[In the following essay, McNulty examines Kushner's representation of the AIDS epidemic in Angels in America in the context of American politics and history. McNulty asserts that while Millennium Approaches offers fresh insight into the workings of history, Perestroika retreats from this radical historical revisioning through the fantastical element of the angel descending from heaven.]

AIDS plays have come to be thought of as a phenomenon of the 1980s, as Happenings were of the 1960s. Though the epidemic still rages, the bravely furious genre that began with William Hoffman's As Is and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart has for the most part receded into the paragraphs of theater history textbooks. Nicholas de Jongh identifies the central mission of these plays as the fight against “an orthodoxy that regards AIDS as a mere local difficulty, principally affecting a reviled minority.”¹ It is not entirely surprising, then, that the category has been said to have drawn to a close. The disease, after all, has been acknowledged, albeit belatedly, to be a widespread calamity; only the morally deaf, dumb, and blind have resisted this assessment, and they most certainly remain beyond the pale of agitprop, no matter how artfully conceived. To make things official, an obituary of the genre appeared in American Theatre in October of 1989:

Recently, AIDS has fallen off as a central subject for new drama. It's no wonder. When, for instance, spectacle and public ritual are so movingly combined in the image and action of the Names Project Quilt, conventional theater seems redundant—at best a pale imitation of the formal, mass expressions that help give shape to real grief and anger. Time and again the spirited protestors of ACT UP have demonstrated that the theater of AIDS is in the streets.²

The cult of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, by far the most celebrated play of the 1990s, would appear, however, to have rendered all this premature. Subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Kushner's two-part epic features a deserted gay man with full-blown AIDS battling both heaven and earth. But Angels represents not so much a revival of the category as a radical rethinking of its boundaries. For the playwright, the question is no longer what is the place of AIDS in history, but what of history itself can be learned through the experience of gay men and AIDS.

Kushner's angels were inspired not from any Biblical ecstasy but from the great twentieth-century German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”³ Benjamin, writing in the spring of 1940 in France only a few months before he was to kill himself trying to escape the German occupation, borrows Paul Klee's 1920 painting Angelus Novus to convey his rigorously anti-Hegelian understanding of the movement of history:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.⁴

The movement of history is conceived not in terms of a dialectical narrative intent on progress, but as a steadfast path of destruction. All, however, is not lost. For Benjamin, the present represents a crisis point in which there is the opportunity to take cognizance of the homogeneous course of history, and thereby shift a specific era out of it.⁵ For Kushner, a gay activist and dramatist enthralled by Benjamin's brooding analysis of history, the present crisis couldn't be more clear. Surveying five years of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, the playwright casts a backward glance on America's domestic strife, and with it something unexpected flickers into view—the revolutionary chance to blast open the oppressive continuum of history and steer clear into the next millennium.

To realize this Benjamin-inspired vision, Kushner follows the lives of two couples and one political racketeer from the annals of the American closet—all in the throes of traumatic change. Louis, unable to deal with the fact his lover Prior has AIDS, abandons him; Joe, an ambitious Mormon lawyer, wants to abandon the homosexual part of himself, but ends, instead, abandoning his valium-popping wife Harper, and last, but not least, Roy Cohn, sick with AIDS, abandons nothing because he holds onto nothing. In an age in which shirkers of responsibility are encouraged to unite, Louis, the obstructed New York Jewish intellectual, and Joe, the shellacked all-American Mormon protégé of Cohn, spend a month together in bed, while their partners are forced to find ways of coping alone. “Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan's children,” is how Louis characterizes Joe and himself, in this most troubling trouble-free time. “You're scared. So am I. Everybody is in the land of the free. God help us all,”⁶ he says to Joe, sincerely, though at the same time still groping for a way to move beyond guilt and self-consciousness into the intoxicating pleasures of sexual betrayal.

Kushner provides a quintessential American framework for the current historical dilemma in the play's opening scene, which features Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz's eulogy for Louis's grandmother. Not knowing the departed too well, the Rabbi speaks of her as “not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted” (1:10). Referring to the mourners as descendants, Rabbi Chemelwitz admits that great voyages from the old worlds are no longer possible, “[b]ut every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is. […] She was the last of the Mohicans, this one was. Pretty soon … all the old will be dead” (1:10-11). For Kushner, the past's intersection with the present is inevitable, a fact of living; what disturbs him is the increasing failure of Americans to recognize this, the willful amnesia that threatens to blank out the nation's memory as it moves into the next millennium.

