When Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway a quarter-century ago, it became the most talked-about theatrical event of its day. It brought Kushner a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony, and that Tony was followed by another when its second half, Angels in America: Perestroika, opened six months later. Taken together, the two parts of Angels in America—running seven-and-a-half hours in all—were widely thought to constitute the most important American play of the late 20th century. Now it has returned to Broadway in a production from the National Theatre in London, where it was greeted with near-universal acclaim, much of it from critics who were not yet born when the real-life events depicted by Kushner took place.
The inception and reception of Angels have been chronicled in The World Only Spins Forward, a book-length oral history compiled by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois.* Based on interviews with 250 people who took part in or saw its early productions, it documents the impact that Angels had on its first viewers. One of them, Ben Brantley of the New York Times, observes with only minor exaggeration that “Angels brought theater back into the national conversation.” So it did, if only for a time.
Its immediate success was in part a result of its then-salient subject matter, the AIDS crisis, as well as the unprecedented frankness with which Kushner portrayed gay life (and sex) on stage. The question that arises from the revival is this: Is Angels in America really the masterpiece that nearly everyone quoted in The World Only Spins Forward believes it to be? Does it measure up to such American classics as The Glass Menagerie and Long Day’s Journey into Night? Or might it best be understood less as a living work of art than as a document of its fast-receding historical moment?
Part of what makes this question hard to answer is that Angels is unlike any other American play previously thought to be of enduring value. That Kushner unapologetically presented homosexuality not as a dramatic problem but as a normal part of the human condition was by no means the only thing that sets Angels apart from its predecessors. Not only is its extreme length daunting, but it is also an intensely political play, one whose characters include fictionalized versions of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s one-time protégé, and Ethel Rosenberg, in whose execution Cohn played a key role. In addition, Angels is an all-encompassing amalgam of realistic and anti-realistic elements (several of its scenes are elaborate portrayals of AIDS-related hallucinations) whose language ranges from kitchen-sink naturalism to extravagant flights of quasi-poetry.
What, then, made Angels in America so popular? It helped that it was a political play, one whose triple-barreled message was that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, that the Republican Party is “a polestar of human evil,” and that the AIDS crisis would come to an end. Rarely have playwrights gone far wrong by telling audiences what they want to hear, and New York theatergoers have a history of supporting sufficiently entertaining shows that wear their liberal politics on their sleeves.
But Angels is, fortunately, more than that—a nontraditional but nonetheless conventional domestic drama, the story of two couples whose lives intersect by chance and are disrupted beyond repair. The central plotlines are as tightly intertwined as those of a traditional “well-made” play. Joe Pitt, a Mormon man married to Harper, gives in to his suppressed homosexual urges and embarks on an affair with the radical leftist Louis. Louis, in turn, has been emotionally wrecked by the fact that his partner, Prior, has AIDS. All this roots Angels in a time-honored theatrical structure.
At the same time, its Shavian subtitle, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” points to Kushner’s intention to make it much more. Hence the presence of Cohn, the AIDS-afflicted archvillain of Angels, as well as the fact that Joe is not merely a closeted gay man but Cohn’s protégé, a conservative religious Republican. Hence, too, the climactic hallucination scene, in which a despairing angel reveals to Prior that it is man’s tragic destiny to succumb to “the slow dissolving of the Great Design.” Prior rejects this fate, preferring to devote what is left of his life to what he and the angel refer to as “the Great Work.”
And what is this “Great Work”? Kushner evidently has in mind the coming of the millennium of progressive politics, a secular faith whose goals are the full acceptance of homosexuality and the advent of democratic socialism: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward….That’s what politics is. The world moving ahead. And only in politics does the miraculous occur.”
Angels in America, then, is not merely political but ideological, a work of art shaped by its author’s deep sympathy for Marxism. “I make [the] most meaning of the world,” Kushner said in 2004, “when I read the history and ideas of any number of great socialist thinkers, including Karl Marx.” In the same interview, he called Stalinism “the worst thing that ever happened to a great idea.” And whether or not he believes that the triumph of that idea is historically inevitable, his view of history is fundamentally Marxian. In a recent Los Angeles Times interview, he made the following statement:
I’m a big believer in identity politics and political correctness. Why shouldn’t we want to be politically correct, if by correct you mean not toeing the party line but toeing the line of history, being on the right side of history, being moral and ethical.
