As we follow these couples’ trials, we come across a handful of other colorful characters, including Roy Cohn, a malevolent, secretly gay Republican lawyer, political power broker, and mentor of Joe’s who is dying of AIDS Belize, Prior’s ex-lover and a former drag queen who is stuck in the middle of Prior and Louis’s failing relationship Hannah, Joe’s straight-laced, no-nonsense Mormon mother from Salt Lake, and The Angel, a divine emanation who appears to Prior as a messenger of God to inform him that “The Great Work” is about to begin. In its blending of fantastical with familiar, ruin with repair, and conservatism with change, Angels in America tells that we, even in the darkest of times, can find community and comfort.Angels in America is Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour epic, which he describes as “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” In the first part, we meet Louis and Prior and Harper and Joe, two couples whose relationships are on the rocks: the former because of Prior’s AIDS diagnosis and Louis’s inability to cope with illness, the latter because of Joe’s closeted homosexuality and Harper’s incessant fears and hallucinations, as well as her addiction to pain-killers. Kushner has subtitled his play, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which we can see in its scope and breadth with examining queerness and the entity of “America” through a range of lenses, from suffering to sacredness.
In this atmosphere of uncertainty and decay, how, then, do we keep moving forward? As one of the characters, Harper, tells us: “everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way.” While Harper’s statement is about the world at large, it also rings true to the characters in the play as they face tumult in their own lives.
Part One of Tony Kushner’s sweeping set of epics, Millennium Approaches chronicles the intersecting stories of a cast of New York (and otherworldly) characters as they grapple with the AIDS epidemic, the social and political climate of the 1980s, and the approaching of the new millennium.
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