Why Tony Kushner is brilliant

Tony Kushner has been in the zeitgeist recently, due to the fact that his magnum opus Angels in America is being revived off-Broadway this fall, as well as a new play of his being released. I came across an interview Kushner did in Vanity Fair, and devoted a few hours this past weekend to re-reading this play. I've been thinking about it a lot since then.

Whenever someone asks me to name my favorite piece of literature, the answer is always the play Angels in America. I came across it when I was 15, because my dad was watching the miniseries of it that HBO had produced. The miniseries was six hours long, he told me, and had Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, and Mary Louise Parker in it, among others. (A random aside- it always felt wrong to me that the first three I listed were always treated like the stars of this film, cause of the name recognition I suppose,  when they really weren't the main characters.) Just from the title and length I immediately brushed it off; I figured it was some weird Touched By an Angel esque thing all about the glory of God, some religious movie. I overheard one line, though, that made me interested in it: "It's 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Or maybe the troubles will come. And the end will come. And the sky will collapse and there'll be terrible rain and showers of poison light. Or maybe, maybe my life is really fine... maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise." 

I watched the entire six hours of it that night. The basic plot of it is that it takes place in 1985, during the AIDS crisis and Reagan administration, and it's politics are one of the main aspects of the book. The protagonist is Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS in New York City, who is abandoned by his boyfriend Louis soon after his diagnosis. Another character, Harper Pitt, is a Mormon woman also living in New York City who has a valium addiction and agoraphobia, who has hallucinations that get even worse once she finds out that her husband Joe is gay, and Joe's boss is the real-life character of Roy Cohn, a Reagan controlled lawyer who hid his AIDS diagnosis from the public, calling his condition liver cancer. 


Prior begins to get very sick, and is visited by an Angel who tells him that he is a prophet who's mission is to "stop moving." She tells him that God has left Heaven because of human beings moving and changing and causing so much suffering by continuing to progress, and the sadness human beings face is echoed in Heaven. In the meantime, Harper's delusions get worse as she imagines she is living in Antarctica with a man named Mr. Lies. I don't want to ruin the play for anyone who considers reading it, or spend this entire blog summarizing, and at any rate it is a very difficult play to describe. 


Kushner wrote this play in response to the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan administrations appalling reaction to what had happened. The play is horribly heartbreaking in some parts, and the few friends I've loaned it to have said that after watching the six hours they've felt emotionally drained. And it is pretty heavy material. Kushner gives us one of the saddest, most sympathetic characters with Prior Walter, who's incredible isolation is felt after his abandonment. (A scene that never fails to make me cry.)


 It is most definitely a political play, and Kushner is an unabashed socialist. Each character discusses and laments over the politics over the time, none more than Louis, Prior's erstwhile boyfriend, who in one memorable excerpt from the play has an almost two page monologue describing democracy in America with Prior's best friend, an African American drag queen named Belize (who also turns out to be Roy Cohn's nurse.) It's pretty dense, but interesting:


Louis: It's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America...
Belize: Here in America race doesn't count. 
Louis: No, no, that's not... I mean you can't be hearing that...
Belize: I...
Louis: It's- look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist-- only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts or spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people. 


I really think this is the play that got me invested in politics, and I started researching the Reagan administration after I read this play. But it also invokes religious issues, as you see characters who are Jewish, Christian, and Mormon and got me interested in different religions. Parts of the play you really do feel Kushner's intense anger and frustration with what had happened in the 80s, and I liked the emotional aspects of it, but I think the main reason I like it so much is that it's so intellectual. I know how pretentious that sounds, but it deals with such intense topics, and holds nothing back. It most definitely has a "liberal agenda," whatever that means, and focuses pretty heavily on the detriments of being individuals instead of communities. Kushner points out the larger culture's disingenuous response to suffering that was seen with the AIDS crisis, and puts out a message of compassion and tolerance, but in no part does the play cross the line to be preachy or manipulative. It rejects the idea of America as it was during the 80s, and strives for something better. In another one of my favorite excerpts, Belize discusses this:


Belize: Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.


I've had a hard time getting people into this play, and I think going straight to the text might be difficult as like I said, it is pretty intense. But I think everyone should at least watch the miniseries, which was one of the best miniseries (or just movies, for that matter) I've ever seen. I've posted the trailer below:







I wish I could just comb over every single detail about this play and discuss it at length. Everything about it is so wonderfully written, it switches from being unbelievably devastating to hysterically comical to spiritual within pages, and each of the characters is written in such an in depth way. Roy Cohn isn't caricatured, and somehow is seen as semi-likable even though he plays one of the most disturbing and horrible people of the 20th century. Kushner doesn't shy away from anything political, and his open condemning of our past is a hope to pave a way for a better future. Or as Harper puts it in one of the plays final scenes, "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so."