December 07, 2003

ANGELS IN AMERICA: AN APPRAISAL

Yale Kramer

About ten years ago, curious about the original production of Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America: Millenium Approaches," I went to see it on Broadway where it was playing at one of Broadway’s largest theaters, the Walter Kerr. My curiosity had been stirred by the wretchedly excessive hype by the then prophet of the theatre, the New York Times critic Frank Rich, and the theatrical buzz that this young gay socialist had overnight become America’s greatest playwright, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Mozart rolled into one, and that he had written something akin to "Hamlet" and "King Lear."

My researches ten years ago finally resulted in a review essay that appeared in the American Spectator in July 1993. Its central focus was an examination of what Kushner was trying to say in the play, about which there was much doubt among the reviewers of the elite media even though they all seemed to think there was something profound in it. My view of the play differed markedly from the views of the trend-defining critics. And eventually John Simon twigged on to this in his review of part two of the play in New York Magazine, several months later. He said “Actually, and not altogether surprisingly, the best assessments of Angels in America so far have come not from us drama critics but from outsiders: Andrew Sullivan, the homosexual editor of The New Republic in his column of June 21, 1993; and the psychiatrist Yale Kramer, in a penetrating analysis in last July’s issue of The American Spectator.”

This, of course, made me think that I had at last driven a stake through the heart of this pretentious, grandiose, hulk of a play and laid it to rest.

But cant, folly, and ignorance are difficult to get rid of. Now a new generation of media elitists are hyping Angels in America, this time about a new film version to be aired on HBO tonight and next Sunday.

This time the hype is so profuse that it took up almost three full pages in last Sunday’s edition of the Times. There Kushner was, big as life, in a photo covering almost half of the front page of the Arts & Leisure section—dreamy-eyed, wearing an ankle-length black coat, poetically mufflered—our resident, aging (now he is forty-seven), genius. The ladies of the press left no detail of his creative life to the imagination. They included in a sidebar a list of some of the young genius’s more profound ideas: “Bush out of the White House in 2004; the retirement of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas; Instant free psychoanalysis for anyone who owns or is thinking of buying an SUV; FREE! PUBLIC! SUPERB! NURSERY SCHOOL TO Ph.D.” These and several others are listed as his current political preoccupations—mind you, not dreams, or hopes, or wishes, but “political preoccupations.”

The interviewer seemed impressed by what she called his “verbal barrage.” “His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential…” She quotes some of his brilliant conversation: “Brecht was like a light bulb going off.” [What he means is “like a flash bulb going off,” or “like a light bulb going on.” But he is too much of genius to care, apparently.] “He [Brecht] teaches you that within what is apparently a naturally occurring event lies a web of human labor and relationships. [Apparently he has discovered that human relationships are complex.] “He teaches you to see that something can be the thing it’s supposed to be, and not.” [It’s not clear whether he is referring to paradox or the difference between appearance and reality. In either case these are ideas that are taught at any decent college in the freshman year.] In this sample of his pretentious speech one can easily see that what passes for brilliance is a combination of name-dropping, pseudo-mastery, conviction, and above all else the uncritical sense he has of his own genius.

Is it unfair to make these generalizations about Kushner from a sentence or two in an interview? No, because much of his writing has this incoherent, incompletely thought-out quality. This is why most critics who characterize his writing as profound cannot really say in what his profundity consists. Much of what he says amounts to a torrent of buzz words and simplex ideas that get signal responses from his worshipful audiences.

What follows is an abridged version of the review-essay written in 1993 on the occasion of the play’s Broadway opening. The essay is an appropriate length for a monthly review, but quite long for a blog—even Horsefeathers. But the play is long, and as long as our cultural media still think it is a play of cultural importance, I believe it is our mission at Horsefeathers to expose it as an expression of fashionable folly. The first part of the essay will appear today and the second part next Sunday.

ANGELS ON BROADWAY

Yale Kramer

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

--Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852

“A most brilliant play,” proclaimed Sir Ian McKellen to the Tony Awards audience in 1993. “One of the greatest…as funny as it is profound,” shouted USA Today. Frank Rich, guru of cultural New York, pronounced on the occasion of its opening in Los Angeles that Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America” had “created an original theatrical world” that “once entered by an open-minded viewer of any sexual or political persuasion, simply cannot be escaped.”

