Full Title

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Part One is entitled

Millennium Approaches; Part Two is entitled Perestroika
Author
Tony Kushner
Type of work
Play, in two parts
Genre
Political drama (preoccupied with themes of democracy, community and personal
responsibility)
Language
English (although some characters intermittently speak in French)
Time and place written
Begun in 1989; Part One was first presented in workshop form in 1990 and had its
world premiere in 1991, while Part Two was workshopped in 1991 and premiered in
1992, though Kushner continued to tinker with both scripts; written primarily in New
York City
Date of first publication
1992
Publisher
Theatre Communications Group
Narrator
None
Climax
The main climaxes come late in Perestroika, with Louis's confrontation of Joe in Act
Four and Belize and Louis's recitation of the Kaddish for Roy in Act Five. Other, lesser
climaxes include Joe and Louis's abandonment of their lovers in Act Two, Scene Nine of
Millennium; the Angel's first appearance at the end of Part One; and Prior's visit to
Heaven and his rejection of his prophecy at the end of Part Two.
Protagonist
Four main characters can be considered the protagonists: Louis and Joe, who abandon
their partners and then repent, and Prior and Harper, who are abandoned and learn to
assert themselves
Antagonist
Most importantly, Roy Cohn and the Angel; more generally, homophobia and
intolerance, lack of community, and the ravages of AIDS
Setting (time)
October 1985 to February 1986, with an epilogue in February 1990
Setting (place)
Mostly New York City, with a few scenes in Salt Lake City, Moscow and an airliner
flying to San Francisco, along with others in Heaven, Hell, dream sequences and places
imagined by the characters
Point of view
The play focuses equally on all the main characters (Joe, Harper, Louis, Prior, Roy),
giving us access to their thoughts in the form of lengthy speeches to others and

sometimes monologues; some scenes focus on other characters who seem unrelated to the
plot (e.g. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov)
Falling action
Prior returns from Heaven to his hospital room, where his friends are asleep; Louis asks
Prior if he can come back to him, but Prior says no; Harper leaves Joe forever, and boards
a flight to San Francisco; Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah reconvene at the Bethesda
Fountain four years later, as Prior defiantly proclaims his desire to keep living
Tense
Mostly presentaction unfolds before our eyes; a few flashbacks, as when Prior
recounts the story of the Angel's visit to Belize
Foreshadowing
The play does not rely heavily on foreshadowing, although certain early passages evoke
later ones, like Joe's memory of Jacob wrestling the Angel and Prior's literal wrestling in
Part Two
Tone
Often heavily dramatic, poetic and theatrical mixed with frequent humor, allusions to
pop culture and references to contemporary politics and events
Themes
Community; the politics, demands and viewpoints of identity, especially ethnicity, race
and homosexuality; stasis versus change; truth, lying and coming out of the closet;
tradition and heritage; the aftereffects of history; death and disease; prejudice and stigma;
forgiveness; sexuality
Motifs
Biblical references; politics; religion, particularly Judaism and Mormonism; humor,
especially gay camp humor; medicine and the body; travel; imagination, hallucination
and dreams; fantasy; debate and argument
Symbols
Few direct symbols, but some suggestive images include the city of San Francisco; the
Sacred Prophetic Implements; God's flaming Aleph; angels of different kinds

I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt(a sari) the tropopause, the safe air,
and attained(a ajunge) the outer rim(coroana), the ozone, which was
ragged(zdreantuit) and torn, patches(bandaj) of it threadbare(zdrentuit,
jerpelit) as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something
that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who
had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up,
like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the
souls of these departed joined hands, clasped(a fixa ca un carlig) ankles, and
formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen
molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was
repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful

progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I
think that's so. (Harper Pitt)
But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I
do.I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live
through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more
spirit than body more sores than skin when they're burned and in agony
when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children they live.
Death usualy has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I
don't know if it's not braver to die, but i recognize the habbit. The addiction
to being alive. So we live past hope. If i can find hope anywhere, that's it,
that's the best i can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still
bless me anyway. I want more life. And if he comes back, take him to court.
He walked out on us, he aughta pay. (Prior Walter)
The vision oh Heaven by Belize, Angel Of Death
Roy Cohn: What's it like? After?
Belize: After...?
Roy Cohn: This misery ends?
Belize: Hell or heaven?
Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance
Belize: Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.
Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On
every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up
catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth,
fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
Roy Cohn: Isaiah.
Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and
obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting
booths.
Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.
Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance
palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion.
And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race,
taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.
Roy Cohn: And Heaven?
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.
Roy: The fuck it was.

