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Next play on the script shelf is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1559363843\")
<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\nClifford Odets and Tony Kushner do not. Their writing is so good. They do not sacrifice character for idea. Angels in America<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here’s an excerpt.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This scene takes place after one of his late-night walks. He comes home to find her awake, sitting in the dark.<\/p>\n