheat on each other constantly and lie through their teeth...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
