Angels in America (1991/1992) 

The full title of Tony Kushner’s two-part play is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, with part one being Millennium Approaches and part two, Perestroika. When performed all together, the play is almost eight hours long. Part One: Millennium Approaches premiered in Los Angeles in 1991, and Part Two: Perestroika the next year in ‘92. Then in 1993, Angels in America opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre with Part One starting performances in May and Part Two joining it in November. The original Broadway cast consisted of Ron Leibman, Stephen Spinella, Kathleen Chalfant, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeffrey Wright, Ellen McLaughlin, David Marshall Grant and Joe Mantello. Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika both won the Tony for Best Play in 1993 and 1994, respectively. They both also won the Drama Desk Award for Best Play and Millennium Approaches won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Throughout the play’s life, Tony Kushner has made both minor and major changes to both parts and in 2013 a complete edition was published. It has been revived many times around the world. In 2017, a new production opened at the National Theatre in London to great acclaim. Starring Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, Denise Gough, James McArdle, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, and Russell Tovey, the production transferred to New York the next year for an 18-week engagement at the Neil Simon Theatre. Both the London and New York production received numerous awards including the Olivier Award, the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award for Best Revival of a Play, and acting awards for Andrew Garfield (Tony, Drama Desk), Nathan Lane (Tony, Drama Desk), and Denise Gough (Olivier). Evidenced by its many successful productions across the years, Angels in America has a deep, substantive, and sustaining role in theatre history.  

Plot: 

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The plot of Angels in America is complex, with multiple storylines weaving in and out of each other. The setting is New York City in between October 1985 and February 1986, with the play’s final scene taking place in 1990. At the core of the show is Prior Walter, a gay man diagnosed with AIDS who begins to receive "prophetic" visions. His Jewish boyfriend, Louis Ironson, leaves him when Prior’s symptoms become too much for Louis to witness. Louis meets Joe Pitt, a closeted Republican Mormon lawyer, whose wife, Harper, is addicted to Valium. Joe’s mentor is Roy Cohn, a Jewish D.C. power broker who was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsellor during the second Red Scare in the 1950s. The Roy Cohn of Angels in America is very closely based on the real historical figure Roy Cohn who died of AIDS in 1986. Other characters include Belize, Prior’s best friend and Roy Cohn’s nurse, and Hannah Pitt, Joe’s mother from Salt Lake City. 

Angels in America is about the Jewish experience and the gay experience, not in opposition but in harmony. The play opens on the funeral of Sarah Ironson, Louis' grandmother. It is there that Prior shows Louis his first purple Kaposi's sarcoma lesion, the "wine-dark kiss of the angel of death." The death of Louis' Jewish bubbe is connected to the incoming death of gay Prior. The funeral (and play) begins with a eulogy from Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz about the "Great Voyage"   Sarah took as a Jewish immigrant from Europe to America. Prior Walter will too go on a Great Voyage of a similar vein through his struggle with AIDS. 

Although Prior is a self-described WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), his story in Angels is incredibly Jewish. Throughout the play, as his illness makes him sicker and sicker, a disembodied voice, heard exclusively by Prior, begins to haunt him, culminating in an angel crashing into his bedroom at the end of Millennium Approaches. It is no question that the heavenly bodies in Angels belong to Jewish mysticism. In fact, the Angel describes God as "a flaming Hebrew letter."   In Perestroika, we find out what the Angel and Heaven have in store for Prior. The Angel deems Prior a prophet with the mission to "Forsake the Open Road"  or as Belize summarises, "don’t migrate, don’t mingle."   The Angel, demanding Prior submit to the will of Heaven, blames human progress on driving God out of Heaven and Earth. Prior, afraid that this new job as prophet will lead to his own demise, rejects the Angel, much like the biblical prophet, Jonah. Jonah is not the only Jewish figure Prior becomes. In his attempt to return the prophecy to the Angel, Prior wrestles with her, conjuring the Masoretic story of the patriarch Jacob and his angel. After his fight with the Angel, Prior ascends a ladder to heaven, again just like Jacob did in Sefer Bereshit (The Book of Genesis). When he reaches Heaven, Prior is met with a council of angels whose message he will not deliver. Prior emphasises humanity's need to progress, even if it is detrimental. He then tells the angels how to deal with God’s abandonment:

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This theological view is overtly Jewish, recalling rabbinical ideas of questioning God as well as Holocaust theology. Prior then requests the angels bless him with "more life"   and he descends the ladder out of heaven, landing in a hospital bed with a broken fever. The angels do not cure him of his AIDS, rather Prior gets a supply of AZT (azidothymidine) that allows him to live with the illness. The play ends with Prior blessing the audience, mirroring the rabbi’s opening eulogy. While Prior himself is not Jewish, he uses Jewish characters, ideas, and philosophy to overcome a death by AIDS.

Kushner continues to make this connection between a Jewish and homosexual identity through the characters of Louis Ironson and Roy Cohn. Louis, the grandson of European shtetl immigrants, is a leftist idealist who is constantly wracked with guilt both justified and not. Roy Cohn, on the other hand, feels no guilt whatsoever, which we see through his interactions with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (the Jewish woman the real Roy Cohn sent to the electric chair for accused espionage). While Louis embraces his Jewish neuroses and his homosexuality, Roy sees both identities as weakness. Roy explains to his doctor that he is not a homosexual because “homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.”  When Roy is faced with disbarment, he imagines the jury convicting him because of his Jewishness. Roy recognizes that being a Jewish homosexual puts him very low on the societal food chain, a powerless minority twice over. In late 20th century America, perhaps Roy can get away with being Jewish but he can’t be a homosexual as well. The closet and his Republicanism, however, can’t save Roy from death.

Louis, however, often uses his Jewish heritage as a power move or trump card, for example, accusing Belize of hating him because of his Jewishness. Where Roy finds safety in assimilation, Louis rejects it both as a Jew and a gay man. Although Louis proclaims he is "intensely secular,"    he is very connected to a Jewish history and culture. When faced with Prior’s diagnosis, the first person Louis turns to is Rabbi Chemelwitz, asking him for guidance on Louis’ temptation to abandon Prior. The rabbi tells Louis that if he’s looking for forgiveness, "worse luck for you, bubbulah. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt."    It takes the entire course of the play for Louis to overcome the Jewish yolk of guilt, when he commits an act of expiation through Roy Cohn.    

The two Jewish characters do not meet until the very end of Perestroika, when Louis performs the Mourner’s Kaddish over Roy’s dead body. Belize invites Louis to steal Roy’s stash of AZT (that will eventually save Prior’s life) but before Louis takes it, Belize asks him to thank Roy for the pills by saying "the Jewish prayer for the dead."    In one of the play’s most solemn scenes, Louis performs the Kaddish with the help of Ethel Rosenberg’s spirit, ending the Aramiac prayer with a curse at Roy, "You sonofabitch."    "All the troubled issues of Angels are economically recapitulated in this brilliant little scene… unjust policies around AIDS, the meaning of being gay, the burden of being Jewish."    Roy’s life and Louis’ life cannot be extracted from their roles as gay men or as Jews. Their journeys culminate in the fusion of the Jewish and homosexual experience.

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