Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Read online

  “Angels in America has proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.”

  —JOHN LAHR, New Yorker

  “Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork . . . Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.”

  —LINDA WINER, Newsday

  “The most influential American play of the last two decades.”

  —PATRICK HEALY, New York Times

  “Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least absconding of God.”

  —JACK KROLL, Newsweek

  “Few plays have captured the spirit of an age more powerfully than Angels in America . . . and the passage of time has not clipped Angels’ wings.”

  —PAUL TAYLOR, Independant (London)

  “Something rare, dangerous and harrowing . . . a roman candle hurled into a drawing room.”

  —NICHOLAS DE JONGH, London Evening Standard

  “Angels breaks all the rules to achieve the astonishing integrity of its vision . . . It is a play that has remained utterly of-the-moment.”

  —JEREMY GERARD, Bloomberg

  “That Angels came so close to the burning heart of the Zeitgeist left Kushner fearing he would never get there again. But in fact he has been there so often that he seems to have passed right through it . . . Angels, so much a cry in the dark about AIDS when it was written, seems now to be as much about the Earth’s potentially fatal illness as gay men’s.”

  —JESSE GREEN, New York

  “The greatest American play of the waning years of the twentieth century.”

  —CHRIS JONES, Chicago Tribune

  “An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve.”

  —CLIFFORD A. RIDLEY, Philadelphia Inquirer

  OTHER BOOKS BY TONY KUSHNER PUBLISHED BY THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

  A Bright Room Called Day

  Caroline, or Change

  Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays

  A Dybbuk and Other Tales of the Supernatural

  (adapted from S. Ansky; translations by Joachim Neugroschel)

  Homebody/Kabul

  The Illusion

  (adapted from Pierre Corneille)

  Lincoln

  (the screenplay)

  Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness:

  Essays, a Play, Two Poems and a Prayer

  Copyright © 2013 by Tony Kushner

  Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

  copyright © 1992, 1993, 2013 by Tony Kushner; Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika

  copyright © 1992, 1994, 1996, 2013 by Tony Kushner

  Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is published by

  Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10018-4156

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Joyce Ketay, The Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010; (212) 634-8105.

  The publication of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, by Tony Kushner, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kushner, Tony.

  Angels in America : a gay fantasia on national themes / Tony Kushner.

  Revised and Complete edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN 978-1-55936-769-1

  1. National characteristics, American—Drama.2. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Drama.3. Sexual orientation—Drama.4. Gay men—Drama.5. Mormons—Drama.6. Angels—Drama. [1. Cohn, Roy M.—Drama.]I. Title.

  PS3561.U778A852013

  812’.54—dc232013001994

  Book design by Lisa Govan

  Cover art by Milton Glaser

  Cover design by Molly Watman

  First Revised Combined Edition, November 2013

  Contents

  Introduction

  By the Playwright

  PART ONE:

  Millennium Approaches

  PART TWO:

  Perestroika

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  Production History

  A Few Notes from the Playwright About Staging

  Two Omitted Scenes from Perestroika

  With a Little Help from My Friends

  Introduction

  Should plays have introductions?

  I started writing in the early 1980s, at a moment in American theater when introductions and other presumably helpful apparatuses—incredibly detailed historical timelines, research documentation and theoretical notation—announced the unapologetic embrace by narrative theater-makers of an intellectual and political seriousness that had previously been at home in European theaters and among American experimental theater artists. Dramaturgs arrived for the first time on the staffs of not-for-profit regional theaters; with the advent of production dramaturgy in America came a new deluge of prefatory and introductory information, served up from enormous black ring binders to the casts of plays as they sat around a table in the first days of rehearsal, and then offered to audiences in their theater programs. Formerly these programs were slim pamphlets containing lists of the production’s personnel and short biographies, place and time settings, and restaurant ads. Staff dramaturgs were now instructed to jam-pack programs with poetry, imagery, critical theory and facts, messages from the playwright, director and artistic director. Before they’d opened their programs, audiences most likely would have passed through lobby displays revealing the historical truths behind the fiction to which they were about to be exposed. I was enamored of this extra-theatrical informational bombardment. As a young playwright, I loved reading Shaw’s prefaces, and I looked forward to having plays of my own to preface. I felt only slightly guilty observing theatergoers diligently, frantically trying to abs
orb this embarrassment of supplementary illumination before the house lights dimmed and the play began.

