Tony Kushner – Angels In America

I have written about quite a few books on this blog, and at no time have I been as much at a loss as to what to write as I am now. I am aware that I write in a fairly formal style on this blog, even a consciously intellectual(ish) style (not too much, God forbid – the day I start talking about post-Foucauldian anti-relativism, or Jamesonian capitalist conceptions of the postmodern or other nonsense that only belongs in my unread dissertations, shoot me), but Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America demands a different kind of response. It shoots for the heart, and it never misses. I have been intending to read this play for years, and I finally got around to it this week, and I didn’t realize quite what I’d been missing.

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 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 usually 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 habit. The addiction to being alive. 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, so inadequate but… Bless me anyway. I want more life.

So speaks Prior, during Perestroika, the second part of Kushner’s emotionally devastating masterpiece, which is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. Set in New York during the Reaganite 1980s, it follows the fortunes of a varied group: a gay couple, one of whom contracts HIV; a vile, powerful right-wing lawyer; and a seemingly straight-laced Mormon couple. The ravages and horrors of AIDS are the catalyst and epicentre of this play, which swings with grace and a cracked beauty from the deep and intimate to Miltonic grandeur, never feeling forced or difficult as it does so. It’s a deeply human work, compassionate and empathetic, and at the same time – and no less – an angry, pissed-off condemnation of the cruelties of right-wing policies regarding homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan years. The tedious, dogmatic ignorances of conservative religion are attacked, and the frailties and sensitivities of human relationships raised to a near-apocalyptic pitch. It’s a frequently harrowing work, but alleviated through several things, notably Kushner’s beautiful, poetic writing (what a gift and privilege for actors it must be to read some of these lines) and a playful sense of the sacrilegious and the profane (an angel making an AIDS-ridden gay man ejaculate in his hospital bed? Conservative Christianity this ain’t, comrades). I welled up on several occasions reading this play; and I’m thankful for it.

There is a TV mini-series adaptation of the play, which I haven’t yet seen, but will soon. It stars Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker (a particular favourite of mine… ahem), and Justin Kirk (who also acts with Parker in the show Weeds). As always though, I think it’s best to go to the original text first, and of course the problem with drama is that it is designed to be staged, designed to be seen on-stage (and Kushner gives lengthy suggestions and proposals for how the play should be staged, including suggesting that the wires and mechanisms of the Angel should be visible to the audience – how Brechtian). Angels in America is a set-piece, a jewel. It’s a large, long play dealing with big, big ideas (redemption? grace? forgiveness? hypocrisy? politics? you’ll find them all here, along with generous lashings of the biggest, best idea of them all: love) which never feels less than present, here, now, with you. It’s in the room with you, looking at you. It is at once near and distant, micro and macro. It will squash your heart into a little ball. Read it. See it.

Alasdair Gray – Fleck

Fleck (2008) is a play in verse by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. Having begun work on a translation of Goethe’s Faust, Gray realised he was unsatisfied with Goethe’s moral vision in the play, and began to realise that he could write an updated version of t he 18th century German masterpiece. The result is the short and strange Fleck, which, as far as I know, has not yet been staged. The principal action is as follows: John Fleck is a dissatisfied, maudlin Scottish professor of science. In the play’s prologue, God and the mischievous Nick (Satan) agree that Nick can “use” Fleck for his own ends; after all, as God concedes, Fleck represents a greater evil: “his well-attended academic courses / make youths into exploitable resources”. Nick appears to Fleck and following Goethe’s narrative, offers him what he truly desires in return for his soul. Fleck attains the woman of his dreams – May – and becomes wealthy working for a global multi-national conglomerate. It is the ending, which I won’t spoil here – where Gray’s tale differs from Goethe’s, which – as Gray remarks in the fifteen-page Postscript – seems to absolve Faust of any moral responsibility for his actions and offers no significant moral vision. Suffice it to say that the play is a “comedy” in the sense of ending happily, in a certain sense at least. The play contains all of Gray’s favourite topics: the dissatisfaction with the machinery of every day life and the longing for something greater; the self-consciously pathetic yearning for unattainable women; the socialism and class awareness. And, of course, the typical Gray illustrations: beautiful and somewhat unsettling at the same time, here mostly taking the shape of devilish gargoyles alternately grinning and weeping.

The text of the play itself shifts from the hymn-like procession of angels at the beginning of the prologue, to Nick’s adoption of Cockey, Australian or other kinds of “low” slang. The play is short – a Prologue, three scenes and an Epilogue – yet covers substantial ground, dealing with the influence of mass corporations, the threat of a nuclear disaster, male middle-aged impotence, the corruption of the British education system, class warfare and more besides. The text, as mentioned, is followed by Gray’s “Postscript” in prose which takes us through Gray’s relationship with Christianity and the literature surrounding it (notably his discomfort at the “Dad” like paternalism of the Biblical God) and spells out his dissatisfactions with Goethe’s Faust. The book closes with a series of “God Poems”, culled from several years of Gray’s writings, which are elliptical and mysterious: “God Again” in which Gray takes on the mantle of God, or the multi-part “Cries From Unceilinged Blood” in which Creation is a “cavity” and biological life a “cancer of the clay”. For anyone who has enjoyed Gray’s previous work, this insight into his fascination (and repulsion) with the spiritual makes for intriguing and illuminating reading.