Angels in America

by Tony Kushner

  8) Staging the Anti-Migratory Epistle: Act Two confronts directors, actors and designers with the formidable (but, I hope, exciting and enjoyable) challenge of staging three characters occupying two locations that are separated, albeit permeably and not cleanly, by distance and time.

  This is a scene involving three characters: Prior, the Angel and Belize. There’s a temptation to sideline Belize to a stationary spot on the outskirts and leave him there for the duration, tossing in quips, irrelevant to the action. This is a tempting choice because it makes the scene easier to stage. The problem is that without Belize’s active involvement, the scene makes no sense. The overarching actions are the Angel’s arrival, the delivery of the Epistle, Prior’s refusal of it, and then his unwilling acceptance of or forced submission to it. But the scene takes place in the present as well as in the past, and integral to the event is the in-the-bedroom/on-the-street contest between Belize and the Angel for Prior’s attention and soul, a battle of three strong wills that propels/pulls Belize into Prior’s bedroom, into his awful dream—where, once he’s entered, the Angel seems intermittently to be aware of Belize’s presence.

  Belize is tough, but Prior unfolds for him what must sound, to a nurse with considerable experience dealing with AIDS, like a wholly unfamiliar form of dementia, far more coherent than anything Belize has heard from his patients. He’s bewildered, grief-stricken, and, when Prior’s delusions assume uncharacteristically, deeply disturbing reactionary, even racist overtones, Belize becomes frightened and then angry. Thus Prior’s desperate attempt to end his loneliness by telling his best friend about the waking nightmare in which he’s trapped results in even greater isolation.

  9) Her Broken Heart: The Angel’s power and purpose semi-successfully conceal an abandoned lover’s determination to get her lost love to return before everything falls apart. Prior is supposed to be useful, as surrogate for his species, the last fragile hope of averting universal extinction. But to the heart-broken lover that this heavenly emissary also is, he’s a hateful, guilty homewrecker who also happens to be her kin and her ward. In this predicament the Angel is recognizable to Prior, to Belize and to us, and she grows more familiar as the Epistle progresses, but only to a point. As I began, so I’ll end: the Angel isn’t human.

  Two Omitted Scenes from Perestroika

  In previous published versions of Perestroika I included two scenes which were almost always cut in production. In preparing this new version, I decided it was time to acknowledge the verdict of twenty-two years of production history and remove the scenes from the play. I’m including them here for whatever enjoyment and interest they provide readers; the play in production unquestionably works better without them.

  This scene, formerly Act Five, Scene 6, immediately followed the scene in which Prior confronts the Angels in the Hall of the Principalities.

  Act Five, Scene 6

  On the streets of Heaven. Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz and Sarah Ironson are seated on wooden crates with another crate between them. They are playing cards. Prior enters.

  PRIOR: Excuse me, I’m looking for a way out of this, do . . . Oh! You’re . . .

  SARAH IRONSON (To the Rabbi): Vos vil er? [What does he want?]

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Di goyim, zey veysn nisht vi zikh oyftsufirn. [These Gentiles, they have no manners.]

  PRIOR: Are you Sarah Ironson?

  (She looks up at him.)

  PRIOR: I was at your funeral! You look just like your grandson, Louis. I know him. Louis. He never wanted you to find out, but did you know he’s gay?

  SARAH IRONSON (Not understanding): Vi? [What?]

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Dein aynickl, Louis? [Your grandson, Louis?]

  SARAH IRONSON: Yeah?

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ (Sotto voce): Er iz a feygele.

  SARAH IRONSON: A feygele? Oy.

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ (To Sarah): Itst gistu. [You deal.]

  PRIOR: Why does everyone here play cards?

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Why? (To Sarah) Dos goy vil visnfar-Vos mir shpiln in kortn. [The goy wants to know why we play cards.]

  OK.

  Cards is strategy but mostly a game of chance. In Heaven, everything is known. To the Great Questions are lying about here like yesterday’s newspaper all the answers. So from what comes the pleasures of Paradise? Indeterminacy! Because mister, with the Angels, may their names be always worshipped and adored, it’s all gloom and doom and give up already. But still is there Accident, in this pack of playing cards, still is there the Unknown, the Future. You understand me? It ain’t all so much mechanical as they think.

  You got another question?

  PRIOR: I want to go home.

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Oh simple. Here. To do this, every Kabbalist on earth would sell his right nut.

  Penuel, Peniel, Ja’akov Beth-Yisroel, Killeeyou, killeemee, OOO-oooooooo-OOOO-oooooohmayn!

  (The ladder, the music and the lights. Prior starts to descend.)

  SARAH IRONSON: Hey! Zogt Loubeleh az di Bobbe zogt:

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: She says tell this Louis Grandma says:

  SARAH IRONSON: Er iz tomid geven a bissele farblonjet, shoin vi a boytshikl. Ober siz nisht keyn antshuldigunk.