This fugitive wish to escape the clutches of the past is concentrated most intensely in Louis, who is faced with the heavy burden of having to care for his sick lover. An underemployed, hyper-rationalizing word processing clerk in the court system, he is unable to come to terms with his current life crisis. In a conversation with his Rabbi, he tries to explain why a person might be justified in abandoning a loved one at a time of great need:

Maybe because this person's sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time … maybe that person can't, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit … and sores and disease … really frighten him, maybe … he isn't so good with death.

(1:25)

Louis is determined to “maybe” himself out of his unfortunate present reality—and he's not beyond invoking the heaviest of nineteenth-century intellectual heavyweights to help him out. This peculiar trait is only magnified after he eventually leaves Prior for Joe. One of the more incendiary moments occurs at a coffee shop with Prior's ex-lover and closest friend, Belize. Wishing to ask about Prior's condition, Louis launches instead into a de Tocqueville-esque diatribe. “[T]here 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” (1:92), he explains breathlessly over coffee to Belize, who appears unimpressed by all the academic fireworks. In fact, Belize makes clear that he can see right through Louis's highbrow subterfuge. “[A]re you deliberately transforming yourself into an arrogant, sexual-political Stalinist-slash-racist flag-waving thug for my benefit” (1:94), he asks, knowing all too well from his experience as a gay African American drag queen that history is not simply some dry-as-dust abstraction, but an approximation of the way individuals lead both their public and private lives.

Though Kushner is critical of Louis, he in no way diminishes the gravity of what this character is forced to deal with. Louis has, after all, good reason for wanting to flee. When he confronts his lover on the floor of their bedroom, burning with fever and excreting blood, the full horror of this disease is conveyed in all its mercilessness and squalor. “Oh help. Oh help. Oh God oh God oh God help me I can't I can't I can't” (1:48), he says to himself, mantra-like, over his fainted lover—and who could be so heartless to argue with him? Louis's moral dilemma is compelling precisely because what he has to deal with is so overwhelming. Still, the playwright makes clear that all the talk of justice and politics will not free us from those terrifying yet fundamental responsibilities that accompany human sickness and death. All the Reaganite preaching of a survival-of-the-fittest creed will not exempt us from our most basic obligations to each other. Belize knows this, and he brings the discussion back to the matter at hand, Louis's desertion of his lover at a moment of profound need. “I've thought about it for a very long time, and I still don't understand what love is,” he says before leaving Louis alone outside the coffee shop. “Justice is simple. Democracy is simple. Those things are unambivalent. But love is very hard. And it goes bad for you if you violate the hard law of love” (1:100).

Though stalwartly behind Belize's felt wisdom, Kushner observes an analogy between the ambivalence of love and the working out of democracy and justice, the bedroom and the courtroom not being as far apart as most would assume. Louis and Joe's ravenous infidelity, for example, is seen to be in keeping with the general dog-eat-dog direction of the country. During the warm-up to their affair, Joe tells Louis of a dream he had in which the whole Hall of Justice had gone out of business: “I just wondered what a thing it would be … if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free” (1:72). Louis, whose motto has become “Land of the free. Home of the brave. Call me irresponsible” (1:72), has found the perfect soulless mate for a self-forgetting fling. “Want some company?” he asks. “For whatever?” (1:73). Later, in Part Two of Angels, when the two men get involved, they help each other get over the guilt of leaving their former lovers behind. First Joe:

What you did when you walked out on him was hard to do. The world may not understand it or approve it but it was your choice, what you needed, not some fantasy Louis but you. You did what you needed to do. And I consider you very brave.

And then, somewhat more reluctantly, Louis:

You seem to be able to live with what you've done, leaving your wife, you're not all torn up and guilty, you've … blossomed, but you're not a terrible person, you're a decent, caring man. And I don't know how that's possible, but looking at you it seems to be. You do seem free.⁷

Joe, giving a new American spin to the phrase the “banality of evil,” admits to being happy and sleeping peacefully. And so all would seem to be well in the couple's new-founded East Village love nest, except that Louis has bad dreams.