  I’ve changed, and in recent years I’ve grown averse to anything that intrudes itself upon an innocent audience and the play it’s about to watch, or an innocent reader about to read a play for the first time. If the playwright has done his or her job, if the production team and cast are doing theirs, the text of the play and the experience of watching or reading it should be sufficient unto itself.

  The moment a play begins, or a reader takes in the words of the script on the first page, is as exciting and scary as any plunge into the ocean ought to be. Disappointment, bewilderment, outrage, great terror, pity and joy may follow, but these are only to be encountered once the plunge is made. Introductory material is for reluctant dawdlers and lag-behinds. A dusty grammar school usher and a sub-sub-librarian take many pages to tell you everything known about whales before each steps aside (well, before each dies, actually) to permit you to hazard the extremely perilous, mind-, heart- and molecule-altering voyage that is Moby-Dick, in the course of which voyage you realize that neither the usher nor the sub-sub, nor you, nor for that matter the crew of the Pequod nor their lunatic captain knows Thing One about what a whale is. When it’s a damp, drizzly November in your soul, Ishmael tells us, plunge in without preparation! The sea awaits!

  If you’re still reading this and haven’t skipped ahead to the first scene, it could be because you strenuously disagree with me about introductions, or you’re unconvinced or simply agnostic on the subject. You may be asking yourself why I’m continuing to write this introduction deploring introducing—a reasonable question. I suppose it’s because a good deal of time has passed since I wrote Angels, and, while I have no desire to introduce the two plays of which it’s comprised, I feel I ought to make mention of what’s changed. Maybe I haven’t changed as much as I hoped, or as much as I ought.

  I began writing these plays—I thought at the time that I was writing a single play—in 1987, when I was thirty-one years old. The AIDS epidemic was in its sixth year, the Reagan administration in its seventh. It was a terrifying and galvanizing time. I finished the first draft of Millennium Approaches in 1988, and the first draft of Perestroika in 1990. So Angels in America is approximately twenty-two years old, and I’m precisely fifty-six.

  This edition incorporates changes I’ve made to Angels over the past several years. Most of these changes are to be found in Part Two, Perestroika, which is now closer to complete than it’s ever been. I can’t quite bring myself to write that it’s complete. Since the day I finished the first draft of Perestroika, I’ve always known that it’s one of those plays that refuses to be entirely in harmony with itself. Some plays want to sprawl, some plays contain expansiveness, roughness, wildness and incompleteness in their DNA. These plays may, if they’re not misunderstood and dismissed as failed attempts at tidiness, speak more powerfully about what’s expansive, rough, wild and incomplete in human life than plays with tauter, more efficient, more cleanly constructed narratives.

  Millennium Approaches has a taut, efficient narrative, and I’ve never seen any need to change it. In this edition it’s substantially the same play that was first published nearly twenty years ago, although as a result of the work on both parts of Angels for the Signature Theatre’s 2010 revival, a few minor alterations were made to it.

  Significant changes have been made to Perestroika. I discovered what I believed to be a missing thread in its narrative, the substructural space for which, I realized, I’d laid in long before I knew what use to make of it. In this version, with a little help from my friends and a very long preview period, that thread has been woven in. I won’t specify to which moments I’m referring, because calling attention to them would undermine the effort made to integrate the new material. Of course there are two other published versions of Perestroika, and anyone with sufficient time and interest can make comparisons, but most people have better things to do with their time. Life, after all, is always shorter than we think.

  I think a lot more about mortality at fifty-six than I did at thirty-one. At fifty-six, I’m more certain of my own mortality, as it presses nearer, and much more uncertain about the future existence of my species than I was when I started writing Angels. Time has vindicated some of the plays’ conflictedly optimistic spirit; progress has been made. Angels is not teleological, its apocalyptic forebodings notwithstanding. As the dead old rabbi says in Perestroika (in a scene relegated in this edition to the back of the book), hope, when it can’t be discovered in certainty, can almost always be located in indeterminacy, and Angels is a hopeful work.

  Unfortunately, the passing years have been equally if not more confirming of the plays’ aforementioned apocalyptic forebodings, which loom darker and resound more ominously for contemporary audiences and readers.

  Angels in America, more than twenty years old, survives, as do I. I’m utterly and happily in the dark about the longevity of my work, but I hope Angels outlasts me, I hope it will continue to be entertaining and of interest and use to people for years to come. I hope there’ll be people for years to come.

