As a born-and-raised Catholic, angels were a symbol that I latched onto. They were always depicted so beautifully, with billowing robes, soft faces, and powerful wings that proved their divine power. They were guardians, messengers, warriors: the ultimate symbol of comfort and beauty within the religion I was raised in. In fact, although I am not nearly as involved in the Catholic faith as I used to be, I still consider angels to be very beautiful, and the word “angel” still gives me the comforting warm-and-fuzzies.
So naturally, if a piece of media depicted an angel, I was interested. And somewhere along the way, I discovered Tony Kushner’s award-winning two-part play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. I think I first found it through the 2003 miniseries, with the poster of Emma Thompson’s angel descending in a burst of golden light. Although I still have not seen the miniseries, nor have I seen the play, I found an audio recording of the 2017 Broadway cast.
In 1980s New York City, six different characters grapple with their personal, religious, or political issues. Prior discovers that he’s sick with AIDS, and his lover, Louis, becomes so distraught by the news that he abandons Prior. As a distraction, Louis gets close to another man, Joe, a closeted gay Republican man who also works as a legal clerk for the slimy lawyer Roy Cohn, who soon learns that he is in the late stages of AIDS. Belize, Prior and Louis’s sometime-drag queen friend, becomes Roy’s nurse. And Harper, Joe’s wife, is addicted to pills, and wanders in and out of drug-induced hallucinations.
Angels in America is the epitome of melancholy. Set during the AIDS epidemic, the characters grapple with their mortality and their sexuality. Joe, for example, is a closeted gay man who comes out to his mother with less than successful results. He is a Mormon Republican who works for the most ruthless Republican lawyer in New York City, so coming out of the closet is tantamount to political and personal treason. Roy Cohn insists that he doesn’t have AIDS, but liver cancer instead, refusing to confess how he, a proud Republican who prosecuted against the Rosenbergs and did this wonderful country a great service, could have a “homosexual” disease.
In some ways, Angels in America is yet another story of characters suffering beautifully in New York City, but this time with more blatant angel imagery to compile the beautiful suffering. Louis and Belize have an argument next to Bethesda Fountain with the angel statue. Prior has a powerful fever dream of the hospital roof crashing down around him to reveal an angel descending from the heavens. I find those images very striking and a focal point of real beauty in a sad story like this.
And what a deeply human story it is. Louis makes the mistake of turning his back on Prior, finding solace in another man he knows nothing about, and learning almost too late what a mistake it was. It doesn’t help that Prior appears to be going insane, taking his angelic vision to heart and truly believing that he is a prophet with a divine mission. Meanwhile, Joe grapples with how to care for his deeply depressed addict wife, and how to move forward after coming out to her and his deeply religious mother as gay.
We even see some shreds of humanity within Roy Cohn, infamous for being part of Joseph McCarthy’s team, who prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for supposedly engaging in Communist activity in America. He pretends to give pearls of wisdom to Joe when he is unsure of accepting a position in D.C., and holds himself to a standard of both American and Republican greatness for what he did to the Rosenbergs and everything he’s done since. Of course, he only starts to be somewhat sympathetic once he’s haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and bent over in pain from AIDS, as a sort of comeuppance for the awful things he did.
But there isn’t much levity to the story. There isn’t any particular scene I can remember where you were meant to get a straight-up laugh, unless perhaps you count the scenes where Roy Cohn is sick in the hospital and still being a dick on the phone. Angels in America is obviously not supposed to be a comedy, but for almost eight hours, you’re stuck listening to the poetic ramblings of six very sad, broken, flawed people, and it gets to be a bit much after a time. There is a hopeful ending, but you have to wade through a lot of sadness to get there.
