Note: If you haven’t done so yet, please view the one-hour documentary on Angels on reserve in the Gavilan library.

Discussion of Act II

So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth.
                                    Harper to Prior, Act I, Scene 7

By now you’ve met the diverse cast of characters that people Tony Kushner’s "fantasia" Angels in America. You’ve met Prior and Louis, a young couple confronting the everyday challenges posed by a fatal illness, a health crisis most don’t face until much later in their lives. You’ve been introduced to "the octopus," Roy Cohn, who blithely views the universe "as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity, but instead of grains of sand it’s shards and splinters of glass" (13). What a world this man inhabits! No wonder he’s always on the make, aggressively pushing his agenda, pursuing his ends by any means necessary. You’ve met Harper, the lonely, pill-popping Mormon housewife, one of the people who "sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining . . . beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart . . ." (16). To me, she represents "the canary in the mine," the vulnerable one whose disintegration warns us that our "systems" are unhealthy. (Canaries were sent into the mines after a blast to see if the tunnels were safe for the miners to enter. If the canary didn’t return, it was clear that the air in the tunnel was still toxic.) You’ve met her husband Joe, a man of contradictions: a Mormon who believes in the church’s dictum that homosexuality is a sin but that he’s doing the right thing as long as he fights his homosexuality. To him, it doesn’t matter what he might be "deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it" (40). Sadly for him and his wife, he knows that the struggle to kill part of himself has left him an empty shell.

In Act II of the play, all of the tensions that have emerged in Act I come to a crisis point: Prior gets sicker and Louis gets more uncomfortable. Roy continues pressuring Joe to go to Washington as his contact in the Justice Department. Roy believes that if anyone ever tries to debar him because of his shady dealings, a "well-place friend" such as Joe could threaten Roy’s enemies and scare them into backing off. Joe and Harper’s relationship . . ., well, you can imagine, disintegrates as Joe finds it harder to deny his emerging feelings for . . . another character in the play. (I don’t want to spoil your surprise by telling you who it is.)

Meanwhile, as the characters struggle, the issues embedded in Kushner’s "fantasia on national themes" emerge: to whom are we responsible? What kind of society have we created? Who wins and who loses? Roy describes to Joe his philosophy of the primacy of the individual: "Love, that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone. . . . Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way" (58). Of course, Roy represents Kushner’s critique of a self-centered, individualistic society in which a man is responsible only to himself and not to the Priors of the world, those who are suffering or in need. Louis, himself a bundle of contradictions, recognizes that this is the frightening, selfish world he inhabits. After leaving Prior and guiltily trying to "commit suicide" by a variety of means—unprotected sex, sitting outside in the freezing cold of a New York winter, Louis asks the Republican Joe what it’s like to be "Reagan’s kid" and answers his own question: "No connections. No responsibilities. All of us . . . falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to our selves and . . . what we owe to love" (71).

A minor character, Roy’s friend Martin, expresses some of the goals promoted by those who believe in this kind of individualistic society: "By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench—Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate" (63). Indeed, as we’ve seen in the 90s, many of these predictions have come to pass, but such values aren’t limited to the Republican Party. After all, it was the Democrats under Clinton who approved "welfare reform" and NAFTA. Kushner hopes we'll ask ourselves whether this is the society we wish to have.

Like all great literature, the play poses important moral questions about ourselves and our society, providing you a mirror and an opportunity to reflect on your own values. To whom are we responsible? How shall we live?

Discussion of Act III
"We pay high prices for the maintenance of the myth of the Individual: we have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death, and on and on."
Tony Kushner, Afterword, Angels in America, Pt. II

In Act II you watched everything come apart: the couples split, the sick end up in the hospital, Joe comes out to his mom and she hangs up on him. Not a pretty picture. Act III, subtitled "Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning," begins more hopefully. As the characters have reached their lowest points, there’s nothing for them to do but grow . . . or die. In Act III we watch each character face the challenge of beginning a new life after the changes of Act II.

Prior, visited by his ancestors, talks about his fear of dying, his sadness about being abandoned by Louis. An encounter with the angel convinces Prior that he’s suffering one of the most pernicious effects of AIDS, dementia.