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: From when he was a boy he was always mixed up. But it’s no excuse.

  SARAH IRONSON: He should have visited! But I forgive. Tell him: az er darf ringen mit zain Libm Nomen. Yah?!

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: You should struggle with the Almighty.

  SARAH IRONSON: Azoi toot a Yid.

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: It’s the Jewish way.

  END OF SCENE

  In earlier versions of Perestroika’s Act Five, this scene followed Scene 7 and preceded Scene 8 (in the current version’s numbering).

  Roy, in Heaven, or Hell or Purgatory—standing waist-deep in a smoldering pit, facing a great flaming Aleph, which bathes him and the whole theater in a volcanic, pulsating red light. Underneath, a basso-profundo roar, like a thousand Bessemer furnaces going at once, deep underground.

  ROY: Paternity suit? Abandonment? Family court is my particular metier, I’m an absolute fucking demon with Family Law. Just tell me who the judge is, and what kind of jewelry does he like? If it’s a jury, it’s harder, juries take more talk but sometimes it’s worth it, going jury, for what it saves you in bribes. Yes I will represent you, King of the Universe, yes I will sing and eviscerate, I will bully and seduce, I will win for you and make the plaintiffs, those traitors, wish they had never heard the name of . . .

  (Huge thunderclap)

  Is it a done deal, are we on? Good, then I gotta start by telling you you ain’t got a case here, you’re guilty as hell, no question, you have nothing to plead but not to worry, darling, I will make something up.

  END OF SCENE

  With a Little Help from My Friends

  This essay was originally published in the New York Times on November 21, 1993, and was included in the two previous published versions of Perestroika.

  Angels in America, Parts One and Two, has taken five years to write, and as the work nears completion I find myself thinking a great deal about the people who have left their traces in these texts. The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that artistic accomplishment is exclusively the provenance of individual talents, is politically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts.

  While the primary labor on Angels has been mine, over two dozen people have contributed words, ideas and structures to these plays: actors, directors, audiences, one-night stands, my former lover and many friends. Two in particular, my closest friend, Kimberly T. Flynn (Perestroika is dedicated to her), and the man who commissioned Angels and helped shape it, Oskar Eustis, have had profound, decisive influences. Had I written these plays without the participation of my collaborators, they would be entirely different—would, in fact, never have come to be.

  Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual:
We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death. Way down close to the bottom of the list of the evils Individualism visits on our culture is the fact that in the modern era it isn’t enough to write; you must also be a Writer, and play your part as the protagonist in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic; the punishment dismal; it’s a zero-sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.

  When I started to write these plays, I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition’s ugly twin, pretentiousness. Given the bloody opulence of this country’s great and terrible history, given its newness and its grand improbability, its artists are bound to be tempted towards large gestures and big embraces, a proclivity de Tocqueville deplored as a national artistic trait nearly two hundred years ago. Melville, my favorite American writer, strikes inflated, even hysterical, chords on occasion. It’s the sound of the Individual ballooning, overreaching. We are all children of “Song of Myself.” And maybe in this spacious, under- and depopulated, as yet only lightly inscribed country, the Individual will finally expand to its unstable, insupportably swollen limits, and pop. (But here I risk pretentiousness, and an excess of optimism to boot—another American trait.)

  Anyone interested in exploring alternatives to Individualism and the political economy it serves, Capitalism, has to be willing to ask hard questions about the ego, both as abstraction and as exemplified in oneself.

  Bertolt Brecht, while he was still in Weimar-era Berlin and facing the possibility of participating in a socialist revolution, wrote a series of remarkable short plays, his Lehrstücke, or learning plays. The principal subject of these plays was the painful dismantling, as a revolutionary necessity, of the individual ego. This dismantling is often figured, in the learning plays, as death.

  Brecht, who never tried to hide the dimensions of his own titanic personality, didn’t sentimentalize the problems such personalities present, or the process of loss involved in letting go of the richness, and the riches, that accompany successful self-creation.

  Brecht simultaneously claimed and mocked the identity he’d won for himself, “a great German writer,” raising important questions about the means of literary production, challenging the sacrosanctity of the image of the solitary artist and, at the same time, openly, ardently wanting to be recognized as a genius. That he was a genius is inarguably the case. For a man deeply committed to collectivity as an ideal and an achievable political goal, this blazing singularity was a mixed blessing at best and at worst, an obstacle to a blending of radical theory and practice.

  In the lower right-hand corner of the title page of many of Brecht’s plays you will find, in tiny print, a list of names under the heading “collaborators.” Sometimes these people contributed little, sometimes a great deal. One cannot help feeling that those who bore those minuscule names, who expended the considerable labor the diminutive typography conceals, have gotten a bum deal. Many of these effaced collaborators, Ruth Berlau, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, were women. In the question of shared intellectual and artistic labor, gender is always an issue.