It’s very interesting, though, reading this play in the times that we’re in. I’m not an expert on the Reagan years, but I remember it as a time where leaders tried to bring America back to a more traditional, conservative, religious nation. They tried to bring back a vision of America where the nuclear family riding the capitalist machine would rule the day, all while creating a world that tried to diminish, if not altogether erase, the existence of the LGBTQ+ community. After all, some extreme religious circles framed AIDS as a sinner’s disease: that God was punishing you for not fitting the heterosexual mold.
Joe and Roy have a few conversations about how the Reagan administration will transform America into the twentieth century city on the hill. Roy Cohn in particular talks about his proud service prosecuting against the Rosenbergs for supposedly engaging in Communist activities. To him, it sounds like there is no more proud American thing to do than to put two people that were supposedly Communists to death. They have almost fetishized the American values of protecting democracy and maintaining tradition. And while they fetishize capitalism and heterosexual superiority, people are getting left to die because they did not pray enough, or they were not straight or conservative enough.
And so, I suppose we can find gratification when Roy Cohn finds himself stuck in the hospital, dying of a “homosexual disease” he refuses to admit to, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the very person he helped give a death sentence to, haunts him. The pleasure Ethel takes in tormenting Roy for his misdeeds is sweet, even if Roy still vehemently refuses to apologize for all the terrible things he did.
But still, it doesn’t diminish just how terrible of a place this so-called “city on the hill” can be. Belize, who is a sometime drag queen, sermonizes about why he doesn’t see America as a city on a hill. Rather, he sees it as a cesspool of scammers who sell this idealized version of America that have no intention of actually giving it to people like him: people who don’t fit the white, conservative, heterosexual mold laid down by the people in power. I can’t say I disagree with him.
It took me a while to warm up to all these characters. Prior is absolutely distraught about his AIDS diagnosis, terrified that he is only thirty years old, about to die, still has not done a lot with his life, and his partner of four years has just left him. I can understand him spending the play crying, screaming, and yelling about his pain, but it didn’t make Prior the easiest character to bear.
Joe mostly sucks. He is not only a legal clerk to arguably one of the most evil political figures of the twentieth century, but he also abandons his addict wife when she’s going on a bender, and he sacks up with Louis knowing that he helped design legislation that diminishes Louis’s humanity as a gay man. His humanity comes from how he tries to wrestle with his own homosexuality, especially in the scene where he drunkenly calls his mother to finally tell her that he is gay. It’s one of the more haunting, sad scenes in the whole play, because his Mormon mother’s only response is “Drinking is a sin. We raised you better,” before hanging up on him.
It’s like she is so disgusted about her son being gay, but she chooses to focus on the fact that her Mormon son has been drinking, which they are not supposed to do. She’d rather face the fact that her son committed a sin like drinking before she can face that he is gay.
All that being said, the play does move toward a hopeful ending (no spoilers, don’t worry). When Prior has another vision of the angels, they tell him that they have seen catastrophe coming for humanity if they do not stop progressing. God became so fed up with mankind’s destructive progress that he left Heaven at the start of the century. And since then, mankind seems to have moved faster and faster toward complete destruction. Prior cannot deny that terrible things have happened, but he argues that there is no way to stop progress, because humanity will perish if they do not keep going.
And the characters do move forward. The play ends with some of the players standing before the Bethesda Fountain again, rejoicing in the news that the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Cold War is over. They talk about how in ten years, in the year 2000, they will come back to the fountain to bathe in the water, per the legend of the fountain, where the fountain will fill up with water and they can cleanse themselves of their physical and emotional pain. It’s a beautiful ending, and it just speaks to Prior’s point about the necessity of progress.
I’m sure this play would have a much greater impact on me if I had actually seen a performance as opposed to listening to it. But as it is, Angels in America is a powerful piece of work that deserves the recognition it gets. I’m sure there are moments and themes that I neglected to mention here, but the piece is so big I cannot possibly touch base on every single one. It’s quite the heavy piece, with extended periods of despair and confusion, but it’ll likely be worth the journey for anyone seeking beautiful ideas and imagery.
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