Robert Cohn
Roy Cohn: Aw fuck. Ethel.
Ethel Rosenberg: You don't look good, Roy.
Roy Cohn: Well, Ethel. I don't feel good.
Ethel Rosenberg: But you lost a lot of weight. That suits you. You were
heavy back then. Zaftig, mit hips.
Roy Cohn: I haven't been that heavy since 1960. We were all heavier back
then, before the body thing started. Now I look like a skeleton. They stare.
Ethel Rosenberg: The shit's really hit the fan, huh, Roy? Well the fun's just
started.
Roy Cohn: What is this Ethel, Halloween? You trying to scare me? Well
you're wasting your time! I'm scarier than you any day of the week! So beat
it, Ethel! Boo! Better dead than red! Somebody trying to shake me up? HAH
HAH! From the throne of God in heaven to the belly of hell, you can all
fuck yourselves and then go jump in the lake because I'm not afraid of you
or death or hell or anything!
Ethel Rosenberg: Be seeing you soon, Roy. Julius sends his regards.
Roy Cohn: Yeah, well send this to Julius!
Roy flips her the bird
Ethel Rosenberg: You're a very sick man, Roy.
Homeless Woman: In the new century, I think we will all be insane.
Hannah hurries away as fast as she can
The Angel: Greetings, Prophet! The great work begins! The Messenger has
arrived!
Hannah Pitt: An angel is a belief, with wings, and arms that can carry you.
It's not to be afraid of, and if it can't hold you up, seek for something new.
Prior Walter: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Hannah Pitt: Well that's a stupid thing to do
How do people change?
Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very
nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and
then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and
they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and

pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk
about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to
you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then get up. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending
This dialogue between Harper and the Mormon mother appears in Act Three, Scene
Five of Perestroika. The Mormon mother's description of how people change is one of the
most unforgettable passages in the play. The question of change and how it affects people
is one of the central themes of Angels in America, pitting the Angel, who believes all
change is destructive and should be avoided, against the characters who do change
dramatically over time: Harper, Hannah, Prior. The Mormon mother's description
seems to fuse elements of both positions. She would certainly agree with the Angel that
change is threatening and destructiveso much so that her words sear us with their
painful intensity. But for the Mormon mother change cannot be avoided, can only be
enduredthe question is not whether people should change but how we must live
afterwards. What's more, this description of change is particularly realistic since nothing
is added or taken away. People are not magically transformed by gifts from without; we
must make do instead with what we were born with, rearranged and restitched, but very
much our own.

Belize: He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe. A queen

can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's
the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice
finally meet. Peace, at last. Isn't that what the Kaddish asks for?
Throughout the play characters grapple with questions of love and justicewhether it is
just to abandon a loved one, how to care for others, whether to incorporate villains and
enemies into the communities they disavow. Belize's call for Louis to join him in
forgiving Roy, which appears in Act Five, Scene Three of Perestroika, resolves some of
these questions by pointing out a way to unify people while accepting their limitations.
Belize acknowledges that Roy was terrible, and so his sins are not excused. But as Belize
notes, forgiveness is only valuable because people are flawedif Roy had been loving
and kind there would be no need to forgive him. Forgiveness drives the final events of the
play: it is what allows the characters to rebuild their community in the play's epilogue
(Prior must forgive Louis in order to love him and remain friends with him), what
permits Ethel to return to the afterworld in peace, what enables Harper to put Joe out
of her mind and begin her life anew. It mends the calamities of Millennium and allows
relationships and societies to be strengthened.

Harper: Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits
and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we
think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of

our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged
into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.
In this quote from Act One, Scene Seven of Millennium Approaches, Harper is describing
to Prior that it ought to be impossible for him to appear in her hallucination, since she
should only be able to hallucinate that which she has already experienced. The audience
knows the answerit is no hallucination but a real encounter. But even if it were not,
Harper's theory could not possibly be correct since it is contradicted by Prior's very
presence. In Part Two, however, the Angel faces a similar problem to the one Harper
describes: she and her colleagues cannot create but must rely on God, or on Prior, to
invent things for them. Although Harper does not realize it, human beings are more
imaginative and thus more powerful than the Angels, providing support for Prior's
decision not to obey them.

Louis: There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no
angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political,
and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of
politics
Louis's comical monologue in Act Three, Scene Two of Millennium concludes with the
quotation aboveimmediately afterward he is interrupted by Belize. He contends that
because of the nation's newness and its recent settlement (except for the Indians, as he
admits), America is less racially polarized than Europe, more centered on political
debate. But he is wrong, as Belize deftly proves and as the play re-confirms. In calling
attention to this passage the play's title refutes itthere is very much an Angel in
America, one who is in fact the Angel of America. Politics is critically important, but it
must be informed by history and identity. By deflating Louis's secular claim, Kushner
seems to be connecting his populist optimism with a sense of spirituality. The America the
characters are striving for is as transcendent as it is democratic.