  Last spring, after Millennium Approaches had opened on Broadway, on the day when the Tony nominations were being handed out [May 1993], I left the clamorous room at Sardi’s thinking gloomily that here was another source of anxiety, another obstacle to getting back to work rewriting Perestroika. In the building’s lobby I was introduced to the producer Elizabeth I. McCann, who said to me: “I’ve been worried about how you were handling all this, till I read that you have an Irish woman in your life. Then I knew you were going to be fine.” Ms. McCann was referring to Kimberly T. Flynn; an article in the New Yorker last year about Angels in America described how certain features of our shared experience dealing with her prolonged health crisis, caused by a serious cab accident several years ago, had a major impact on the plays.

  Kimberly and I share Louisiana childhoods (she’s from New Orleans, I grew up in Lake Charles); different but equally complicated, powerful religious traditions and an ambivalence towards those traditions; Left politics informed by liberation struggles (she as a feminist, I as a gay man), as well as socialist and psychoanalytic theory; and a belief in the effectiveness of activism and the possibility of progress.

  From the beginning Kimberly was my teacher. Though largely self-taught, she was more widely read and she helped me understand both Freud and Marx. She introduced me to the writers of the Frankfurt School and their early attempts at synthesizing psychoanalysis and Marxism; and to the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, whose importance for me rests primarily in his introduction into these “scientific” disciplines a Kabbalist-inflected mysticism and a dark, apocalyptic spirituality.

  As both writer and talker Kimberly employs a rich variety of rhetorical strategies and effects, even while expressing deep emotion. She identifies this as an Irish trait; it’s evident in O’Neill, Yeats, Beckett. This relationship to language, blended with Jewish and gay versions of the same strategies, is evident in my plays, in the ways my characters speak.

  More pessimistic than I, Kimberly is much less afraid to look at the ugliness of the world. She tries to protect herself far less than I do, and consequently she sees more. She feels safest, she says, knowing the worst, while most people I know, myself included, would rather be spared and feel safer encircled by a measure of obliviousness. She’s capable of pulling things apart, teasing out fundamental concerns from their camouflage; at the same time she uses her analysis, her learning, her emotions, her lived experience, to make imaginative leaps, to see the deeper connections between ideas and historical developments. Through her example I learned to trust that such leaps can be made; I learned to admire them, in literature, in theory, in the utterances people make in newspapers. And certainly it was in part her example that made the labor of synthesizing disparate, seemingly unconnected things become for me the process of writing a play.

  Since the accident Kimberly has struggled with her health, and I have struggled to help her, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing; and it doesn’t take much more than a passing familiarity with Angels to see how my life and my plays match up. It’s always been easier talking about the way in which I used what we’ve lived through to write Angels, even though I sometimes question the morality of the act (while at the same time considering it unavoidable if I was to write at all), than it has been acknowledging the intellectual debt. People seem to be more interested in the story of the accident and its aftermath than in the intellectual genealogy, the emotional life being privileged over the intellectual life in the business of making plays, and the two being regarded, incorrectly, as separable. A great deal of what I understand about health issues comes from what Kimberly has endured and triumphed over, and the ways she’s articulated those experiences. But Angels is more the result of our intellectual friendship than it is autobiography. Her contribution was as contributor, teacher, editor, adviser, not muse.

  Perhaps other playwrights don’t have similar relationships or similar debts; perhaps they have. In a wonderful, recently published collection of essays on creative partnerships, entitled Significant Others, edited by Isabelle de Courtivron and Whitney Chadwick, the contributors examine both healthy and deeply unhealthy versions of artistic interdependence in such couples as the Delaunays, Kahlo and Rivera, Hammett and Hellman, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—and in doing so strike forcefully at what the editors call “the myth of solitariness.”

  We have no words for the people to whom we are indebted. I call Oskar Eustis a dramaturg, sometimes a collaborator; but collaborator implies co-authorship and nobody knows what “dramaturg” implies. Angels,
I wrote in the published version of Perestroika, began in a conversation, real and imaginary, with Oskar Eustis. A romantic-ambivalent love for American history and belief in what one of the play’s characters calls “the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up” are things Oskar and I share, part of the discussions we had for nearly a year before I started writing Millennium. Oskar continues to be for me, intellectually and emotionally, what the developmental psychologists call “a secure base of attachment” (a phrase I learned from Kimberly).

  The play is indebted, too, to writers I’ve never met. It’s ironical that Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Olivier Revault d’Allonnes’ Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, provided me with a translation of the Hebrew word for “blessing”—“more life”—which subsequently became key to the heart of Perestroika. Harold Bloom is also the author of The Anxiety of Influence, his oedipalization of the history of Western literature, which when I first encountered it years ago made me so anxious my analyst suggested I put it away. Recently I had the chance to meet Professor Bloom and, guilty over my appropriation of “more life,” I fled from the encounter as one of Freud’s Totem and Taboo tribesmen might flee from a meeting with that primal father, the one with the big knife. (I cite Bloom as the source of the idea in the published script.)