[REVIEW] Angels in America
May. 2nd, 2005 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI had a chance to read Kushner's Angels in America two weeks ago. It's certainly an impressive piece of political drama, and I do look forward to catching the HBO film version. I was unsettled by something in it, though, what felt to my mind like a basic structural flaw. I worried away at this until I found it in the words of the gay African-American nurse Belize to Roy Cohn as he lay dying on his sickbed, when Belize is communicating his vision of heaven.
This vision of heaven as a messy place, as a place with fluid and permeable identities, is all well and good. The problem is that the first person in Angels in America who embraces this answer to the question of personal identity is Cohn himself, in the character's famous speech to his doctor when Cohn is told that he has AIDS.
The real-life person of Roy Cohn appears to have mastered the identity question quite nicely. I was struck by the final two paragraphs of a four-page article on Cohn in People, published in the issue of 14 July 1986 before Cohn's death.
Famously, Cohn's AIDS was--to the doubtful outside world--claimed to be liver cancer, and Barbara Walters was his girlfriend.
This isn't Angels in America's problem, since, in all likelihood, Cohn likely wasn't engaging in the sort of playful confusion that Belize was talking about. It's much more likely that Cohn was simply trying to remain in the closet, starting from false first principles. The more serious problem with Angels in America is that its narrative needs to demonstrate something, but that it seems to be inconsistent about what this something should be.
I might be misreading this play, or, I might be mistaking the importance of this apparent contradiction. I don't think that I'm committing either mistake, though. Angels in America fits squarely into a very long tradition of religious literature concerned with describing the afterlife and recommending what one should do so as to ensure one's arrival at this most favoured of destinations. Heaven, hell, purgatory: A theology that includes these three destinations must be precise on what is to be done to end up in any one of these end-goals of human life. Angels in America doesn't do a very good job at all of communicating these instructions. I like Angels in America and thank Kushner for writing it, but for all of its grand themes and exquisite human drama something terribly important is lacking at its very core.
Like San Francisco. [. . .] Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray sky full of ravens. [. . .] Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. [. . .] And everyone in Belanciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. [. . .] And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. (Perestroika, III.5)
This vision of heaven as a messy place, as a place with fluid and permeable identities, is all well and good. The problem is that the first person in Angels in America who embraces this answer to the question of personal identity is Cohn himself, in the character's famous speech to his doctor when Cohn is told that he has AIDS.
You problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. [. . . Labels] tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain in the pecking order? not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favours. This is what a label refers to. (Millennium Approaches, I.9M)
The real-life person of Roy Cohn appears to have mastered the identity question quite nicely. I was struck by the final two paragraphs of a four-page article on Cohn in People, published in the issue of 14 July 1986 before Cohn's death.
There is, as there always has been, a central enigma about Roy Cohn. He is an intellect who prefers the company of scoundrels. He has been intoxicated with wealth and power and yet may finish his life on charity. He has made the entire government dance and yet could not control his tax returns. He dines at New York's elegant Le Cirque, yet the meal is invariably tuna fish.
These days he is attended by a young associate, Peter Fraser, who frets about his boss's drinking and diet. The big-shot friends and cronies are, for the most part, gone. The celebrity- packed parties have ended. Roy Cohn, who made the mighty quake, is a lonely, dying man.
Famously, Cohn's AIDS was--to the doubtful outside world--claimed to be liver cancer, and Barbara Walters was his girlfriend.
This isn't Angels in America's problem, since, in all likelihood, Cohn likely wasn't engaging in the sort of playful confusion that Belize was talking about. It's much more likely that Cohn was simply trying to remain in the closet, starting from false first principles. The more serious problem with Angels in America is that its narrative needs to demonstrate something, but that it seems to be inconsistent about what this something should be.
- All current hierarchies and systems of categorization should be destroyed. They should be replaced by another system of categorization, built on sounder grounds than before.
- All current hierarchies and systems of categorization should be destroyed. They should be replaced by open-ended and pragmatic systems not undergirded by theory.
I might be misreading this play, or, I might be mistaking the importance of this apparent contradiction. I don't think that I'm committing either mistake, though. Angels in America fits squarely into a very long tradition of religious literature concerned with describing the afterlife and recommending what one should do so as to ensure one's arrival at this most favoured of destinations. Heaven, hell, purgatory: A theology that includes these three destinations must be precise on what is to be done to end up in any one of these end-goals of human life. Angels in America doesn't do a very good job at all of communicating these instructions. I like Angels in America and thank Kushner for writing it, but for all of its grand themes and exquisite human drama something terribly important is lacking at its very core.