“In America, there's a great attempt to divest private life from political meaning,” Kushner has said on the subject of his play's vision. “We have to recognize that our lives are fraught with politics. The oppression and suppression of homosexuality is part of a larger agenda.”⁸ In fact, nearly everything under the sun, from valium addiction to VD, is considered part of a larger agenda. For Kushner, politics is an intricate spiderweb of power relations. His most singular gift as a dramatist is in depicting this skein, in making visible the normally invisible cords that tether personal conscience to public policy. The playwright does this not by ideological pronouncement, but by tracking the moral and spiritual upheavals of his characters' lives. AIDS is the central fact of Angels, but it is one that implicates other facts, equally catastrophic. Racism, sexism, homophobia, moral erosion, and drug addiction come with the Kushnerian territory, and, as in life, characters are often forced to grapple with several of these at the same time.

Kushner uses split scenes to make more explicit the contrapuntal relationship between these seemingly disconnected narrative worlds. Roy's meeting with Joe, to discuss the junior attorney's future as a “Roy-Boy” in Washington, occurs alongside the scene in which Louis is sodomized in the Central Park Rambles by a leather-clad mama's boy. Louis's mini-symposium at the coffee shop is simultaneous with Prior's medical checkup at an outpatient clinic. Dreams, ghosts, and a flock of dithering, hermaphroditic angels are also used to break through the play's realistic structure, to conjoin seemingly disparate characters, and to reveal the poetic resonances and interconnectedness of everyday life. In a mutual dream, Harper, tranquilized and depressed, travels to Prior's boudoir, where she finds him applying the last touches of his Norma Desmond makeup. In a febrile state known portentously as the “[t]hreshold of revelation” (1:33), the two are endowed with clairvoyant insight, and it is here that Harper learns for sure that her husband is a “homo,” and Prior understands that his illness hasn't touched his “most inner part,” his heart (1:33-34). Even in his characters' most private, most alone moments, the “myth of the Individual,” as Kushner calls it, is shot through with company.⁹

Nowhere is this merging of social realms more spectacularly revelatory, however, than in the presentation of Cohn. Though much is based on the historical record, Kushner publishes a disclaimer:

Roy M. Cohn, the character, 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 […] 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.

(1:5)

Cohn, however, would have nothing to complain about: Kushner does the relentless overreacher proud. All Nietzschean grit and striving, Kushner's Cohn is forever trying to position himself beyond good and evil. “Transgress a little, Joseph,” he tells his Mormon acolyte. “There are so many laws; find one you can break” (1:110). Power alone concerns him. Politics, the game of power, “the game of being alive,” defines every atom of his being—even his sexuality, which refuses to be roped into traditional categories. Identity and other regulatory fictions are decidedly for other people, not for Cohn, who informs his doctor that labels like homosexuality

tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favours. This is what a label refers to.

(1:45)

Cohn's own claim to transcendental fame is that he can get Nancy Reagan on the phone whenever he wants to. How different this is from Prior's relationship to his own sexuality; on his sickbed, he steels himself with the words: “I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong” (1:117).

But it is Louis, as Ross Posnock has noted, who is Cohn's true emotional antithesis.¹⁰ Though the two share no scenes together, their approaches to the world represent the thematic struggle at the center of Kushner's play. Yes, Louis transforms himself into a Cohn wannabe, but in the end he proves too conscience-ridden to truly want to succeed. Early on, when he asks his Rabbi what the Holy Writ says about someone who abandons a loved one at a time of great need, it is clear that he will have trouble following Cohn's personal dictum: “Let nothing stand in your way” (1:58). “You want to confess, better you should find a priest,” his Rabbi tells him. On being reminded that this isn't exactly religiously appropriate, his Rabbi adds, “Worse luck for you, bubbulah. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews belief in Guilt” (1:25). Louis is a would-be Machiavelli hampered by the misgivings of his own inner-rabbi. “It's no fun picking on you Louis,” Belize tell him; “you're so guilty, it's like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there's no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93). An exemplary neurotic, Louis internalizes the play's central conflict: the debt owed to the past vs. the desire for carte blanche in the future. Or as Louis himself puts it, “Nowadays. No connections. No responsibilities. All of us … falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves and … and what we owe to love” (1:71).

