Poignant `Angels in America' provides funny insights

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by Ryan Minor

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The title change occurred because despite our enlightened rhetoric and official aesthetic creed that being gay is cool, AIDS and three-dimensional gay men are still woefully taboo ( Philadelphia , anyone?). As one character says, "That's just liberalism, the worst kind of liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance. And what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred."

Angels , which is divided into two parts -- "Millennium Approaches," which I am now reviewing, and "Perestroika," which opens in a couple of weeks -- is about a disintegrating world order. This decaying order is personified not only by AIDS, intolerance and other hot topics, but also by some fairly archetypal people who are directly dealing with them: a gay couple (Prior, who has AIDS, and Louis, who has liberal guilt), a nominally straight Mormon one (pill-popping Harper and her closeted husband Joe) and Roy Cohn (J. Edgar Hoover's henchman), Joseph McCarthy and not incidentally, a closeted homosexual with AIDS.

Add to that Ethel Rosenberg, Reaganite politicos, an ex-drag queen and heavy doses of apocalyptic mysticism and some of the wittiest dialogue since Shakespeare, and you have Angels in America .

The great irony with this self-imposed censorship, as well as the omnipresent disclaimers that the play is not for everyone, is that Angels is not that risqué. Prior strips naked for a standard medical check-up, and his lesions are rude enough to forget to pack up and leave so we wouldn't be too scandalized. People cuss a lot. Sex is simulated. And the gay characters resist the opera-and-home-decorating track and actually talk as mature adults. Never mind that this would be standard fare in a PG movie about straight people -- the Alley has braced itself for a backlash.

Whether or not Houston can provide an audience, Angels remains an incredible work of art. I was lucky to have seen the original cast on Broadway. I am glad to attest that this production is just as good as the New York one.

But the star of any Angels production remains Tony Kushner's script, as demonstrated by the following scene, in which Prior first tells Louis that he has AIDS:

LOUIS: What? Tell me.

PRIOR: K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death ... I'm a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire's disease.

LOUIS: Stop.

PRIOR: My troubles are lesion.

LOUIS: Will you stop !

PRIOR: Don't you think I'm handling this well? I'm going to die.

But Louis cannot deal with his lover's illness:

PRIOR: I can't find a way to spare you, baby. No wall like the wall of hard scientific fact. K.S. Wham. Bang your head on that.

LOUIS: Fuck you! ( Letting go ) Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!

PRIOR: Now that's what I like to hear. A mature reaction. Let's go see if the cat's come home.

Later on:

PRIOR: It's not going well, really -- two new lesions. My leg hurts. There's protein in my urine, the doctor says, but who knows what the fuck that portends? Anyway it shouldn't be there, the protein. My butt is chapped from diarrhea and yesterday I shat blood.

LOUIS: I really hate this. You don't tell me ...

PRIOR: You get too upset, I wind up comforting you. It's easier ...

LOUIS: Shitting blood sounds bad to me.

PRIOR: And I'm telling you.

LOUIS: And I'm handling it.

PRIOR: Tell me more about justice.

LOUIS: I am handling it.

PRIOR: Well Louis, you win Trooper of the Month.

This is not a healthy landscape, as Kushner's script makes clear. Harper sees "beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart." In one of her Valium-induced hallucinations, she meets Prior, who is dreaming. He opines, "I usually say, `Fuck the truth,' but mostly, the truth fucks you."

Which is exactly what Louis does:

PRIOR: Apartment too small for three? Louis and Prior comfy but not Louis and Prior and Prior's disease? ... I'm dying! You stupid fuck! Do you know what that is? Love! Do you know what love means? We lived together four-and-a-half years, you idiot, you animal.

If anything, Angels is a deeply funny play. Quotable one-liners are scarce, but even in the direst of situations there lies a sense of good-natured wit.

The Alley cast executes this combination of wit and pathos extremely well. The actors playing Roy, Belize (the ex-drag queen and a former lover of Prior's), and especially Harper -- James Black, Michael McElroy and Annalee Jefferies, respectively -- were to me better than their Broadway counterparts: more "believable," less inclined toward the stock figures which could easily have plagued as sweeping a play as Angels .

My main problem with the production was the Alley Theatre. Angels works best in a smallish theatre, true, but one with a proscenium stage; the arena approach is too limiting. The famous Angel who crashes through the roof can't crash through the roof here. And one of the most poignant images of the Broadway production -- a scene in which Louis comforts Prior in a beautiful Pieta-like pose after Prior has "an accident" -- was impossible on this stage. Above all, the words in this play require some distance, and up-close I felt that the words were being performed in some sort of staged dramatic reading.

The Alley is very excited about this production -- my press kit was emblazoned with an angel feather -- and they have every right to be. It is an amazing piece of theater.

As the Angel says, "The Great Work begins."

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the April 7, 1995 issue.

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