When it opened in New York it won the Pulitzer Prize. Producers nearly shed blood amongst themselves over which of them would bankroll the play on Broadway. Rarely before had we seen the media in such a feeding frenzy. The New Yorker’s John Lahr practically swooned in ecstasy. “From its first beat, ‘Angels in America’ exhibited a ravishing command of its characters and of the discourse it wanted to have through them with our society.” He ended his paean to the play in the mellifluous and reverential tones of an Addison DeWitt—the deliciously hypocritical maker-and-shaker of the theatrical world in All About Eve:

“Kushner and the excellent Taper ensemble had made a little piece of American theatre history on that cloudless California night. ‘Angels in America’ was now officially in the world, covered more or less in glory. It was a victory for Kushner, for theatre, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty.”

The following issue of the New Yorker published a puff piece on Kushner himself that took the words out of Kushner’s mouth and turned them into the usual simplex New Yorker sociopolitical hash: “Kushner, however, did not set out to record the horror of AIDS alone but the horror of American life during the nineteen-eighties—the triumph of heartlessness and the withering of community.”

Actually, if you avoid the media hyperbole and keep a clear head about it, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, turns out to be more flawed than the official gatekeepers of our culture can acknowledge.

“Millenium Approaches,” Part I of “Angels in America,” does not stand alone as a play. You have to wait until Part II to find out the fate of its characters. There are three loosely connected subplots. Joe Pitt, a young Mormon lawyer, decent and honest, is working in New York as a law clerk for a federal court judge. He is also deeply unhappy in his marriage to Harper, a beautiful but flaky young woman addicted to tranquilizers. Apparently the problem is that Joe, a shy man, avoids sleeping with Harper and is struggling with homosexual inclinations and is deeply conflicted about them.

Subplot number two consists of the infamous Roy Cohn trying to persuade the decent and honest Joe Pitt, for whom he has a soft spot, to leave his wife and go to Washington to work as a “Roy Boy” in Ed Meese’s Department of Justice. Joe would be there, Cohn explains, to help protect Cohn against the enemies he believes he has in the white-shoe law firms trying to disbar him. In the middle of all this, Cohn discovers that he has AIDS and begins to show signs of mortality.

Subplot number three is about two gay men in New York: Louis, a Jew, and Prior, a WASP. They have been living together for four years and apparently love each other. At the funeral of Louis’s grandmother that begins the play, Prior tells Louis that he has AIDS. Louis struggles against but loses out to his fear of AIDS and leaves Prior to die alone. But his grief and guilt are not too great to prevent him from finding and seducing honest and decent Joe Pitt.

Part I ends on an indeterminate note: Harper is left in an hallucinatory Antarctica hoping for an Eskimo to come by; Joe is going off to Louis’s apartment to taste gay sex for the first time; Roy Cohen is left writhing in pain on his living room rug as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt him; and Prior is having hallucinatory nightmares in which he is visited by the Angel of Death.

Although the play is not profound, it is understandable that audiences find it dazzling. It is meant to leave the audience bewildered, to make us feel, at the end of it, like dumb hicks—straight, three-piece-suited, permanent-waved goyim. Kushner can’t seem to tell the difference between profundity and razzle-dazzle; he should know that a profound work of art results in a sense of illumination and a clarity about the human condition, not "Wow, what does all this mean? It must be very deep." The razzle-dazzle is created by a combination of techniques serving no other function than to inspire awe and alienation.

There are thirty-two scenes in “Part I: Millenium Approaches,” alternating back and forth between the three plots, thus allowing logical and chronological gaps and discontinuities to occur without the author having to account for them, and leaving us doubtful on occasion about what exactly is going on. These thirty-two scenes are, moreover, often played as split scenes—two scenes at either end of the stage going on at once or alternately.

Contributing to the confusion is the gratuitous and unexplained androgyny. The opening scene consists of a eulogy spoken by a very old rabbi with a long beard—played by a woman. What’s going on? And later in the play, Roy Cohn’s physician tells him he has AIDS; the physician, Henry, is played by a woman in drag. Why? Don’t ask me.

We’ll skip the rapid, overlapping speech, and the excessive length that prolongs the evening well past 11:30 (by which time our critical faculties have long since gone to bed). These contribute to the “brilliance” and tumult but are not important. What is important is the uncertainty and equivocation created by the pseudo-madness and ambivalence in the play. Many of the scenes are dream scenes, or frank hallucinations. Here are the stage directions for Scene 7:

“Mutual dream scene. Prior is at a fantastic makeup table, having a dream, applying the face. Harper is having a pill-induced hallucination. She has these from time to time. For some reason, Prior has appeared in this one. Or Harper has appeared in Prior’s dream. It is bewildering.”

