The Books: “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” (Tony Kushner)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

So now … we must leave Ibsen behind. It’s tough, I know.

Next play on the script shelf is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition, Part 1 Millennium Approaches, by Tony Kushner. Kusher is the Clifford Odets of our day. His plays are glorified pamphlets – but his writing is sublime. He elevates propaganda into a transcendent art. Man oh man, I can think of only a couple of playwrights who are able to do that. Usually when playwrights get up on soap boxes (or, actually, anyone gets up on a soap box) they transform into a BIG. FAT. BORE.

Clifford Odets and Tony Kushner do not. Their writing is so good. They do not sacrifice character for idea. Angels in America is full of indelible characters. It’s also very funny. Kushner doesn’t sacrifice humor, either. And look: many gay men who lived through the 1980s have sacrificed their senses of humor. They lost too many friends. Larry Kramer comes to mind. If I lost most of my friends, I don’t think I’d have too much to laugh about. But Kushner takes that situation – the AIDS epidemic blossoming – and turns it into something almost transcendent.

I love this play. I love how Kushner, unlike 99.99999999% of the playwrights writing today, is unafraid to just go for it. He’s unafraid to write about the big themes. He may go overboard – but God, isn’t that better than being cautious, and writing tepid little kitchen-sink dramas? Or coy arch abstract performance-art pieces? Kushner comes right out and says what he means. Agree with him or not – that’s immaterial. A voice like his is very important to have in the theatre.

Here’s an excerpt.

Harper and Joe are a young married Mormon couple. Joe is a lawyer, and they have just moved to New York City. Harper is a little bit … “off” … shall we say. She never leaves the apartment. She takes sleeping pills – pretty much throughout the day. She’s been in and out of mental institutions. She is convinced that there are people living behind their walls – she always hears noises. (Because this play is so hallucinatory, with angels breaking through ceilings on occasion – Harper doesn’t seem so crazy. There really may be entities behind their walls. Harper seems more sane than most everyone else in this play.) And Joe … a clean-cut Mormon guy … is … there’s something a little bit “off” about him, too. The two of them have almost a friendship – not really a marriage. Joe, deep down, knows that he is gay … it is the mid 1980s – He is so religious, and so fearful of what “being gay” will mean – that he cannot even acknowledge it to himself. The struggle of these two people – in their marriage – to come to terms with this – is one of the main plots of this two-part massive play. Joe has been offered a great job down in Washington. Harper doesn’t want to go. Their marriage is really in trouble. Joe goes out late at night, and walks through Central Park … watching the gay guys having sex with each other in the shrubs. He doesn’t participate, he just stares. He’s a tragic character.

This scene takes place after one of his late-night walks. He comes home to find her awake, sitting in the dark.

EXCERPT FROM Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition, by Tony Kushner:

(Harper is sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her. Joe enters, but he doesn’t turn on the lights)

JOE. Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.

HARPER. No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.

JOE. No one was.

HARPER. Maybe actually in th ebed, under the covers with a knife. Oh, boy, Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You … you know what I mean?

JOE. Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try too …

(He turns on the light. She turns it off again.)

HARPER. When you pray, what do you pray for?

JOE. I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

HARPER. Oh. Please. Don’t pray for that.

JOE. I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day. Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling — just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is … a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m … It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

HARPER. In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. Terribly. That’s what’s so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can’t dream that away.

JOE. Are you … are you really going to have a baby?

HARPER. It’s my time, and there’s no blood. I don’t really know. I suppose it wouldn’t be a great thing. Maybe I’m just not bleeding because I take too many pills. Maybe I’ll give birth to a pill. That would give a new meaning to pill-popping, huh? I think you should go to Washington. Alone. Change, like you said.

JOE. I’m not going to leave you, Harper.

HARPER. Well maybe not. But I’m going to leave you.

Curtain