AIDS brings this dilemma to a rapid and painful reckoning. Grief has come into people's lives earlier in the late 1980s, occurring where it normally would have been postponed. Kushner believes this sad fact may very well force Americans to confront the consequences of their blind individualism. The trauma of AIDS holds for him the greatest potential source of social change. Early death, governmental back-turning, and whole populations of enraged mourning have created what Kushner would call a state of emergency. The conditions, in other words, are ripe for revolution. Communal consciousness, provoked by loss, has translated into militancy and activism. What's more, Kushner has convinced himself of Benjamin's prerequisite for radical change—the belief that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”¹¹ Haunting Angels in America is the restive ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the woman Cohn famously prosecuted and had ruthlessly sentenced to death. “History is about to crack wide open” (1:112), she cries out with a vengeful laugh at her ailing enemy, who taunts her with the idea of his immortality. Indeed, “Millennium Approaches” has become the dead's battle-cry as well as that of the living.

To make clear that the forces of light are rallying against the forces of darkness, Kushner entitles the last act of Millennium Approaches “Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning.” Even level-headed Belize shares this fervent sense that revolutionary change is coming. Outside the coffee shop, he assures Louis that “[s]oon, this … ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it-can you smell it? […] Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace” (1:100). It is on this hopeful note that the playwright ends the first part of his epic saga. An angel, crashing through Prior's bedroom ceiling, announces:

Greetings, Prophet;

The Great Work begins:

The Messenger has arrived.

(1:119)

The Great Work, however, begins with a nay-sayer. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the world's oldest living Bolshevik, begins Part Two: Perestroika declaring:

The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we change? In Time?

And we all desire that Change will come.

(Little pause)

(With sudden, violent passion) And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory? What System of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity?

(2:13-14)

Kushner himself doesn't have a theory to offer before the lights come up on Prior cowering in bed with an Angel hovering over him. What the playwright has instead is an insight into the workings of history. “As Walter Benjamin wrote,” the playwright reminds, “you have to be constantly looking back at the rubble of history. The most dangerous thing is to become set upon some notion of the future that isn't rooted in the bleakest, most terrifying idea of what's piled up behind you.”¹² Kushner understands that the future needs to have its roots in the tragedies and calamities of the past in order for history not to repeat itself. The playwright's very difficult assignment, then, in Perestroika is to somehow move the narrative along into the future, while keeping history ever in sight; he must, in other words, find the dramatic equivalent of Klee's Angelus Novus, and bring us either to the threshold of a fresh catastrophe or to a utopia that throws into relief the suffering of the past.

Surprisingly, and in most un-Benjaminian fashion, Kushner rushes headlong into a fairy tale of progress. Tom between the reality of protracted calamity and the blind hope of a kinder, gentler millennium, the playwright opts for the latter, hands down. Kushner says of himself that he “would rather be spared and feel safer encircled protectively by a measure of obliviousness.”¹³ To that end, Prior not only survives his medical emergencies, but the playwright has him traipsing up a celestial scaffolding to heaven. Louis and Joe's torrid affair ends when Louis finds out the identity of Joe's boss. Calling Cohn “the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54,” Louis explodes at his month-long bedfellow, “He's got AIDS! Did you even know that? Stupid closeted bigots, you probably never figured out that each other was …” (2:111). After Joe punches him in the nose, Louis goes back to Prior, who lovingly tells him it's too late to return. Cohn, at long last, kicks the bucket, only to have Louis and Belize (with help from the ghost of Rosenberg) say Kaddish over him. “Louis, I'd even pray for you,” Belize admits, before explaining the reason for his unusual benevolence:

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?

(2:124)

Though the two men end up ransacking the undearly departed's stockpile of AZT, it is Cohn who has the last laugh. In a fleeting moment of monstrous irony, Kushner grants Cohn his dream of immortality by letting him serve as God's defense attorney. Harper, tired of traveling through her own drug and-loneliness-induced Antarctica, demands Joe's charge card and leaves for the airport to catch a night flight to San Francisco. “Nothing's lost forever,” she says before making her final exit. “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead” (2:144).

The action concludes in a final pastoral scene in Central Park, in which Prior, Louis, Belize, and (somewhat implausibly) Hannah, Joe's Mormon mother and Prior's newest friend and sometimes caretaker, bask in the sun of a cold winter's day. “The Berlin Wall has fallen,” Louis announces. “The Ceausescus are out. He's building democratic socialism. The New Internationalism. Gorbachev is the greatest political thinker since Lenin” (2:145). (Thus the title Perestroika.) The soothing story of the healing angel Bethesda is told, after which Prior sends us all contentedly home:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.

The time has come.

Bye now.

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.

