Winged Defeat

First appeared in National Review, January 24, 1994.

If, like Tony Kushner, you plan to write a second play wringing another three and a half hours of drama out of the same small set of characters, it is perhaps tempting fate to let one of your players in Part I toss off a quip about "the limitations of the imagination. It's something you learn after your first theme party it's all been done before."

But Angels in America, reviewers seem to agree, is no ordinary stage work subject to ordinary rules. It is an event: a theatrical event, of course, playing to full houses, with a sackful of Tony and Drama Desk prizes, as well as a Pulitzer; but also a literary, artistic, and moral event: a "masterpiece" (The New Yorker), "the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time" (Newsweek). Here, one might hope, is a long-awaited revival of the theater of ideas. As a "Gay Fantasia on National Themes" that crossed over to charm many straight suburbanites, it might also be expected to contribute to mutual understanding on that vexed current issue.

Now, after much anticipation, the second half of Angels has been installed alongside the first at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. The two productions share the same fine director (George C. Wolfe) and often-virtuosic cast, permitting a sort of double-blind comparison between the sugar-coated "Millennium Approaches" (Part I) and the more medicinal "Perestroika" (Part II).

The virtues of Part I, it turns out, are those of traditional entertainment: a steady flow of funny lines and clever observations, defying the gravity of its subject, AIDS, like a masonry bridge, by a sustained use of the arch. The pacing is sharp enough to keep you from caring that the poetic flights and recycled religious imagery don't really make much sense, or that little is happening by way of plot. ("Nobody even died yet," grumbled one patron on his way out.) Even less happens in Part II. In the central dramatic situation of Part I, Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello), overcome by nursing his AIDS-stricken lover, has abandoned him. Now, not very surprisingly, he is failing either to find a new love or be taken back by the old. The traditional playwright's answer would be to send him off to perform some great moral gesture, probably by stopping a bullet, but instead he's left to welter in guilt.

Being Mr. Kushner's alter ego, he at least gets an allotment of choice lines. The cast-off Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), endearingly ditsy in Part I (as when, in diva drag, he pronounced himself an impending "corpsette"), is now well on his way to crankhood, groaning under tablets of prophecy and robed with heavy ideas. Worse dramatic fates await Louis's admirer, the gay Republican lawyer Joe Pitt (David Marshall Grant), and Joe's wife, Harper (Marcia Gay Harden), whose mental derangement is (excuse the solecism) insufficiently motivated, unless you believe that being married to a Republican will do the trick. About the only improvement in characterization is the closer look we get at Hannah Pitt (Kathleen Chalfant), Joe's mother, a stern woman with a talent for knocking the self-indulgence out of characters like Harper.

On the other hand, the character of Roy Cohn, which gave Ron Leibman a justly celebrated star turn in Part 1, now lies abed with little to do while other characters rant on about how awful he is (the "pole star of human evil the worst person who ever lived," etc.). In Part 1, when the ghost of convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg (the fine Kathleen Chalfant again) arrived to haunt him for his role in her execution, she was coolly detached, operating mostly through pauses (as Shakespeare knew, ghosts thrive on silence). Now, to vastly less effect, she tells the dying Cohn that she hates him and laughs at his pain. I have no use for Cohn either, but this is high-school revenge-fantasy stuff.

The funny lines are fewer this time, as are the wry currents of self-deprecation that are needed amid material like this if anger, portentousness, and self-pity are not to intrude like salt into a water table. A chief casualty is Belize, the wisecracking black nurse (Jeffrey Wright), now dismally swollen into a Conscience, the only character the others aren't allowed to score points off, even when he announces, "I hate America." The Angel (Ellen McLaughlin), who descended at the close of Part 1, is also now much in evidence, a beautiful bore. She turns a somersault in the air, a pretty exercise, so she repeats it at intervals through the evening, suggesting first a celestial gymnast and finally Cal Worthington, the Los Angeles car dealer who used to stand on his head on TV ads. In another classic instance of more-is-less, Prior, who was jolted by a sudden vision of a neon aleph in Part I, is now shown the better part of the Hebrew alphabet.

Far more moving is the final scene, where Mr. Kushner gathers his favorite characters in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The sacred waters of the original Bethesda were believed to work miraculous cures, and Prior invites us to imagine a future day when humanity will have passed through the healing flood to emerge whole on the other side. Atop the fountain we see the statue of an angel. "They commemorate death, but they symbolize a world without dying. ...They are made of stone, the heaviest thing on earth, but they symbolize the power of flight."

At moments like this, Mr. Kushner strives for universality and reconciliation. In a nice exchange, Prior, on learning that Mother Pitt is fairly serious about her Mormonism, declares her views "repellent" to him. "How do you know what's going on in my head?" she shoots back. "You don't make assumptions about me, I won't make them about you." She soon shows herself rather more sophisticated than he is.

"I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile," he says, wittily chastened.

Sad to say, that passage is atypical: the crowd-pleasing swipes at conservatives, Republicans, and Mormons, an occasional irritant in Part I, have multiplied this time to fill the dramatic vacuum. They even undermine the play structurally. At the start, Mr. Kushner committed himself to making one of his principal characters, Joe Pitt, both a gay man and an idealistic Reaganite who ghostwrites opinions for a conservative appellate judge. The resulting portrait was uneasy in Part 1, but by now Mr. Kushner is simply fed up with this character and assigns him unbelievable lines and motivations.

In a climactic spat, Louis, who has secretly dug up and read a stack of the opinions his boyfriend has written for the judge, confronts him with his complicity in (we are meant to believe) the ultimate, apocalyptic evil.

It's too bad. A playwright widely lauded for his imagination, one that ranges from Antarctic ice floes to manhole covers in heaven, can't imagine what it's like to be a conservative. And the resulting harangues will seem as unpleasant and off-putting to intelligent conservative playgoers as well, as many of the contents of conservative magazines these days will seem to intelligent gay readers.

We need not demand new ideas in a stage work, and we don't get them in Angels in America. But we might hope for a bit more of the advertised insight into the common humanity of both sides, rather than yet another shove toward the polarization and politicization of this subject.

Meanwhile, those false friends, the overpraising reviewers, do their best to turn Tony Kushner into a monument. For the moment, all it looks as if they've succeeded in doing is taking away his power to fly.

Comments are closed.