Mel Bossa's Reviews > Millennium Approaches

There was a scene in the movie Still Alice when the maddeningly sexy Kristen Stewart reads Harper's last monologue from this play to her mother, and it tore my heart out HARD.

The words of the monologue were so unique and touching. I looked up the play and was happy to find it in the queer library close to my house. Read it in a day or two and I have to say I've never read anything quite like Angels in America before.

GOD I LOVE JEWISH WRITERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There I said it.

And GAY JEWISH WRITERS.

My brain had multiple orgasms reading Kushner's witty, stark, wild, righteously angry, politically incorrect, loving, generous, imaginative prose. I only have one question.

HOW?

I mean, how the fuck did he pull this off? Every character in here, from the life-affirming black nurse Belize (Drag Queen name), to Joe the closeted republican clerk, to his wife Harper, the fragile woman in love with her gay husband, to Prior, the terrified man AIDS who is visited by the Angel with the Silver wings, down to his all too human and cowardly boyfriend Louis who abandons him alone in a hospital... They lived. They were so vividly rendered. I ate this up like Tom Cruise eats up Scientology cookies.

And let's not forget the majestically honest and brutally uncompromising Roy Cohn.

Whew. This isn't a review. It's a plead to you all to read this read this read this!!!!

Yet, through all the humor and careful wake-up calls in this masterpiece--Tony Kushner's testimony--I began to feel raw like a fresh wound. Because that's what Angels in America really is twenty years later: a transcript of a time when men ten years younger than I am today were dying, dropping like flies, while the Reagan administration looked the other way.

Only through art, literature and in the hearts of those who still love them can those young men be remembered.

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