Okay, we get the idea; we’re not complete hicks. We know an analogical relationship when we see one. Though Prior and Harper have never met and don’t even know of each other’s existence, we perceive that they are both rejected lovers, victims of spiritual betrayal, she by her husband, he by his boyfriend. We also know that in the post-Freudian world of the theater, guys like Kushner like to put “higher" truths into the mouths of the insane or into the dreams or hallucinations of their characters, so that they can avow and disavow something at the same time. Both the responsibility for and the truth value of the revelation can remain in doubt. And Kushner is very good at this kind of ambiguous “truth” telling. He knows that audiences don’t like to be lectured, as they are in some other plays about homosexuals.

Kushner is nothing if not clever at warding off resistance to his messages, and ambivalence is another technique he uses for this purpose—almost to a fault. Harper tells Joe she is going to have a baby:

JOE: Are you really?
HARPER: No. Yes. No. Get away from me.

Of course modern audiences have come to expect ambivalence. But it’s one thing to acknowledge an ambivalence of the characters in the plays of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller, whose issues are personal and human-sized. It’s quite another to try to understand the messages that come out of the mouths of Harper and Louis and Joe, whose concerns are with Justice and Love and Good and Evil and Politics and Society, and who are characters in a play whose subtitle is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”

The trouble is that between all the razzle-dazzle, the ambivalence, and the pseudo-madness it is hard to know what the characters, the playwright, and we ourselves believe by the end of the evening. We are, as the playwright wishes us to be, bewildered. Intimidated, confused, impotent, and alienated from what is going on onstage—the way, Kushner wants us to believe, the gay man feels in America today.

Alienation is, indeed, one of the major themes of the play. The first scene, in which the old rabbi makes a funeral speech, sounds the tonic note of alienation—“how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you could not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.” For Kushner, being a Jew is a metaphor for being gay.

On the surface, the play seems to be about the conflict between love and loyalty on the one hand and self-gratification on the other, between selflessness and doing your own thing. The post-Freudian homosexual ideal is to not go against your nature—to be true to your instincts. Two of the major figures in he play—Louis, the ambivalent Jewish intellectual, and Joe, the moral, upright lawyer trying to fight off his homosexual feelings—are faced with this conflict. Louis claims to love Prior, who needs him more than ever now that he is dying of AIDS, yet Louis runs away. He engages in much weeping and breast-beating over his faithlessness, but these have no apparent effect on his behavior. His suffering serves only to arouse him to betray Prior even more by seducing young Joe Pitt, who is wandering around looking to be seduced.

Joe’s moral dilemma is whether to leave his helpless wife and come out of the closet—transgressing against the laws of his God and his parents but being true to his homosexual inclinations—or continue to be a good man “and learn to live dead, just numb.”

All of the protagonists are deeply flawed and yet embody some redeeming quality that makes it possible for the audience to identify with them. It also makes it possible for the author to both accept and reject responsibility for some important truth that each of the characters utters. Louis, pathetically weak, childish, and cowardly, is also witty, and charmingly self-reproachful. Joe is timid, passive, and confused, but decent, kind, and good. Even Roy Cohn, who is meant to be demonic—which in Kushner’s scheme is the same as being Republican—demonstrates flashes of redeeming tenderness. But more important, what redeems him is his homosexuality—even though he hates homosexuals. In some sense Kushner is saying that no matter what evil Cohn committed in his life, the fact that he was a homosexual makes him worthy of redemption.

Cohn is certainly the most compelling character in the play. Like Satan in “Paradise Lost,” he has all the best lines; we listen to his blasphemies, his sophistries with fascination, half believing them and admiring him. He stands for ruthlessness, lawlessness, raw power, and unbridled self. He redefines the essence of homosexuality, in one of the most interesting moments of the play, as impotence in the real world rather than sexual preference. Power, he says, is what defines a heterosexual man, not whether he “fucks around with guys.” This may be self-delusion, but there is a grain of truth in what Cohn says, and Kushner knows it.

In fact, the moral dilemmas of Louis and Joe are cliches in the world of gay drama. Every so-called AIDS play—Robert Chesley’s “Jerker,” William Hoffman’s “As Is,” Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart”—focuses on the issues of loyalty and fear of abandonment: Will you still love me and stay with me when I’m diseased, ugly, and dying? Should I stay with him when he’s dangerous and no fun to be with? And the coming-out-of-the-closet dramas like “March of the Falsettos” all face similar issues of betrayal: Should I leave my wife and children, whom I love, and finally realize my true self, or do my duty to them and go on living a lie?