Louis visits on Belize a long, guilty harangue about American politics. Impatient with Louis’ self-centered rantings, Belize departs, but not before conferring one of the most hopeful lines of the play. Noticing the impending snowstorm, he associates it with "softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace" (100).

Harper, seeking an escape after the dissolution of her marriage, goes to Antarctica with Mr. Lies, who offers her a "deep-freeze for feelings" (102). She returns to her fantasy of pregnancy (rebirth?) and fantasizes that her newborn will have a "pouch [she] can crawl into. Like a marsupial. We’ll mend together" (103). Ever aware of her vulnerability, Harper articulates the need for healing that all of the characters are experiencing.

Joe’s mother, Hannah, arrives in New York, probably intending to straighten out her son but instead meeting the critically ill Prior (in Part II of the play) and developing a deep compassion for this man and his gay compatriots.

As Roy struggles with a fatal illness, the transgressions of his past arrive to haunt him, represented by a ghost of his past, Ethel Rosenberg. As observed in the playwright’s notes at the beginning of the play, "the acts attributed to the character Roy, such as his illegal conferences with Judge Kaufmann during the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, are to be found in the historical record" (5). In the PBS documentary about the making of Angels, Tony Kushner says Roy is an exemplar of Reagan’s politics, premised on the belief that society will only be pleasant for a few, while the majority suffer amidst the chaos of social disintegration. Kushner sees the Reagan years as a moral and economic disaster, marked by its deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable members of our society, those, like Prior, who simply cannot meet our society's requirements for individualism and self-reliance. Ironically, the play reveals, those who appear to be the strong individuals, like Joe, ultimately seem to be the most wounded, the least able to love and be loved.

At the end of the play, Joe and Louis find each other. "Strange bedfellows," Louis remarks wryly (117), considering that neither feels he deserves to be loved in return.

As the angel finally approaches, in one of the most powerful lines of the play, Prior fights for life: ". . . I’m frightened, I . . . no, no fear, find the anger, find the . . . anger, my blood is clean, my brain is fine, I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong and . . . ." (117). An unwilling participant in the angels’ project, at the end of the play Prior is nevertheless selected as their "prophet." When the angel bursts through the ceiling, she announces that "The Great Work begins" (119).

Since the play doesn’t really end here (it’s just the end of Part I), there’s no real sense of closure in the final scene. On the contrary, there’s a strong sense of mystery; questions are raised: what do the angels want from Prior? Why has he been "chosen" and for what purpose? The director of the Broadway production, George C. Wolfe, provides us a clue: he believes plays such as Angels give us characters from "outside the core" who are in touch with strength and truth and through their journeys of self examination offer us a "manual of survival for the heart, decency and forgiveness" (PBS documentary). Such stories, he feels, are critical in times of crisis such as ours. In America, at the millenium, what kind of "prophet" would a gay man suffering from AIDS be?

It’s reassuring to me that authors who offer us a view from the "margins" can help us see aspects of our lives or society that need rethinking. One critic has spoken of the integral connection between society (the political) and individual lives (the personal) in Kushner’s work: "If as it seems, for Kushner the personal is always at some level political, part of his genius is his ability to make the political inescapably personal" (Hurwitt 40). Writers such as Kushner give us hope that the choices we make in our lives can and do affect society--and vice versa. Although the views we glimpse from the margins can be shocking in the horror they portray, we need such perspective in order to see the world clearly. As Kushner says in the afterword of Perestroika (Angels, Pt. II): "The world howls without; it is at this moment a very terrible world. . . ." (158). But through the collective effort of seeing the world as it is, "we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery; and we help each other to discern, amidst the gather dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace, and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected" (158). In times such as these, we turn to literature and art from the margins to glean the lessons we need to help us survive . . . and thrive!

Discussion of Act III

We pay high prices for the maintenance of the myth of the Individual: we have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death, and on and on.
                  Tony Kushner, Afterword, Angels in America, Pt. II

In Act II you watched everything come apart: the couples split, the sick end up in the hospital, Joe comes out to his mom and she hangs up on him. Not a pretty picture. Act III, subtitled "Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning," begins more hopefully. As the characters have reached their lowest points, there’s nothing for them to do but grow . . . or die. In Act III we watch each character face the challenge of beginning a new life after the changes of Act II.