(2:148)

We won't die secret deaths anymore? The world only spins forward? Such uncritical faith in Progress would have been anathema to Benjamin, and to the Kushner of the first part, who so cogently applies the German's uncompromising historical materialism to America's current fin-de-siècle strife. The playwright has quite emphatically turned his attention away from the past and present turmoil, to a future that seems garishly optimistic in contrast. What happened?

There is a definite movement in Perestroika away from historical analysis towards a poetics of apocalypse. The pressure of reality seems to have induced an evangelical fervor in Kushner, in which social and political reality has become subordinate to religious fantasy. “The end of the world is at hand,” Harper declares, while standing barefoot in the rain on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. “Nothing like storm clouds over Manhattan to get you in the mood for Judgment Day” (2:101), she adds to the timely accompaniment of a peal of thunder. If that is not enough to convince us, Kushner whisks us around the heavens to hear the angels sing:

We are failing, failing,
The earth and the Angels.
Look up, look up,
It is Not-to-Be Time.
Oh who asks of the Orders Blessing
With Apocalypse Descending?

(2:135)

As Frank Kermode points out in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, “[I]t seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in an extraordinary relation to it. … We think of our crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.”¹⁴ This is, of course, in large part a way to distract from the urgency of the present. Cultural anxiety is often transmuted into the myth of apocalypse; society, too, has its defense mechanisms for dealing with uncomfortable reality. On this point Savran agrees: “Regardless of Kushner's intentions, Angels sets forth a project wherein the theological is constructed as a transcendent category into which politics and history finally disappear.”¹⁵

Ironically, though the play is set in a tragic time (a “murderous time” implies the Stanley Kunitz epigraph to Millennium Approaches), Kushner steers clear of tragic death, preferring instead to finish on a Broadway upnote. What makes this ending particularly hard to accept is that the playwright hasn't provided any convincing evidence to suggest that the state of emergency has let up in the least. Instead, he focuses on the gains in Prior's inner struggle, his will to live and general spiritual outlook. “Bless me anyway,” Prior asks the angels before returning to a more earthbound reality. “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. […] If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do” (2:135-36). New Age self-healing now takes precedence over politics, the spirit of individualism infects AIDS, and anger becomes merely an afterthought directed at God. “And if He returns, take Him to court,” Prior says in a huff before leaving the cloudy heavens behind. “He walked out on us. He ought to pay” (2:136).

The situation parallels almost exactly the course of public response to AIDS in America. In the second decade of the epidemic little has changed, except for the fact that there is a diminishing sense of crisis. Activism has lulled, militancy has subsided into earnest concern, while conservatism, fundamentalism, and Jesse Helms-style homophobia are on the rise. AIDS, though still deadly, has been symbolically tamed. “Nothing has made gay men more visible than AIDS,” Leo Bersani observes in Homos.¹⁶ “But we may wonder if AIDS, in addition to transforming gay men into infinitely fascinating taboos, has made it less dangerous to look.”¹⁷ Troubled by the enormous success of Angels, Bersani argues that it is yet another sign of “how ready and anxious America is to see and hear about gays—provided we reassure America how familiar, how morally sincere, and particularly in the case of Kushner's work, how innocuously full of significance we can be.”¹⁸

Bersani offers these comments as part of a larger critique on the Queer movement's spirited, if often hollow, rhetoric of community building, which has come in response to AIDS, and which he views as dangerously assimilationist. Sharing Louis's belief in “the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up” (1:80), Kushner insists on the possibility of this kind of Queer (i.e., communal) redemption. Indeed, the playwright has said (with no trace of self-irony) that he finds Benjamin's sense of utopianism to be in the end profoundly apocalyptic.¹⁹ Savran explains that, “[u]nlike the Benjamin of the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ for whom any concept of progress seems quite inconceivable, Kushner is devoted to rescuing Enlightenment epistemologies.”²⁰ That is to say, “Angels unabashedly champions rationalism and progress.”²¹

Benjamin's vision, however, seems ultimately far less bleak than either Kushner's or Savran's wishful idealism. Bertolt Brecht's remark on “Theses on the Philosophy of History” seems peculiarly apt: “[I]n short the little treatise is clear and presents complex issues simply (despite its metaphors and its judaisms) and it is frightening to think how few people there are who are prepared even to misunderstand such a piece.”²² Progress was for Benjamin a debased term primarily because it had become a dogmatic expectation, one that left the door open to very real destruction:

