[In the following essay, Meisner examines Kushner's representations of women and femininity in Angels in America.]

We pay a high price for the maintenance of the myth of the individual.

—Tony Kushner¹

It may seem an odd project to focus on the female characters in Tony Kushner's two-part modern epic Angels in America since the plays' action revolves around Prior, Louis, Joe, and the other male characters. Kushner himself notes his plays' specificity by lightheartedly calling them “Jewish fag plays.”² This is not the whole story, however, as the plays do rely upon complex representations of femininity, femaleness, and biologically female-coded bodies for their coherence. The extent to which these plays have been used as source texts for queer theory throughout the 1990s makes them a rich site for investigation of the interstices between feminism and queer theory. If any texts could be termed venerable in a field as fledgling as queer theory Millennium Approaches and Perestroika would certainly be accorded this status. The plays, temporally and historically marked as they are, often serve as a kind of intimate shorthand for queer, performance, and theatre theorists.³

One of the most fascinating aspects of the plays is their ability to engage with and disrupt the bigoted rhetoric of blame that was aimed at gay men during the advent of the AIDS crisis in North America. The visible markings left by the disease on the very bodies that had transgressed the limits of compulsory heterosexuality provided all too convenient “proof” for those wishing to pathologize open, promiscuous, and indeed all gay sex. Angels in America dissolves this symbolic relationship, as David Savran has pointed out, by “turning one pole of a binarism relentlessly upon another.”⁴ The protagonist Prior, a gay man who in other circumstances might be condemned by the Christian right for his sexual choices, becomes a prophet; Roy Cohn, a rabidly antigay crusader, is himself suddenly thrust out of the closet. At the end of Perestroika the system of compulsory heterosexual marriage is abandoned, in favor of an idyllic new world of gay erotic affiliation. One binary that is not “turned relentlessly” is the one that polices the physical border between male and female bodies. Despite the ability of the plays, as Sue Ellen Case points out in Queer Frontiers, to stage “the convergence of so many different types of politics” the body politics of the border between man and woman, male and female remains remarkably stable.⁵

In works given the hopeful subtitle “Gay Fantasia,” one might expect to find gender roles denaturalized; male and female detached performatively from the biological bodies to which they are compelled to adhere in everyday life. While a spectrum of gender becomes available to most of the male characters through the performance of power and/or drag, the same is not available for the biologically female characters. It is somehow very important to the integrity of the plays' vision that The Angel of History, who is described as a “cosmic reactionary,” be constructed as emphatically female despite being “Hermaphroditically Equipped … with a Bouquet of Phalli.”⁶

The male characters in the plays gain power through the performance of a homoerotic, homo-social, and homo-political engagement. In the case of Joe this is underlined by his much-anticipated emergence from the closet. When he leaves his wife, Harper (“harp,” of course, being a synonym for “nag”), she retreats further and further from the social, sexual, and political spheres. Harper's appearance as a sexually thwarted and politically detached female figure constructs Joe's emergence, by contrast, as all the more reasonable, brave, and lively. The character of Harper could be simply a foil and yet she represents a certain troubling female corporeal presence: A “messy” reminder/remainder that problematizes the plays for audiences, critics, and even for the playwright himself.

Although Angels in America trades in female iconicity, nearly all of the female characters are constructed as ghostly and/or disembodied. In their extra-terrestrial states, The Angel of History, Hannah, Ethel, and Louis's grandmother all rest comfortably as icons within the ideological framework of the plays. However, this is not the case with Harper, whose troublesome body—insofar as it appears biologically coded female—is subjected to a clinical and exhaustive set of restraints and strategies for containment. After her husband's departure, Harper escapes the disappointing circumstances of her failed marriage by retreating to her own absurd fantasy life. Her new prospect is a virtual travel agent appropriately named Mr. Lies. Harper's desires for travel, adventure, and sexual contact are thus titillated systematically and then thwarted by the smug figure of the travel agent. Not only is Mr. Lies an imaginary companion, he is also a failure of the imagination: incapable of providing even an engaging soporific. As such Mr. Lies provides a kind of asbestos insulation between Harper's desiring female body and the socio-political heart of the plays to which it seems to pose a menace.

