Professor Elliott

English 200: Introduction to Graduate Study

2 December 1998

"Such ethical possibility is, however, founded on and coextensive with the subject’s movement toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self,’ the often very fragile concern to provide the self with pleasure and nourishment in an environment that is perceived not particularly to offer them."

–Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
 
 

"Demanding that life near AIDS is an inextricably other reality denies our ability to recreate a sustaining culture and social structures, even as we are daily required to devote such time to the details of the AIDS crisis."

–Cindy Patton

Tony Kushner’s two-part play (or, if you will, two plays) Angels In America is one of most famous and most powerful plays about AIDS and gay life to come out of the early 1990s. It not only engages with the political issues surrounding AIDS and homosexuality in Reaganite America, but also deals with deeply philosophical questions of identity and the nature of God. It’s no surprise that this play has sparked comment, including the criticism of the conservative right. In this paper, I intend to examine two of the articles written on the play. The first, Gordon Rogoff’s "Angels in America, Devils in the Wings," is quite problematic, and errors of fact that the author makes about the play lead me to wonder at its value for analysis. The second article, Charles McNulty’s "Angels in America: Tony Kushner’s Theses on the Philosophy of History" pose some difficult questions regarding the plays’ relationship to the concept of history, arguing that Millennium Approaches¹ deconstructs history while Perestroika moves away from this deconstruction. According to McNulty, this is a problem in the second part of the play. I intend to argue that while perhaps it is the case that Perestroika moves away from a deconstructive engagement with history, that it moves towards a politics that is reparative rather than simply progressive.

Rogoff’s "Angels in America, Devils in the Wings" is an article that’s decidedly critical of the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. He begins his critique with "as one who lives a life rather than a ‘lifestyle,’ I’m not sure what a gay play, let alone a gay fantasia might be" (21). As one who lives a life rather than a "lifestyle" myself, I find this opening to the essay to conjure linguistic maneuvers of the conservative right used to dismiss the grievances of gay men. While I may be going out on a limb in this analysis, most often the binary "life vs. lifestyle" is code for "heterosexual vs. homosexual"—in short, gays and lesbians don’t live lives but rather we live lifestyles. Ours are mockeries of "real" lives, thus requiring the supplemental "-style." Rogoff is "not sure what a gay play…might be." In truth, this is no easy question, and there are no easy answers to it. Are the plays of Tennessee Williams, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie gay plays, since the author was gay? Or do only his later works qualify as gay plays, as they focused specifically on gay material? Are any of the plays of William Shakespeare gay plays, for that matter? Or is this an appellation reserved for post-Stonewall, politically oriented gay plays? These could potentially be very exciting questions, but unfortunately, Rogoff does not pursue them. I’m not certain, however, these are the questions that Rogoff intends to bring up with his questioning about what a "gay play…might be." The tone of the statement indicates it as dismissive, rather than truly querying the categories of what a gay play might be. Furthermore, Rogoff does not pursue the line of questioning beyond this, indicating to me that he’s not really interested in the question except to undercut the possibility of gay theater.

Furthermore, Rogoff writes that "if not exactly a musical-comedy, a play now underscored with so much musical blather instructing us what to feel or think, that it might just as well go all the way" (21). Indeed, neither part of Angels in America is "exactly a musical" (and while the author claims that Perestroika is a comedy, a case could be made that, at least in the Roy Cohn storyline, is a classical tragedy), as anything remotely resembling music occurs only once in the play. In the scene where Prior is being examined by Emily, the nurse, a blazing Aleph appears accompanied by "a huge chord sounded by a gigantic choir" (Kushner, Millennium Approaches 99). There is also a scene in Perestroika where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg sings a dying Roy Cohn to sleep. Aside from those scene, and the subtitle of the play, "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the references to music and musical terminology are absent. Perhaps Rogoff’s confused, as he was with the reference to what a "gay play…might be", about how to classify this play, and therefore concludes that it must be a musical. Having read and seen both parts of the play, I began to seriously wonder which play Rogoff had seen on Broadway to come up with this particular analysis of Angels in America.

