Angels in America

A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

1993

Part 1:  Millennium Approaches

ACT I - BAD NEWS  October - November 1985

Joe Pitt, Chief Clerk for a Federal Appellate Judge, a Mormon and Reagan-revolution conservative, is offered a job in Washington with the Justice Department by his mentor, Roy Cohn, the former aide of Joe McCarthy and now a major conservative power broker.  Joe's wife, Harper, spends her days spinning fantasies of travel with the help of an imaginary travel agent, Mr. Lies, and feeling anxious about her troubled marriage.  Louis Ironson and Prior Walter are lovers.  Following the funeral service of Louis' grandmother, Prior reveals to Louis that he has discovered a Kaposi's Sarcoma lesion;  he has AIDS.  He hasn't told Louis for several days because he's afraid that Louis will leave him.  Louis and Joe meet in the men's room at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan.  Louis assumes that Joe is gay, which Joe denies.  Joe and Harper's marriage is disintegrating under the combined pressure of Harper's refusal to move to Washington and Joe's increasingly obvious lack of sexual interest in her.  He begins to spend long hours away from the apartment.  She asks him if he's gay;  he says he isn't.  She tells him that she's pregnant;  he accuses her of lying but can't be sure.  Louis and Prior are also having serious problems;  Louis is unable to handle the progress of Prior's opportunistic infections, and Prior is feeling worse every day.  Roy Cohn is diagnosed as having AIDS.

Part 1:  Millennium Approaches

ACT II - IN VITRO  December 1985 - January 1986

Prior's condition worsens and he's admitted to a hospital.  Louis leaves him at the hospital and doesn't come back.  Roy pressures Joe to take the job and leave Harper;  in the process he tells Joe that he's dying of liver cancer.  Belize, Prior's best friend and former lover, visits Prior in the hospital.  Prior asks if Belize has heard from Louis;  he hasn't.  Prior tells Belize that he's been hearing a beautiful voice, the sound of which gives him an erection.  Martin Heller, a flackman from the Reagan White House, has come to New York to help Roy pressure Joe into taking the job.  Roy reveals in the process that he's about to be subjected to disbarment proceedings for, among other things, borrowing money from a client.  Roy has an unshakable, if not to say irrational, conviction that Joe is the person who can protect him n D.C.  Louis and Joe meet again, this time on the steps of the courthouse.  Late at night, Joe calls Hannah, his mother in Salt Lake, and tells her that he's gay.  She hangs up on him.  Joe tells Harper that he has no sexual feelings for her.  She vanishes.  Louis goes to the hospital to tell Prior that he's  moving out.  The morning following the phone call from Joe, Hannah Pitt arranges to do mission work in New York, sells her house and leaves Salt Lake.

Part 1:  Millennium Approaches

ACT III - NOT-YET-CONSCIOUS, FORWARD DAWNING  January 1986

At home at night, Prior beings to be visited by the ghosts of ancestors who've died of earlier epidemics:  a 13th-century farmer and a 17th-century Londoner.  They warn him that a mysterious messenger is on her way.  Louis meets Belize in a coffee shop to tell him that he's completely miserable since leaving Prior.  Belize tells Louis that Prior is withdrawing from his friends and believes he's going nuts.  Harper, after vanishing from the Brooklyn apartment, finds herself with Mr. Lies in a fantasy Antarctica, feeling great and free to remake the world according to her own needs.  Hannah arrives from Salt Lake, but Joe hasn't met her at the airport, and she's gotten lost in the South Bronx.  A homeless woman directs her to the Mormon Visitors Center.  Joe tells Roy that he won't take the job.  Roy is furious.  To illustrate to Joe the importance of putting effectiveness before morality, Roy admits that he improperly influenced the judge in the Rosenberg case to secure the execution of Ethel Rosenberg.  After Joe leaves Roy, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to tell Roy that his historical moment is up.  Roy collapses;  Ethel thoughtfully calls the ambulance for him.  Joe follows Louis to Central Park the same night, and admits to Louis that he's gay and attracted to him.  They go together to Louis' apartment.  Prior, alone at home, hears the flapping of great wings;  the ceiling of his bedroom rips open.  An angel descends, calling him Prophet, announcing herself as a messenger, and declaring that their work together will begin.

New Statesman

Monday February 16, 2004

Wings of desire: an anachronistic vision of Reagan-era America fails to convert Andrew Billen  (an excerpt)

In his two Angels in America plays, Tony Kushner delivered a secular Book of Revelation to a United States that seemed to be hurtling to hell. The best were dying of Aids, the worst were full of Reaganite intensity. By the time they were performed ten years ago, they already formed a commentary on a retreating era, the 1980s, but the conclusion was still to play for. HBO's revival of the work as a Mike Nichols "film" (it was actually six hour-long episodes, shown unhelpfully last weekend in two three-hour chunks on Channel 4) therefore posed the question: was Nichols revisiting Angels as a period piece or as a classic still relevant today?

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