No matter how many regimes of restraint the body is subjected to (this is particularly true of the female body with its sexualized and bloodied history on the stage), it resists being fully contained and inscribed by these regimes. Even as Harper is wrapped in layer after layer of dramatic barriers; as each scene in which she appears turns out to be yet another exit, she still makes demands upon the structure of the plays that threaten to disturb their so called natural order.⁷ This is most evident in the warning issued to her by Mr. Lies, who tells her: “You keep messing with the idyllic, you're gonna wind up to your knees in slush” (2:19). The menace of this “slush” within the frame of Kushner's theatre of the fabulous—and within the masculine/liberal/humanist subject to which the plays default—is called forth by Harper, not only messing with the idyllic but imperiling the angelic binaries in these two most influential queer plays.

FROM A THEATRE OF THE RIDICULOUS TO A THEATRE OF THE FABULOUS: A KIND OF PAINFUL PROGRESS

It comes as no surprise that Angels in America should provide fertile ground for the exploration of queer visibility, since the plays were written with the Queer Nation chant blasting in the background: “[w]e're here, we're queer. We're fabulous. Get used to it.”⁸ In an interview with David Savran, Kushner acknowledges that he advocates a shift for gay theatre from a theatre of the ridiculous to a theatre of the fabulous. He defines fabulous “in the sense of an evolutionary advance over the notion of being ridiculous” as well as “in the sense of being fabled, having a history.”⁹ A transition from the ridiculous to the fabulous in Angels creates gay male subjects with integrity. This integrity includes dignity and the shoring up of the porous borders of the self in favor of a sovereign subject. Harper, on the other hand, may tell us that people are like planets who need a thick skin, while her own “skin” is perpetually punctured and the borders of her self blurred as the first play commences; by the end of the second play there seems to be an eclipsing of her character's ability to think and act. Harper's permeability is emphasized by her decrepitude and dissolution when Joe leaves her. Even the slightest material demands of her life such as her personal hygiene seem an impossible task. Her discussion of her own body and the body of other female animals is encoded with loathing. Harper appears only to disappear. She fantasizes only to have her fantasies corrupted to the point that they appear even less satisfying than her life. As the only non-iconic female, she expresses embodied sexual desire solely to castigate herself from it. As such she presents a logjam in terms of what “female” means within Kushner's theatre of the fabulous that raises the question of the erasure of the biological female body within queer theory.

True to the binary logic of the plays, Joe, Louis, and Prior are located in the theatre of the fabulous while Harper remains marked by the “transference of disgust into humor [that] is the province of the grotesque and characteristic of the theatre of the ridiculous.”¹⁰ Similarly, the type of humor generated by Harper's dialogue is more consistent with a theatre of the ridiculous since on a textual level, audiences are encouraged to laugh at, not with her.

The association between being fabulous (being fabled, having a story, belonging to history) and “being citizens” (2:148) is such a profound one that it is very difficult to consider the un-fabulous characters as sentient beings or subjects. Harper speaks of “a kind of painful progress” (2:144) from which she is excluded since such an evolution is constructed as a departure from the ridiculous in favor of the fabulous. The exclusion of Harper from the sphere of the fabulous is related to the fact that fabulousness in Angels finds its highest expression in drag, which the plays showcase in the “girl-talk,” ironic distancing, and pastiching of Belize and Prior. As Richard Cante points out, pleasure derived from female impersonation often depends upon “the conspicuous absence of, ejection, … and possibly even hatred of real female bodies.”¹¹ Drag's celebratory and parodic explosion of femininity is potentially subversive of hegemonic representations of gender. However, one wonders why it is so often accompanied by an erasure and/or an aversion for female bodies. In other words why must a celebration of artifice be accompanied by denigration of a so-called original? Isn't this sacrificial model of identify much less “queer”—if we understand queer to mean a radicalized form of coalitional politics that questions identity-based activism—than a spectrum of bodies upon which masculine/feminine and male/female refuse to resolve themselves?

SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE BOYS AND THE GIRLS FROM EVERYONE

David Savran points out that in Angels the “utopia/dystopia coupling … plays itself out through a host of binary oppositions: heaven/hell, forgiveness/retribution, communitarianism/individualism, spirit/flesh, pleasure/pain, beauty/decay, future/past, homosexuality/heterosexuality, rationalism/indeterminacy, migration/staying put, progress/stasis, life/death.”¹² There is, however, one pairing that Savran leaves out which, from the point of view of queer theory, could stand to be a little more paradoxical and a little more ambivalent: male/female. Theatrical convention calls for jokes to be set up by what is called a “straight man.” In Angels in America, however, the jokes are consistently set up by super-straight women. Neither Harper nor Hannah, The Angel of History nor Emily, seem aware of the humor that surrounds them. Furthermore, when The Woman From the South Bronx cracks a joke it is accompanied by the flat declaration: “That was a joke” (1:104). If a kind of “painful progress” is possible for the citizens of the queer nation that Angels foretells it is only achievable through fabulous ironic distancing and savvy humor. The utter lack of these qualities in the female characters coupled with their persistent association to decay, stasis, death, and indeterminacy constructs them as threatening to the very principle of sociality. Progress has always been attainable for liberal humanism's highest subject—Man. Now this Man is “allowed” to be gay.

The binaries that haunt Angels are mirrored structurally by sets of symbolically paired characters. Roy (based on the infamous Roy Cohn) and Prior are both HIV positive. Roy refuses to claim his HIV status or any kind of homosexual identity, while Prior is not only out of the closet but performatively discloses his diagnosis. Roy is also paired with Ethel (based on Ethel Rosenberg) who haunts him for having campaigned tirelessly to send her to the electric chair. The plays expose the links between racism and homophobia by suggesting that Roy persecuted Ethel not because of her alleged spy activity but to expiate his own Jewishness. Just as Roy uses Ethel as a scapegoat he also “saves” himself from accusations of homosexuality by championing regressive right-wing family values and attacking homosexuals in the public sphere. Prior and The Angel of History make another ghostly pair until Prior is visited by two earlier versions of himself, priors to Prior who situate him historically. Harper is, of course, visited by Mr. Lies who does not perform a similar function for her. Finally, to add the icing on the binary cake, Prior and Harper cross over into one another's dreams, acting as an ambassador for West Village gay culture on the one hand and Salt Lake City Mormonism on the other.

Savran maintains that “these pairings function not just as a set of conceptual poles but also as an oxymoron—a figure of indecidability whose contradictory being becomes an incitement to think the impossible—revolution!”¹³ Yet some binaries are decidedly less oxymoronic than others. What seems to be Joe's journey from a dysfunctional heterosexual marriage to a homosexual awakening is elevated to his journey from stasis to movement; from living death to a life of desire. The sex scene between Joe and Louis blends politics, movement, risk, and subtext, creating opportunities for specular pleasure. This scene happens simultaneously with the one in which Harper sits “slumped in her chair” in an almost vegetable state declaring angrily that she misses “Joe's Penis” (2:37). This declaration is not contextualized by the conversation she is having with Hannah, but serves only to emphasize the point that she is demonstrably cut off from the social world around her and mystically absented of any life force by the removal of the penis/phallus.

There is an incitement to revolution in Prior's prediction at the end of Perestroika. He turns to the audience and says gravely and with great felicity that “[w]e will be citizens. The time has come.” In the next breath he declares: “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one” (2:148). How should spectators relate to the separation of the female characters from every kind of community within the plays? Even Hannah, who is included in the final group, does not take part in the political discussion but only parrots unsolicited citations from the Bible. One wonders if there are any women who can play their parts sufficiently to become fabulous and hence to become citizens.

In the instances where the female characters are called upon to “hold down the fort” and provide ridiculous contrasts to their fabulous male counterparts, Angels in America relies upon what Alison Weir calls a “sacrificial logic that designates femininity as ‘otherness,’ non-identity, and negativity.”¹⁴ Can Harper function as a critique of the liberal, humanist paradigm of an all-male theatre of the fabulous while she is ensconced in the same play under the mantle of the theatre of the ridiculous? Is Angels more easily absorbed by mainstream audiences (as well as by the traditions of epic and canonical literature with their male homosocial underpinnings) due to the fact that it does not challenge the relationship between the primacy of masculinity and capitalism? Its staging of women as socially and erotically thwarted and/or detached would seem to suggest so. When Harper insists on pursuing any erotic prospect she is warned that her actions will “tear a big old hole in the sky” and that she'll find herself “up to her knees in slush” (2:21). When her traditional “femininity” misfires, Harper is not fitted queerly into a complex grid of interlocking social and political relationships but rather spirals into a state of utter abjection. The question must then be asked why an embodied and untraditionally feminine woman in pursuit of sexual fulfillment must automatically pose a threat to the so-called natural order in contemporary queer plays in much the same way she did in those of Shakespeare.