  I’m writing this introduction the day before America goes to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama for president. This is the place from which it seems to me I’ve always written, perched on the knife’s edge of terror and hope. It’s familiar enough, though today the edge is sharper than it’s ever been, and the two worlds it divides, one of light, one of darkness, seem respectively more brilliant and more abysmal, more extremely opposed than ever before.

  Whatever tomorrow brings,* the future—I’m reasonably certain of this—remains indeterminate.

  Tony Kushner

  November 5, 2012

  * It turned out OK. (TK, November 2013)

  Part One:

  MILLENNIUM

  APPROACHES

  THE CHARACTERS

  IN MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

  ROY M. COHN,* a successful New York lawyer and unofficial power broker.

  JOSEPH PORTER PITT, chief clerk for Justice Theodore Wilson of the Federal Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

  HARPER AMATY PITT, Joe’s wife, an agoraphobic with a mild Valium addiction.

  LOUIS IRONSON, a word processor working for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

  PRIOR WALTER, Louis’s boyfriend. Occasionally works as a club designer or caterer, otherwise lives very modestly but with great style off a small trust fund.

  HANNAH PORTER PITT, Joe’s mother, currently residing in Salt Lake City, living off her deceased husband’s army pension.

  BELIZE, a registered nurse and former drag queen whose name was originally Norman Arriaga; Belize is a drag name that stuck.

  THE ANGEL, four divine emanations, Fluor, Phosphor, Lumen and Candle; manifest in One: the Continental Principality of America. She has magnificent steel-gray wings.

  Other Characters in Millennium Approaches

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ, an orthodox Jewish rabbi, played by the actor playing Hannah.

  MR. LIES, Harper’s imaginary friend, a travel agent, played by the actor playing Belize. In style of dress and speech he suggests a jazz musician; he always wears a large lapel badge emblazoned “IOTA” (International Order of Travel Agents).

  THE MAN IN THE PARK, played by the actor playing Prior.

  THE VOICE, the voice of the Angel.

  HENRY, Roy’s doctor, played by the actor playing Hannah.

  EMILY, a nurse, played by the actor playing the Angel.

  MARTIN HELLER, a Reagan Administration Justice Department flackman, played by the actor playing Harper.

  SISTER ELLA CHAPTER, a Salt Lake City real-estate saleswoman, played by the actor playing the Angel.

  PRIOR I, the ghost of a dead Prior Walter from the thirteenth century, played by the actor playing Joe. A blunt, grim, dutiful, medieval farmer, he speaks abruptly and rather loudly with a guttural Yorkshire accent.

  PRIOR 2, the ghost of a dead Prior
Walter from the seventeenth century, played by the actor playing Roy. A Londoner, a Restoration-era sophisticate and bon vivant; he speaks with an elegant Received English accent.

  THE ESKIMO, played by the actor playing Joe.

  A HOMELESS WOMAN, an unmedicated psychotic who lives on the streets of the South Bronx; played by the actor playing the Angel.

  ETHEL ROSENBERG, played by the actor playing Hannah.

  * The character Roy M. Cohn is based on the late Roy M. Cohn (1927–1986), who was all too real; for the most part the acts attributed to the character Roy, such as his illegal conferences with Judge Kaufmann during the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, are to be found in the historical record. But this Roy is a work of dramatic fiction; his words are my invention, and liberties have been taken.

  Millennium Approaches is dedicated to Mark Bronnenberg

  In a murderous time

  the heart breaks and breaks

  and lives by breaking.

  —STANLEY KUNITZ, “The Testing-Tree”

  ACT ONE:

  Bad News

  October–November 1985

  Scene 1

  The end of October. Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz alone onstage with a small coffin. It is a rough pine box with two wooden pegs, one at the foot and one at the head, holding the lid in place. A prayer shawl embroidered with a Star of David is draped over the lid, and at the head of the coffin, a yahrzeit candle is burning.

  The Rabbi speaks sonorously, with a heavy Eastern European accent, unapologetically consulting a sheet of notes for the family names.

  RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Hello and good morning. I am Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz of the Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews. We are here this morning to pay respects at the passing of Sarah Ironson, devoted wife of Benjamin Ironson, also deceased, loving and caring mother of her sons Morris, Abraham, and Samuel, and her daughters Esther and Rachel; beloved grandmother of Max, Mark, Louis, Lisa, Maria . . . uh . . . Lesley, Angela, Doris, Luke and Eric. (Looks closer at paper) Eric? This is a Jewish name? (Shrugs) Eric. A large and loving family. We assemble that we may mourn collectively this good and righteous woman.