Sketchbook's Reviews > Angels in America

Kushner's overheated - and vastly overrated - opus sent me scurrying for my Yma Sumac CD, "The Voice of the Xtaby." When I want a guest to leave my apartment, I put it on with the admonition, "You must hear her 5-octave pipes!" and, shortly, I am happily alone. You too can hear Yma on YT. She trills from high soprano to basso. The music suggests tweeting birds or a volcanic eruption. Kushner, I read, thought his play might be a musical, initially, and it would have needed Yma. It still does.

Its success is a prime example of how a few mediocre dramer critics, infected w toxic fairy dust or nerve gas, can stampede the public into casting off sane reflection and start belching cheerless huzzahs. Kushner's "monumental achievement" mixes gays and Jews and Mormons (huhh?) in a series of blackout sketches, performed by usually two characters (I dont think he can write for 3 actors onstage). The AIDS crise turned him into a Writer, as it did others, so attention must be paid, as Arthur Miller rumbled. Since Kushner has nothing to say, he deals solely with emotions: mostly agitation and anger. A young man dying of AIDS is abandoned by his lover who becomes involved with a closeted gay Mormon who, in turn, has a shrill, pill-addicted wife. The monstrous lawyer Roy Cohn, also dying, gets a ghostly visit from the pathetic Ethel Rosenberg; amid the hysteria, and juvenile raillery, an angel descends and --- where's Yma Sumac?

Like Brecht, Kushner does not write "characters." He writes "symbols" : Evil, Affectation, Death, The Oppressed. His jabber goes on endlessly. "Our suffering teaches us solidarity; or it should," he allows. "Because Kushner has written a second-rate play...about being gay, and about AIDS, no one is going to call [it] the overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess that it is," explains a writer in the New Republic. Meantime, essayist Andrew Sullivan, who loathed the play, dismissed it as political agitprop, adding: "Gay life - and gay death - surely awaits something grander and subtler than this."

I saw an early preview c 1991, and the ranting and raging onstage put me to sleep, though I awoke when Roy Cohn (Evil) was dying in pain, which made members of the audience feel Good. I tried to see the Mike Nichols movie, and again I got the snores, especially when Meryl Streep appeared as a rabbi (or was that a bad dream?) It took me a few days to finish a play read, w long naps. The frenzy and yelping agony of passion in Kushner's revue sent me to Yma Sumac, the Peruvian songbird. Skip this theatrical salacacabia and give yourself up to Yma.