ALLEN's Reviews > Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

This review is of the two plays by Tony Kushner housed under the title ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES -- "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestrokia" -- which can be produced and mounted individually, or together for one rather long (seven-hour) afternoon and evening in the theater.

Although the two plays were workshopped in 1990 and played jointly on Broadway and the West End in 1992 and 1993 -- they are really about the Eighties. Set in 1985 and 1986, with an Epilog in 1990, they're about a people who were credulous enough to believe that the old ways would hold if they just stayed the course.

The first play ("Millennium Approaches") has largely to do with a gay man who falls in love with a closeted, conservative Republican Mormon who abandons his wife. This causes no small amount of confusion in gay, analytical Louis through most of both plays:

"It's just that, you know, belonging to a political party that's one half religious-zealot-control-freak theocrats and one-half ego-anarchist-libertarian cowboys [shrilling for 'freedom'] . . . you've had a lot of practice straddling cognitive dissonance? Or, or what?"
from "Perestroika," Act 3 (p. 195).

On the whole, ANGELS is a freewheeling and often surreal theater piece that gives a role to the late Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed on federal charges of espionage 32 years earlier. A major role belongs to the imperious, grey-winged Angel (played gloriously in the HBO adaptation by Emma Thompson) whom the lead gay character with AIDS, Prior, must straddle to get her attention: "The body is the garden of the soul."

A major character in both plays play is the real-life Roy Cohn, a professional political opportunist who furthered the climate of "Witch-Hunting," persecuting not only political dissidents but inducing a "Lavender Scare" among gay men, during the Joseph McCarthy years of the 1950's. He, too, is homosexual but will not allow the word anywhere near him, even as he prepares to die of AIDS ("liver cancer"):

From the play -- Roy Cohn, diagnosed with AIDS, threatens his doctor:
"No, say it. I mean it. Say: 'Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.' . . . And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do. . . To someone who doesn't understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?"
from "Millennium Approaches," Scene 9 (p. 195).

[Reviewer's Note: The real Roy Cohn once "treated" a reporter to a limousine-ride interview while simultaneously cooling his anal warts (contracted just as you think they were) with an air-conditioner vent. Not for nothing did playwright Kushner call the Eighties "the Fifties in drag."]

Tony Kushner has given us two plays that are probably among the best and certainly among the most powerful of late-Twentieth-Century American theater. If you like plays and how they are written, this volume belongs in your home. Also well worth having is HBO's 2005 miniseries adaptation with top-notch actors like Meryl Streep playing Ethel Rosenberg and Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, which I have reviewed at Amazon.

from the play: "You may be dumber than shit but I refuse to believe you can't figure it out. Try."