These moral issues don’t seem like cliches in “Angels in America” because of all the theatrical tumult. Before you realize what is happening you are off to the next scene/subplot. And all those mystical moments—feathers falling out of nowhere inexplicably; the Book of Life suddenly appearing and disappearing in someone’s vision; Prior’s ancestors from past centuries appearing to him for some hard-to-understand purpose; and finally the pseudo-apocalyptic appearance of the Angel of Death in the final moments—the theater of the Fabulous, as Kushner calls it—make it easy to disguise the basically familiar plot structure.

What Kushner is good at besides theatrics is humor. The humor is mocking and self-mocking, some of it clever. Much of it is gay-oriented. Louis and Prior are both effeminate, and so do and say a lot of campy things that get laughs because some in the audience will recognize them as gay and thus get pleasure from seeing them onstage—the schlock of recognition, so to speak. The laughs depend more on performance or intonation than verbal wit. For example, Prior says, “Jewish curses are the worst. I personally would dissolve if anyone ever looked me in the eye and said, ‘Feh.’” This gets a very big laugh because of the intonation and exaggeration of the performance.

Though there is much hand-wringing, shouting, and weeping among the players, most of this is strangely unmoving. This is because the play is not about real people and the motives that drive the characters are not human motives, but the invented motives of an allegorist. The people on stage are symbols or stereotypes—The Cold Strict Mother, the Ruthless Power-Mad Egomaniac, The Weak, Effeminate, Charming Gay. This is not immediately apparent because of Kushner’s clever use of ambivalence to make his allegorical symbols appear more realistic and human than they really are. There is no one with whom one can empathize as we could with Albin, the drag queen in the film “La Cage aux folles,” in his poignant moments of self revelation. Where “La Cage aux folles” had no message and was about human feeling, “Angels in America” has more messages than Western Union and only bogus feelings that remain unshared by the straight audience.

The recognition of a sense of alienation as a social phenomenon goes back to Marx and Durkheim, and has been ascribed to many economic and political causes since then. And from the beginning of time many groups have been identified as alienated—the Christians because of their Roman persecutors, workers because of the grinding condition imposed on them by the owners of the means of production, Jews because of the anti-Semitism of Christians, blacks because of the racism of whites, youth because of the oppressive values of adults. Now the spotlight has focused on homosexuals and their persecutors, the so-called homophobes.

In all of the gay plays on and off Broadway, the theme of alienation is central—as it is in “Angels in America.” Throughout the play images of alienation abound in the form of craziness, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. In all of these, the victim’s persecutor takes the form of the white male heterosexual Republican Establishmentarian. Prior says:

“People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize…maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into the freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.”

The metaphor for AIDS and homosexuality is always the same—impotent, passive victims controlled, persecuted, and doomed by powerful men unsympathetic to their needs.

What Kushner cannot acknowledge—because his Broadway audience includes straights as well—other gay coterie plays can acknowledge because they don’t worry about straight sensibilities. It is that the essence of alienation for gay men, or at least for the gay men who write plays, comes from the inner conflict they feel between what they really want and what the straight world can realistically give them.

It is foolish to suggest that there is only one set of gay values, one gay lifestyle. There are probably many—not an unlimited number, but at least several. There are some gay men who don’t want to march in parades or protest. There are some who want to lead discreet sexual lives, like many heterosexual men. There are some who have had one or very few sexual partners in their lives. There may even be some who are not interested in gay theater. It is therefore best to generalize in a very limited way to those gay men who write plays and those gay men who applaud them. (Female homosexuality has vastly different behavioral patterns and psychological dynamics.) These men know that sex can have many meanings, can be used for self-punishment, revenge, hostility, humiliation, love, degradation, and for other psychological purposes as well. Louis, in a spasm of guilty self-punishment, goes into the park late at night and finds an anonymous “butch” sadist.

MAN: What do you want?
LOUIS: I want you to fuck me, hurt me, make me bleed.

Many homosexuals like to define homosexuality publicly as the inherent need to love somebody of the same sex. Such a simple definition may be useful propaganda in the media or in congressional testimony but hardly even touches the more complex aspects of male homosexuality and its relationship to social and political forces.

[Part II of this essay will appear next Sunday]