By virtue of its sprawling and complex plot structure and its attempt to tackle Reagan-era nationalism, Angels in America strives to position itself as a candidate for canonicity as well as an heir to a tradition of epic theatre. The plays achieved the elusive feat of crossover in an incredible balancing act between commercial viability and sub-cultural subversion. Angels does not participate straightforwardly in post-WWII American literature's “war between style and content; between a feminized body in the text and a masculinized voice of authority that ceaselessly attempts to subjugate and master the body.”¹⁵ The plays do, however, perform a series of sorting mechanisms upon their female characters that serve to entrench hegemonic gender norms. Involvement in the sphere of politics, the pursuit of erotic fulfillment, the display of agency, and the negotiation between personal and political conflicts—traditionally the stage territory of men—remain emphatically so in Angels in America. Careful attention to the theatrical voice of Harper reveals the way that speech functions differently for men and women in these plays.

Harper speaks copiously and frequently but with far less felicity than Prior, Louis, Joe, or any other character. Stage directions are perhaps the most liminal and the least stable parts of a theatrical text; as such they provide a valuable “hot point” of interface between writer/director/actor/audience. It would not overstate the case to say that the theatrical text's precarious journey toward embodiment is mediated by these italicized asides. Stage directions never appear before audiences and may even be blacked out by a director at the beginning of a rehearsal process to avoid reductive choices by the actors. These texts nonetheless provide physical cues to which theatrical artists must assume a position. For this reason it is useful to look at the stage directions that introduce Harper. When we meet her, we are told she is “talking to herself, as she often does” (1:16). Immediately after that we are told that Harper “speaks to the audience.” Speaking directly to the audience can be a privileged position in drama. A character performing in the aside mode is afforded an extra layer of meaning and her words given added weight.¹⁶ After a character breaks through any theatrical convention—especially the fourth wall—audiences expect her to “mean double” when she returns to a regular performance mode and resumes interaction with other characters. Harper frustrates this expectation since her subsequent interactions with other characters and her enunciatory positions elude multiplicity entirely. The performance style encouraged by Kushner's stage directions acts to inhibit any complicity the actor playing Harper might create with the audience. The effect of novelty and repetition in live performance cannot be overestimated. Unless directed otherwise, a theatre audience tends to give more attention to the uncommon utterance and overlooks the quotidian. Harper's delivery is noted to be “dull” and “flat” (2:33), pointing to a certain lifelessness and separating Harper from the theatre of the fabulous aesthetic. Other stage directions tell us that she is “sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on” and that “we can barely see her” (1:49). Harper's stylized speech, her tendency to numbly repeat snatches of television advertisement, her pill-popping, her agoraphobia, and her stereotyped hysterical fear of a “man with a knife” (1:24) increase throughout the plays in obsessive attempts to fix and/or freeze her. These factors coupled with her avoidance of conflict and tendency to contradict her own statements, such as, “maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it's even worse than I know, maybe … I want to know, maybe I don't” (1:18), tend to exile Harper even further from the nexus of the play. This very nexus is graphically defined by Roy in all its problematic intensity: “this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive” (1:68).

Harper is certainly aware of the processes of history and politics when she notes that “everywhere things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way” (1:17), and yet her most astute comments are invariably made when she is talking to herself. Her lack of awareness of her own performative potential generates laughter that is markedly different from the kind of comedic drive achieved by Belize or Prior or Louis. There are various facets to the male performance of power, ranging from the coercive, dangerous, and deranged figure of Roy Cohn to Belize and Prior's “girl-talk” (1:61). Not being included under the rubric of fabulousness leaves Harper in a strange place; a queer place, one might like to think. But time and again she is exhaustively proven to be deadly normal, empty of originality, and unworthy of our attention. This forced blandness may be what prompts Bruce McLeod to point out that Harper “appears to be rather asexual in a very sexy play.”¹⁷ Given that in Angels politics is sex and sex is being alive, the effect of cordoning off female bodies from any and all sexual pleasure is disastrous.