Toward the end of the article, Rogoff begins to engage with issues in the play, indicating that perhaps he had indeed actually seen it. In a statement echoed by McNulty, Rogoff writes that "Millennium, however, is its own model, even if Perestroika—and Wolfe—are jerking it back to more familiar territory" (28). McNulty comments insightfully on the play in many ways, bringing in Walter Benjamin’s "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and Benjamin’s destructive angel of history. McNulty argues that the first part of the play is "the revolutionary chance to blast open the oppressive continuum of history and steer clear into the next millennium" (85). Unfortunately, he argues, the second part of the play "stops asking those pinnacle questions of our time, in order to dispense ‘answers’ and bromides" (95). Part of what both McNulty and Rogoff are responding to is Kushner’s break with prior plays about AIDS, such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is. In Angels in America, AIDS is not a synonym for death, but Kushner transforms Prior, the person with AIDS, into the bearer of "More Life" (Perestroika 148). Rogoff comments that he "had every reason to guess that the Angel’s arrival before Prior’s sickbed was the signal of his imminent departure, death at last having dominion over the simplest and saddest of characters" (28). What can be seen here is a desire on the part of each of these critics to fit Angels in America into the modes of previously established drama on the topic of AIDS, and that Millennium Approaches fits the bill because it hints at Prior’s impending doom at the end. The Angel, Rogoff reads, must be the Angel of Death. As it turns out, she’s the Angel of America, the Angel of Anti-Migration and Stasis, and she even writes stasis into Prior’s blood, but she is not sent to bring Prior to his doom. And this, it appears, is a large disappointment. "’The Great Work begins,’ she declares, only to reveal in the next play that it’s beginning more for Prior than for the others," Rogoff comments (28). McNulty also engages in this, writing that "Kushner steers clear of tragic death, preferring instead to finish on a Broadway upnote" (93). What can be understood here is our culture’s greater understanding of HIV and AIDS—that those who are infected are doomed to death, possibly tragic, possibly horrible, probably lonely. This is the only understanding brought to Kushner’s play by either critic, and, while they engage other issues, the underlying issue is that Prior doesn’t die when he should have. And yet, as many of us who’ve been touched by HIV and AIDS know, AIDS does not necessarily mean death, that people can and do live a very long time with both HIV positive test results and AIDS.

McNulty comments that "there is a definite movement in Perestroika away from historical analysis towards a poetics of apocalypse" (92). McNulty argues that Perestroika constitutes a return to progressive history, as well. I find this a somewhat limiting view of the second part of the play, dependant on a "movement…away from historical analysis" necessarily constituting a movement towards optimistic progress. Rather, I’d argue on the one hand that the second part of the play constitutes a realistic, and for its time somewhat prophetic, view of how AIDS can be seen. On the other hand, I’d argue that the second part of the play functions in reparative ways, in ways, as Cindy Patton puts it, that "recreate a sustaining culture and social structures" that are so desperately needed even still with regard to people with AIDS (108). The first part of the play does indeed function as McNulty describes, deconstructing history in a wide swath, picking apart in particular Reagan’s 1980s and the policies on AIDS that brought death to many. However, the second half is no simplistic return to progressive politics, as McNulty indicates it to be, but a necessary reparative intervention. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written on how our critical paradigms are overly paranoid, that they prefer to find oppressive structures and avoid pain than to work towards finding pleasure in systems that don’t intend to provide it ("Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" 15-16). Deconstructive interventions are necessary in the discourse on AIDS, but not for their own sake. If one simply demolishes society’s paradigms of understanding AIDS without providing alternate models of understanding, the net result for the person with AIDS remains unchanged. Perestroika functions in ways that provide for alternate understandings of AIDS, the most prominent being that people with AIDS can, and do, survive.

Kushner himself even signals this movement in the opening scene of Perestroika, when the oldest living Bolshevik asks of the audience "Do they have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct . . . " (14)? The same character further asks "What do you have to offer in its place?" and asks "Change? Yes, we must change, only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you that these blind eyes will see again, just to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent" (14). In one sense, we are to feel a certain amount of pity for this character, as he is the last of his kind in the text, but his words are both sharp and damning. Largely, his words are reactionary, and he cannot imagine a future beyond Communism. Like the Angel, he is a force of stasis, arguing that "we MUST NOT move ahead" (15)! He doesn’t want progress—he wants change, but only change with a Theory. He doesn’t want to move the world forward, but to reorder it. He isn’t opposed to change or even to deconstructing what has been built, but he is opposed to deconstruction without a plan for reconstruction: "If a snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin, he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin" (15)? Even this character recognizes the need to "shed one’s skin," to destroy that which came before, but, he argues, it is necessary to have a "new skin" to proceed.

A relatively minor point that both McNulty and Rogoff bring up in their articles is the role the character Louis has in the play. Both McNulty and Rogoff want to see Louis as the center of the plot of each part of the play. In fact, Rogoff writes that "suddenly, it looks as if Louis, on a course with destiny, has been thwarted by his playwright into a course with triviality," and "it’s Louis, of course, with his dynamo mouth and tortured sin-tax, who keeps insisting on his right to a play of his own" (29). At one point, Rogoff compares Louis to Roy Cohn, arguing that Louis could have been Roy Cohn if Louis hadn’t any ethics. McNulty similarly argues that

Both McNulty and Rogoff agree on that Millennium Approaches is radical and new in the directions it takes drama, and they both agree that Perestroika is returning Angels in America "back to more familiar territory." For those who understand the necessity for reconstruction after deconstructing the institutions that have come before, Perestroika represents not "familiar territory," but a venture into new territory—a building anew. Each part of the play does indeed function differently, Millennium Approaches successfully calling into question American politics, the nature of homosexuality, and America’s responses to the AIDS crisis, Perestroika rebuilding from the break up of Louis’ relationship with Prior, Joe’s break up with Harper, and Prior’s illness. It is a simplistic reading of Part Two of the play to simply relegate it to a return to progressive politics, particularly in light of recent developments with AIDS and with AIDS activism.

Millennium Approaches is the Part One of Angels in America. Perestroika is Part Two of the play.