The titles and subtitles of Tony Kushner's Angels in America emphasize its status as political drama, announcing its exploration of “national themes” at a particular moment in global and cosmic history—the moment of “perestroika” as “millennium approaches.” At the same time, these titles and subtitles call attention to the personal and psychological as crucial terms for the play's political analysis. This is a “gay fantasia on national themes,” an intervention in American politics that comes from a specified identity position and that depends somehow upon fantasy. The “angels” of the play's main title condense the political and personal in a particularly efficient manner: evoking at once Walter Benjamin's “angel of history”¹ and the guardian angel who watches over a particular individual, Kushner's Angel is both Prior Walter's fantasy creation and “the Continental Principality of America,” one of seven “inconceivably powerful Celestial Apparatchik/Bureaucrat-Angels” who preside over the continents and the ocean.² Like the “angel of God” whose appearance to Joseph Smith is explained in Perestroika (“He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that” [2:103]), the Angel in Kushner's play is both evoked by individual desire and somehow “real,” speaking simultaneously to one person's needs (“For behold an angel of the Lord came and stood before me [Joseph Smith]. It was by night and he called me by name and he said the Lord had forgiven me my sins”) and to collective historical circumstances (“He revealed unto me many things concerning the inhabitants of the earth which since have been revealed in commandments and revelations”).³

CONSTITUTING IDENTITY

Written, as Kushner makes explicit, out of a “Left politics informed by liberation struggles … and by socialist and psychoanalytic theory” (2:154), Angels in America is at least in part the product of gay identity politics, and central to its political argument is a consideration of sexual identity. The play explores Harper's troubled marriage to Joe, the ways in which this confines both her and him, and the ways in which Harper's fantasy life recapitulates but also enables a certain escape from the unsatisfactory heterosexual relation. The play depicts the closeted figures of Roy and Joe struggling to disidentify from gayness. And it displays complex, indeed contradictory, definitions of gayness as, for instance, both strength and weakness—in Roy's words: “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout” (1:45); in Prior's: “I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong” (1:117).

Closely wrapped up with the play's analysis of sexuality is a recognition of how AIDS—identified in the popular imagination with a gayness conceived of as always already diseased and weak—becomes not just a category of health or illness but also of identity. Roy's disavowal of gayness is simultaneously a disavowal of identity as a person with AIDS: “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (1:46). Prior, unlike Roy, claims despised identities, but his bitter assessment of the world's treatment of “faggots” and people with AIDS echoes Roy's: “We don't [count]; faggots; we're just a bad dream the real world is having” (2:42).

Race, ethnicity, and religion are similarly prominent, and similarly conflicted, categories of analysis in the play. Belize's and Louis's political positions are shown to differ particularly around the question of race, in ways clearly connected to their differing experiences of racial identity (1:89-96). Jewishness and Mormonism figure importantly in constituting a sense of identity for most of the play's characters—Louis and Roy, Hannah, Harper, and Joe. The marginality of each of these religious traditions is shown to contribute to the individual's sense of his or her place (or lack of place) in the structures of power. Even Roy, despite his self-confident assertions, feels Jewishness as an obstacle to maintaining political centrality: “The disbarment committee: genteel gentleman Brahmin lawyers, country-club men. I offend them, to these men … I'm what, Martin, some sort of filthy little Jewish troll?” (1:66-67). Prior Walter's identity as “scion of an ancient line” (1:115) is bodied forth onstage in the figures of the prior Priors who serve as the Angel's heralds; the stability of the Walter family seems a crucial factor in shaping Prior's emerging identity as (reluctant) prophet for the Angel's deeply conservative political project—“YOU MUST STOP MOVING!” (2:52)—a project that Belize suggests is Prior's own fantasy: “This is just you, Prior, afraid of the future, afraid of time. Longing to go backwards so bad you made this angel up, a cosmic reactionary” (2:55).⁴