Angels not only moves its female characters away from erotic affiliation, it also systematically isolates each woman from any ties she may exploit through friendship. Friendship between women is treated as an anomaly in comments such as the one Sister Ella Chapter makes to Hannah: “I decided to like you ‘cause you're the only unfriendly Mormon I ever met” (1:82). Friendship between men may not be perfect but it is necessary, like politics and oxygen. Friendship between women, on the other hand, is a matter of obscure taste and a perverse desire to go against the grain. The disavowal is complete in the passionless goodbye between the two women where Hannah limply agrees that she herself “wasn't ever much of a friend” (1:82).

Contrary to most popular representations of gay sexuality, the sex in Angels is not air-brushed to avoid offending a mainstream audience. Further, gay eroticism and gay sex are not demonized, but celebrated. The stiffening of Prior's penis and his subsequent ejaculation are greeted with a chorus from heaven. The staging of Prior's celestial orgasm, as it links gay male sexual pleasure with the angelic in a specifically Christian context, is a serious challenge to mind/body dualism, which has been one of the crucial factors in the history of sexual oppression. The repetition of gendered notions in philosophical discourse, however, means that Harper's dreams of fulfillment must transport her at the end of Millennium Approaches to the polar opposite of the celestial; literally to Antarctica “the Kingdom of ice, the bottommost part of the world” (1:101).

The constrained subjectivity offered to the female characters in Angels mirrors their status at the conjuncture of liberal humanism and late capitalism. Invoking discourses of male-dominated religion and nationalism, the Rabbi at the opening of Millennium Approaches pronounces: “I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes, nor do justice to her dimensions. She was … not a person, but a whole kind of person” (1:10).

Harper's refusal to abide as this “whole kind of person” may threaten the natural order established by the plays, creating trouble for the female spectator, for critics, and even the playwright himself. In interviews Kushner is ever willing to discuss the finer points of his character choices and even the compromises made to the demands of identity politics. When asked by Bruce McLeod to discuss his treatment of Harper, however, he forecloses upon the subject immediately:

TK:
No. I reject all criticisms of Harper …
BM:
So there have been other criticisms?
TK:
I don't think there—perhaps I shouldn't say this in print, but I don't think the part has been played properly yet.(18)

Dissatisfaction with the way the part has been played may not be due to a lack of skill on the part of the actresses, but to Harper's contested status as an embodied female within a corporeal economy seemingly more comfortable with iconic, elemental, or mythic female presence. In the moments where Harper has the chance to interact with people, to partake of social contact, she is deprived of self-awareness. When she talks to herself her speech invokes the timeworn literary device of women's intuition. The force of Harper's speech acts is diminished considerably given her propensity to parrot television or radio discourse that frames her as insane. Insanity, however, is far from a simple matter in Angels in America given the variety of conditions the word is used to connote.