Prior, visited by his ancestors, talks about his fear of dying, his sadness about being abandoned by Louis. An encounter with the angel convinces Prior that he’s suffering one of the most pernicious effects of AIDS, dementia.

Louis visits on Belize a long, guilty harangue about American politics. Impatient with Louis’ self-centered rantings, Belize departs, but not before conferring one of the most hopeful lines of the play. Noticing the impending snowstorm, he associates it with "softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace" (100).

Harper, seeking an escape after the dissolution of her marriage, goes to Antarctica with Mr. Lies, who offers her a "deep-freeze for feelings" (102). She returns to her fantasy of pregnancy (rebirth?) and fantasizes that her newborn will have a "pouch [she] can crawl into. Like a marsupial. We’ll mend together" (103). Ever aware of her vulnerability, Harper articulates the need for healing that all of the characters are experiencing.

Joe’s mother, Hannah, arrives in New York, probably intending to straighten out her son but instead meeting the critically ill Prior (in Part II of the play) and developing a deep compassion for this man and his gay compatriots.

As Roy struggles with a fatal illness, the transgressions of his past arrive to haunt him, represented by a ghost of his past, Ethel Rosenberg. As observed in the playwright’s notes at the beginning of the play, "the acts attributed to the character Roy, such as his illegal conferences with Judge Kaufmann during the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, are to be found in the historical record" (5). In the PBS documentary about the making of Angels, Tony Kushner says Roy is an exemplar of Reagan’s politics, premised on the belief that society will only be pleasant for a few, while the majority suffer amidst the chaos of social disintegration. Kushner sees the Reagan years as a moral and economic disaster, marked by its deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable members of our society, those, like Prior, who simply cannot meet our society's requirements for individualism and self-reliance. Ironically, the play reveals, those who appear to be the strong individuals, like Joe, ultimately seem to be the most wounded, the least able to love and be loved.

At the end of the play, Joe and Louis find each other. "Strange bedfellows," Louis remarks wryly (117), considering that neither feels he deserves to be loved in return.

As the angel finally approaches, in one of the most powerful lines of the play, Prior fights for life: ". . . I’m frightened, I . . . no, no fear, find the anger, find the . . . anger, my blood is clean, my brain is fine, I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong and . . . ." (117). An unwilling participant in the angels’ project, at the end of the play Prior is nevertheless selected as their "prophet." When the angel bursts through the ceiling, she announces that "The Great Work begins" (119).

Since the play doesn’t really end here (it’s just the end of Part I), there’s no real sense of closure in the final scene. On the contrary, there’s a strong sense of mystery; questions are raised: what do the angels want from Prior? Why has he been "chosen" and for what purpose? The director of the Broadway production, George C. Wolfe, provides us a clue: he believes plays such as Angels give us characters from "outside the core" who are in touch with strength and truth and through their journeys of self examination offer us a "manual of survival for the heart, decency and forgiveness" (PBS documentary). Such stories, he feels, are critical in times of crisis such as ours. In America, at the millenium, what kind of "prophet" would a gay man suffering from AIDS be?

It’s reassuring to me that authors who offer us a view from the "margins" can help us see aspects of our lives or society that need rethinking. One critic has spoken of the integral connection between society (the political) and individual lives (the personal) in Kushner’s work: "If as it seems, for Kushner the personal is always at some level political, part of his genius is his ability to make the political inescapably personal" (Hurwitt 40). Writers such as Kushner give us hope that the choices we make in our lives can and do affect society--and vice versa. Although the views we glimpse from the margins can be shocking in the horror they portray, we need such perspective in order to see the world clearly. As Kushner says in the afterword of Perestroika (Angels, Pt. II): "The world howls without; it is at this moment a very terrible world. . . ." (158). But through the collective effort of seeing the world as it is, "we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery; and we help each other to discern, amidst the gather dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace, and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected" (158). In times such as these, we turn to literature and art from the margins to glean the lessons we need to help us survive . . . and thrive!

Hurwitt, Robert. "A Key to Open Kabul." San Francisco Chronicle. 26 May 2002. 40-41.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part One: Millenium Approaches. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1992.

---. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1994.