While a gender analysis is less prominent in the play than the consideration of sexuality, AIDS, race, religion, and ethnicity,⁵ it nonetheless remains important for the depiction of Harper, who, especially in her engagement with the fantasy figure of the Mormon Mother, recognizes something about her own silencing and disempowerment: “His mute wife. I'm waiting for her to speak. Bet her story's not so jolly” (2:70). And gender is important in the politics of some of the men's self-identifications—particularly those of Belize and Prior as ex- (or ex-ex-) drag queens; thus, though Belize himself suggests that “All this girl-talk shit is politically incorrect. … We should have dropped it back when we gave up drag” (1:61), he responds with anger to Louis's assessment of drag as “sexist” (1:94).

The play also importantly, if playfully, suggests that the very taking of political positions—Joe's being a Republican, for instance—may be an act of self-identification not unlike the claiming, or disclaiming, of a sexual identity, such as Joe's disavowal of gayness (see 1:29).

As this sketch of some of the play's identity concerns should suggest, Angels in America does not arise from or depict a politics that consists simply in embracing an identity position like gayness as the sufficient basis for a political movement. We might indeed see the play as in part a response to criticism, particularly from within feminism, of an identity politics that fails to recognize the multiple determinants of identity; in the words of Elizabeth Spelman, for instance:

Dominant feminist theory locates a woman's true identity in a metaphysical space where gender is supposed to be able to roam free from race and class. … [T]hough doing this appears to be necessary for feminism, it has the effect of making certain women rather than others paradigmatic examples of “woman”—namely, those women who seem to have a gender identity untainted (I use the word advisedly) by racial or class identity, those women referred to in newspapers, magazines, and feminist journals simply as “women,” without the qualifier “Black” or “Hispanic” or “Asian-American” or “poor.”⁶

Kushner's interrogation of gayness similarly recognizes the nonunitary nature of such a category, its differential constitution in relation to other determinants of identity. The play presents us with gay men who are white and black, Jewish and Mormon, conservative and liberal, butch and femme, and certainly not easily unified or unifiable under a single political banner. Thus recognizing the differences within identity categories, the play furthermore emphasizes that any individual's identity is potentially contested and riven: sexuality, gender, and race do not come together without conflict and contradiction. Harper must negotiate between being a thoughtfully articulate woman and being a Mormon woman of whom silence is expected. Joe must navigate the rift between homoerotic desire and political and religious beliefs that insist on the repudiation of that desire. Roy, committed to Republican, McCarthyite political positions and to the political “clout” these bring him, denies as strongly as possible the potentially marginalizing force of his Jewishness and homosexuality. And so forth.

The complexity of identity in Angels in America also arises from Kushner's conception of it as social and relational: one is not oneself in isolation but only in contrast to, in solidarity and negotiation with a variety of other selves. This is obviously true among the main characters of the play, in which, for instance, Prior's state of health reveals or even determines much about how Louis thinks of himself or in which Joe's and Harper's decisions are crucially related to their sense of the other's identity. The others who shape the self may also be internalized figures from the past—an Ethel Rosenberg who returns punishingly to urge Roy on to death. They may be powerful historical presences like the Priors of Prior's heritage or like Louis's grandmother. And they may, most “bewilderingly” (1:30), be a complex mixture of the “real” and the fantastic, as when Prior and Harper, who have never met, somehow appear in each other's dreams/hallucinations to reveal crucial information about each other that each has not, at least consciously, realized (1:33-34, 2:68, 2:121-22). In such scenes even a character's fantasies and imaginations are conceived of as not solely his or hers. These gather their full meaning only in relation to, even interpenetration with, one another—just as, in Kushner's stagecraft, the “split scenes” suggest that discrete actions must, if we are to understand them fully, be read together: Harper and Joe's relationship defines Prior and Louis's, and vice versa, as both couples appear simultaneously onstage.