THE MENACE OF CRAZINESS

In Angels we are asked to simultaneously place a premium value on reason and to perceive the instability of the boundary between reason and insanity in American society. Insanity becomes both a lurking menace and a reason for hope. Many types of departures from reason are catalogued: schizophrenia, religious visitations, genealogical reincarnations, and chemically-induced hallucinations. Yet this plethora of madness adheres to some very strict gender lines. When insanity appears in Harper or in The Woman From The South Bronx it is framed as neurotic rather than visionary due to its lack of support by the events of the play. Harper repeatedly questions her own sanity with statements such as “I'm only crazy” (1:18). Louis says casually of his grandmother that “she was pretty crazy. She was up there in that home for ten years, talking to herself” (1:19). When Prior is menaced with unreason it is denaturalized. As he says, “the whole world is [crazy], why not me? It's 1986 and there's a plague, half my friends are dead and I'm only thirty-one” (1:55). Belize warns him immediately by saying; “You better not fucking flip out. This is not dementia. And this is not real. This is just you, Prior, afraid of the future, afraid of time” (1:55). When Prior and Harper meet at the Mormon visitors center and discuss their experiences of supernatural visions, Harper tells him “that sort of stuff” always happens to her. Prior, on the other hand, is afforded a logical explanation for his hallucinations: he has “a fever … and should be in bed” (1:64). Of the two, Prior alone gains self-knowledge from his visions. Not only is his madness justifiable, it is proven productive when his status as a prophet is confirmed. His visions situate him as the center of the plays as he waves dominant culture's favorite sign—perhaps the only one that refuses to become detached from its signifier in pomo homo culture—the tumescent penis. Harper, on the other hand, may be “a witch” (2:43) whose visions are a waste of time since, as Deborah Geis claims, “each of the supposedly apocalyptic things she mentions has already (more or less) occurred within the narrative of the play.”¹⁹

Given the forthright representation of sex and autoeroticism, the reticence that surrounds the female body is puzzling. It is interesting that the supposedly hermaphroditic Angel of History is still designated as “she” and that the didascalic cough that Kushner identifies as best for the Angel is “a variation on a cat hacking up a furball … sharp, simple and effectively nonhuman” (2:9). This non-humanity contributes to the notion that all the women in the plays sit at the “border of animal and machine.”²⁰ These links between women, Harper particularly, and the animal world are pernicious. When Harper finally overcomes her agoraphobia and takes some action in the “real” world it amounts to her “imagining herself a beaver” (2:32) and chewing down a tree in a public park. The image of chewing echoes many other feminized images that invoke tearing holes in or puncturing the orderly world of the symbolic. Her connection to animals and animalistic connotations of female genitalia are reinforced when Harper appears later holding Prior's missing cat, whom he refers to as “le chat” (1:21). The choice of animals is telling since beaver is slang for vagina and “chat” has the same connotations in French that “pussy” does in English. A kind of essentialism is aimed at Harper as her body becomes de-humanized, de-sexualized and made ridiculous all in the same stroke. These terms double and redouble causing the essentialism to misfire in a hyperbolic frenzy of euphemism for female genitalia (beaver, chat, cooter, etc.). In tandem with the breakdown of the borders between female/human/animal this frenzy triggers a crisis of meaning around the term female and its currency in these plays. Border wars between the animal and human occur repeatedly at the site of Harper's body. She recounts a television program where “men in snowsuits videotaped … polar bears running to escape … and their tongues lolled and their eyes rolled in their stupid tiny heads and the men stabbed them in their huge butts with hypodermic needles, knocked them out. And then they shoved frozen polar bear sperm pencils up their cooters” (2:34). As Harper recounts the program the stage directions tell us she “makes the deep wheezy hooting of a panicky animal.” The loathing expressed by Harper for female animals is mimetically extended to her own body when she vocalizes along with the polar bears. In another passage she expresses disdain: “there's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs” (2:20). This loathing is overshadowed by the bodily-inflected lateral violence aimed at Hannah by the Woman From the South Bronx who calls her a “loathsome whore” and screams “Slurp slurp slurp will you STOP that disgusting slurping! YOU DISGUSTING SLURPING FEEDING ANIMAL! Feeding yourself, just feeding yourself, what would it matter, to you or to ANYONE, if you just stopped. Feeding. And DIED?”²¹ This imagined death echoes the breakdown of social ties and intersubjectivity between women. Furthermore the ensuing state of stillness mirrors Prior's comment about the angels when he declares that he “like(s) them best when they're statuary … they are made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, they weigh tons but they're winged, they are engines and instruments of flight” (2:147). The angels he invokes are at once animated and dead—female, but disembodied. In most instances the departure of women from traditional femininity in Angels in America represents an “attack against Language and the Sign so totalizing as to be self destructive.”²²

In the end, the plays accession to the status of the fabulous relies upon the figure of the female to provide obstacles and impediments to the pursuit of male desire. This is what prompts David Savran to note that Angels “seems to replicate many of the structures that historically have produced female subjectivity as Other.”²³

DRAGGING HARPER OVER THE GENDER LINE

Angels at its most fabulous in the everyday “drag” of Prior and Belize that allows them to harness ironic self knowledge in order to perform their gender identities. This playfulness is constitutive of the theatre of the fabulous, whose elucidation of gay male subjectivity unfortunately is erected on the vestiges of the ridiculed and essentialized female body. None of the female characters in the play ever attain the status of a full speaking subject, but Harper at least (in her troublesome embodiment) offers a marker of sacrificial logics that are often operational in the production of male subjectivity.