It is this iron certainty that “history” has a “right side” that makes Angels so attractive to many latter-day progressives. They are as sure as Kushner of their own rectitude—and as quick to demonize those who fail to toe the lines they draw. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to Marianne Elliott’s neon-lit, self-consciously “relevant” Broadway revival, in which we are meant to think “Donald Trump” whenever we hear “Ronald Reagan,” suggests as much.
Therein lies the first of Kushner’s two main weaknesses as a playwright—his failure to portray his ideological enemies with the total imaginative sympathy of the truly great artist. No compromise is possible: They must be unambiguously annihilated, even as Roy Cohn is annihilated by Ethel Rosenberg’s triumphant exit line (she calls him a “sonofabitch” after saying the Kaddish over his still-warm corpse). Angels would be a richer play if Kushner had had both the wit and the honesty to portray her as shamelessly guilty. And the second half would have been improved had he acknowledged, even in passing, that the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev, of whom brief but prominent mention is made, was enabled by Ronald Reagan, the dark god at whose altar Cohn worships.
Kushner’s other weakness is his defective sense of aesthetic proportion. For him, longer is always better. (His play Homebody/Kabul begins with a monologue that lasts 90 minutes.) The extreme length of Angels is one of the things that those who love it most affect to admire about it, but in fact it would be a vastly better play were it vastly shorter. But while Angels is conceptually gargantuan, it calls for a cast of just eight actors, which means it can be produced on a modest scale without feeling cramped or constrained. Moreover, it profits from the spatial compression imposed when it is mounted in a small house. When Angels is done that way, as was the case with Signature Theatre’s 2010 off-Broadway staging, its strongest features come to the fore, in particular the domestic scenes that are the best things about the play. Angels is never more poignant—or more believable—than when it depicts the breakdown and disintegration of the fragile romantic relationships that lie at its heart.
It is especially gratifying that Kushner portrays Harper, Joe’s pill-popping wife, as a tortured, lonely young woman whom Joe has kept in the dark about his sexuality, and who is thus as much a victim in her own way as is the AIDS-infected Prior (and as are all straight spouses of closeted gays who have deserted or deceived them for similar reasons). Another writer might have treated Harper as a mere prop, an unfortunate obstruction standing in the way of Joe’s self-actualization, but Kushner lets the viewer feel the raw hurt of her plight. No scene is more affecting than when she deliberately burns Joe’s dinner, then demands that he confess his secret, in the process making a shocking admission of her own: “You think you’re the only one who hates sex; I do; I hate it with you; I do. I dream that you batter away at me till all my joints come apart, like wax, and I fall into pieces.”
Gratifying, too, is the way in which themes of high seriousness are frequently treated by Kushner with a light touch. Angels is genuinely funny, and its surprising lightness of touch helps to enliven Cohn, who in real life was altogether unfunny. In Angels, however, he is quite outrageously funny, never more so than when he musters the gallows chutzpah to deny that he is homosexual after his doctor tells him he has AIDS:
I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who f—- around with guys.
Does all this place Angels in America in the canon of classic American plays? I think it unlikely that it will be as admired a half-century from now as it is today. It is noteworthy how many younger viewers, gay and straight alike, already regard Angels as a period piece. A gay millennial director recently told me that it means no more to him than The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley’s once-scandalous 1968 play about a group of unhappy gay friends, which is itself about to be revived on Broadway. “I’m a lot more interested in plays about what gay life is like right now,” he explained.
Nor does its tacit portrayal of the AIDS crisis as a problem mostly affecting white men sit well with certain of today’s progressives. One of them, Steven Thrasher, recently published an essay in which he condemned Angels for “its terrible racial politics…Angels in America gentrifies blackness out of the American AIDS story.” For the true-blue leftist, it seems, no one—not even Tony Kushner, notwithstanding his ardent belief in identity politics and political correctness—can be pure enough.
If Angels in America does last, it will surely be as a history play, one in which directors and actors of the future find enduring truths that speak to their own condition and stage it in ways suggestive of intergenerational parallels. This may well happen, for Angels’s virtues outweigh its flaws. Still, it is so compulsively garrulous that I cannot watch it (and I have seen it four times) without longing on each occasion to hack at least two hours out of the script. That said, many of these same flaws are defects of its preeminent virtue, Kushner’s determination to write a play that was big in every sense at a time when most of his peers had opted to play it safe and write small-cast plays about the travails of domestic life.
This explains the epigraph of The World Only Spins Forward: “If I’ve made a fool of myself, I have at least made of myself the kind of fool I want to be: That is the virtue and power of pretentiousness.” It is also the virtue and power of Angels in America, a play that is nothing if not pretentious—as well as ambitious, for both good and ill.