Identities so complexly defined entail certain political possibilities—cross-identifications like Harper's and Prior's and renegotiations of identity and difference that might make certain shifts in power relations possible, might, for instance, allow Joe to move from a simple disavowal of homosexuality to a reconsideration of it that also entails rethinking political and religious alignments. But the play also is careful not to depict identity simply as fluid and thus subject to easy, volitional change; nor does it attach a utopian political fantasy to the belief that identity might be renegotiated. Despite the presentation of identity as complex, as multiply determined, as relational, identity stubbornly remains identity, a marker of something unique to—given and intractable in—the person. Roy evokes “the immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become” (2:82), and, while Roy should by no means be taken as a reliable spokesman, the belief in such a “heart” is not his alone. A similar notion is at work when Harper reassures Prior that, despite his having AIDS, his “most inner part” is “free of disease” (1:34) or when Joe reassures Louis that, despite his having left Prior, he is “in [him]self a good, good man” (2:38) with “a good heart” (2:75). All of these assessments may be erroneous—they are each challenged elsewhere—but they nonetheless express a strong sense of the depth and stability of identity. The first speech of the play, Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz's eulogy for Sarah Ironson, calls attention to a material heritage that is inescapable, “the clay of some Litvak shtetl” worked into her children's bones (1:10). The self may be always on a “voyage” and a “journey” (1:10-11), it may move somewhere new, but it also returns continually to a place of origin in a movement beyond the control of individual will, a function of constraints placed on the self by the history into which it is born.

If the self is not constituted by some simple, unconflicted claiming of identity, if, as well, it is not formed in isolation from others but, rather, responds to a whole variety of (political) pressures, it also is not so easily changed or reshaped. Indeed, having recognized, in Kushner's conception of identity, the potential for political change, we must also recognize that the how of that change is problematic. The “Great Question” with which Perestroika begins is “Are we doomed? … Will the Past release us? … Can we Change? In Time.” Here, as stated by Prelapsarianov, the “World's Oldest Living Bolshevik,” the question is explicitly political, and its “we” is the we of world history, not of identity politics or personal psychology (2:13). But in Kushner's play, with its insistence on the merging of the political and the personal, the question does not only resonate with the grand narratives of international politics. Indeed, the same Great Question reappears later in Perestroika, transposed into the language of the individual: Harper asks her fantasy figure, the Mormon Mother, “How do people change?” (2:79). Whether raised by Harper with personal urgency or by Prelapsarianov as he searches for the next “Beautiful Theory” to “reorder the world” (2:14), this is perhaps the play's central political question.

CONVERTING IDENTITY?

Angels in America is in many ways a play about conversion. The experience of HIV illness is often conceived as involving a conversion of the self (we speak, e.g., of “seroconversion”), and Prior's discovery that he has AIDS is depicted in part as making him a new person: “I'm a lesionnaire” (1:21). The Angel's visitation to Prior takes the form of a mission of conversion: given a new identity, Prior is, like Joseph Smith, to become Prophet of a new dispensation. Indeed, in the course of the play all its characters undergo startling shifts in identity. Hannah is not only physically transplanted to New York but becomes “noticeably different—she looks like a New Yorker” (2:145). Roy, who clings tenaciously to his professional status as a lawyer, is disbarred just before his death. Harper moves through a period of dysfunction to strike out on her own, choosing “the real San Francisco, on earth,” with its “unspeakable beauty” (2:122), over her unsatisfying life with Joe, a fantasized Antarctica, and a “depressing” Heaven, “full of dead people and all” (2:122). Belize re-embraces a discarded drag identity (1:94) and, in Perestroika, works through his hatred for Roy Cohn toward some kind of “Forgiveness” (2:124). Louis and Joe each move out of “marriages” and into a new relationship with each other, a movement that, for both, entails a radical rethinking of the self. Louis is forced to consider whether he is capable of truly loving; when he decides that he is and tries to return to Prior, he finds that he “can't come back” (2:143), that the relation to Prior is now essentially changed. The couple that Prior and Louis once formed is replaced by the play's final argumentative, but communal, quartet of Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah. And Joe, the character whose fate is left least resolved at the end of Perestroika, is also perhaps the character who has undergone the most radical conversions. He admits his at first denied homosexuality. He moves from a heterosexual to a homosexual relationship, from a commitment to Reaganism and Mormonism to a willingness to “give up anything” for Louis (2:74), from “never [having] hit anyone before” to a violent attack on Louis (2:111-12). By the end of the play his relation to Harper has been precisely reversed. She is leaving him, having slapped him as he has just beaten Louis. He, not she, is now the one in need of psychological support that is not forthcoming, and, as she leaves, Harper transfers to Joe the Valium she herself once used in substitution for his missing support (2:143). As (a fantasized) Harper earlier suggests to Joe, “You're turning into me” (2:40).