In the plays, erotic desire and its free expression are not only the test for subjectivity but also for mental and physical health. This is highlighted by the fact that Joe gets a bleeding stomach ulcer when he tries to remain in the closet. The ghosting of Hannah, Ethel, The Angel, and The Woman From the South Bronx, condemns them to a realm devoid of desire. In pursuit of her own satisfaction, Harper succeeds against all odds in “messing with the idyllic.” In a supposedly gender-bending play, one wonders why it is important that the double-sexed angel be played by a female actor as Kushner specified in his notes to the text. The whole, healthy, alive, conflicted, active, male subjects are created by their separation (under the logic of conflict and sacrifice), from the fragmented, pathological, passive female objects.

Does the exclusion of all the women from the political and sexual realms serve to construct a fabulous new world that either uses them as iconic presences or eclipses them entirely? Joseph Boone, in his introduction to Queer Frontiers, addresses exactly this kind of exclusion in another queer source text (the music video for the Pet Shop Boys “Go West”) that also creates a brave new world of multicultural and erotic affiliation. Boone notes that the “visual omission in this panoply of queer difference, of course, is women, in the plural. What the video offers us, instead, is a single woman, the iconic representation of the Statue of Liberty … an exoticized diva who, in contrast to the moving men, remains frozen in place.”²⁴

Perhaps for Angels in America there is no “right” woman to play the part of Harper, an embodied female character who pursues her erotic desires. Whereas the other female characters in Angels dovetail easily with the ghostly, the disembodied, and the iconic “Woman,” Harper remains stubbornly an inhabitant of her body. By remaining thus, she serves as a reminder that the price we pay “for the maintenance of the myth of the individual” (2:150) is, in some cases, far too high.

Notes

1. Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 2:150. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

2. Bruce McLeod, “The Oddest Phenomena in Modern History,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 14.1 (1995): 143-153.

3. This is evidenced by the density of citation from and familiar reference to these plays in collectively authored books that deal with developments in queer theory such as the one edited by Joseph A. Boone et al., Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

4. David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels In America Reconstructs the Nation,” Theatre Journal 47.2 (1995): 211.

5. Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Feminist Retro-Future,” in Queer Frontiers, 330.

6. David Morgan, “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” in Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body, ed. Sue Scott and David Morgan (London: Falmer Press, 1993), 73.

7. For an excellent discussion of the way the term “nature” has been rhetorically employed as a containment strategy in response to different waves of the women's rights movement see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).

8. David Savran, “The Theatre of the Fabulous: An Interview with Tony Kushner,” in Essays on Kushner's Angels, ed. Per Brask (Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1995), 139.

9. Ibid., 140.

10. Jane Arthurs, “Revolting Women: The Body in Comic Performance,” in Women's Bodies: Discipline and Transgression, ed. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw, (London: Cassell, 1999), 137.

11. Richard Cante, “Pouring On the Past: Video Bars and the Emplacement of Gay Male Desire,” in Queer Frontiers, 150. Original emphasis.

12. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 212.

13. Ibid.

14. Alison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 138-39.

15. David Savran, Taking it Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8.

16. Characters speaking in the aside mode may not always be reliable—think of the trickster—but are usually accorded a special status and often provide a conduit between the audience and the other characters or the characters and supernatural forces.

17. McLeod, “The Oddest Phenomena,” 81.

18. Ibid., 140.

19. Deborah R. Geis, “The Delicate Ecology of your Delusions: Insanity, Theatricality, and the Thresholds of Revelation in Kushner's Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 200.

20. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 150.

21. Kushner, Angels, 1:104. Capitals are in the original.

22. Weir, Sacrificial, 147.

23. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 215.

24. Boone, Queer Frontiers, 7.