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it is as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.²³

Kushner's brand of progress, in fact, seems dangerously close to that uncritical optimism on which Social Democratic theory, the antagonist of Benjamin's entire vision, relies:

Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men's ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course.²⁴

For Benjamin, history is essentially the history of trauma. It is the sequence of violent breaks and sudden or catastrophic events that cannot be fully perceived as they occur, and which have an uncanny (in the rich Freudian sense of the word) tendency to repeat themselves. His essay is above all an inducement to consciousness, a clarion call to the mind to wake from its slumber and apprehend this persistent cycle of oppression and the mountain-high human wreckage left in its wake. Benjamin doesn't so much believe, as Savran suggests, that the present is doomed by the past, as that paradoxically in order for a society to free itself to move in a more utopian direction, the fundamental inescapability of the aggrieved past must be vigilantly acknowledged.

In her essay “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” Cathy Caruth makes the crucial point that “the traumatic nature of history means that events are only historical to the extent that they implicate others … that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas.”²⁵ This insight provides a way to understand not only the sweeping synthesis of Kushner's political vision in Part One, but also what may have gone awry in Part Two. From the vantage point of the traumatic experience of gay men and AIDS, Kushner taps into a much larger pool of American trauma, from the McCarthy witch hunt and Ethel Rosenberg to Reagan and neoconservatism. That Kushner is able to reveal from such an unabashedly gay, indeed flaming, position these indissoluble political bonds may be surprising to those who cannot conceive of sharing anything in common with men who imitate Tallulah Bankhead. But through the intimate concerns of Prior and Louis's relationship, Kushner opens up historical vistas onto generations of America's oppressed. The question is: were the almost unbearable scenes of Prior's illness, the pain of his and Harper's abandonment, and the punishing hypocrisy of Roy Cohn and his kind so overwhelming, so prolific of suffering, that they forced the playwright to seek the cover of angels?

By the end of Perestroika, Kushner stops asking those pinnacle questions of our time, in order to dispense “answers” and bromides—Belize's forgiveness of a rotten corpse; Harper's comforting “[n]othing's lost forever”; Louis's paean to Gorbachev and the fall of the Iron Curtain. By the final scene, Prior learns that “[t]o face loss. With Grace. Is Key …” (2:122). This is no doubt sound knowledge. But to be truly convincing it must be passed through, dramatized, not eclipsed by celestial shenanigans peppered with Wizard of Oz insight. Surrounded by loved ones, Prior sends us off with hearty best wishes. AIDS has become an “issue” and all but vanished from sight. After convincing us brutally, graphically, of the centrality of AIDS in our history, and of the necessity of keeping the traumatic past ever in sight, the playwright abandons the house of his uncommon wisdom. Millennium Approaches may be the most persuasive and expansive AIDS play to date, but, as the silent backtracking of Perestroika suggests, the genre needs continuous reinforcing.

Notes

1. Nicholas de Jongh. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (London, 1992), 179.

2. Alisa Solomon, “AIDS Crusaders Act Up a Storm,” American Theatre (Oct. 1989), 39.

3. David Savran, “Tony Kushner Considers the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness,” American Theatre (Oct. 1994), 22-23.

4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 257-58.

5. Benjamin, 265.

6. Tony Kushner, Angels in America; A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York, 1993), 74. Subsequent references will be included in the text, preceded by the numeral 1.

7. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika (New York, 1994), 38. Subsequent page references will be included in the text, preceded by the numeral 2.

8. John Lahr, “Beyond Nelly,” New Yorker (23 Nov. 194), 127.

9. Kushner, “Afterword,” Perestroika, 150.

10. Ross Posnock, “Roy Cohn in America,” Raritan, 13:3 (Winter 1994), 69.

11. Benjamin, 257.

12. Savran, “Tony Kushner,” 25.

13. Kushner, “Afterword,” 155.

14. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London, 1966), 94.

15. David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” Theatre Journal, 47:2 (1995), 221.

16. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 19.

17. Ibid., 21.

18. Ibid., 69.

19. Savran, “Tony Kushner,” 26.

20. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 214.

21. Ibid., 214.

22. Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934-1955, trans. Hugh Rorrison (London, 1993), 159.

23. Benjamin, 259.

24. Ibid., 262.

25. Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” Yale French Studies, 79 (1991), 192.