It is not surprising, given the play's emphasis on such radical changes in self and self-conception, that it focuses so much attention on Mormonism and Judaism, both religions whose originary moment is a conversional one that involves a movement of dis- and relocation.⁷ This is true in Mormonism not only in the revelation to Joseph Smith and the westward movement that this initiated but also in the opening visions of The Book of Mormon, in which Lehi is “commanded” to separate himself from the corrupt Jews of Jerusalem by “tak[ing] his family and depart[ing] into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 2:2). This founding moment of course echoes the founding of Judaism in God's command to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1).⁸ (The echo is intensified in the names of Abraham's and Lehi's wives—Sarai/Sarah and Sariah.) Mormonism is indeed explicitly recognized as a religion of conversion in Angels in America; in the play's only use of the word convert Prior responds to Hannah's unexpected solicitude toward him by saying, “Please, if you're trying to convert me this isn't a good time” (2:100).

But, while both Judaism and Mormonism originate in a radical movement away from a prior religious tradition, both also express a strong resistance to change. We remember, for instance, the words of the Rabbi that open the play and that make the Great Voyage of Jewish migration both an enormous dislocation and a refusal of “this strange place,” a preservation of the “ancient, ancient culture and home” (1:10). Later Louis will recognize, comically, a circular movement enacted by Jewish immigrants and their descendants: “Alphabetland. This is where the Jews lived when they first arrived. And now, a hundred years later, the place to which their more seriously fucked-up grandchildren repair. … This is progress?” (2:15). Mormon social conservatism and traditionalism—“People ought to stay put” (1:82)—stands starkly against the radical break of its originary moment and founding mythos. Such ambivalence is already present in The Book of Mormon. Here the most radical conversions can occur; the black-skinned Lamanites can, with spiritual reform, turn white (see 3 Nephi 2:15-16). At the same time, however, the conception of Lamanite identity as essentially marred remains unchanged. The converting Lamanites become Nephites; the idea of a white Lamanite or of a morally upright black-skinned person is not admitted.⁹

An ambivalence similar to that present in both Judaism and Mormonism characterizes all the conversionary movements in Angels in America. The Angel's promise to undertake “a marvelous work and a wonder,” to abolish “a great Lie,” to correct “a great error” (1:62), turns out to be a call not for change but for its opposite, a project intended not to transform established identity categories or structures of power but, instead, to secure these with “Deep Roots”: “Neither Mix Nor Intermarry … If you do not mingle you will Cease to Progress” (2:52). In the depiction of Prior it is an active question whether AIDS accomplishes a transformation of the self, with the play giving two contrasting answers: Prior's “I don't think there's any uninfected part of me. My heart is pumping polluted blood. I feel dirty” (1:34) posed against Harper's “deep inside you, there's a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease” (1:34), which Prior later echoes—“my blood is clean, my brain is fine” (1:117). Louis changes position frequently in the play, but his movement is ultimately circular, a return to where he began. With characters like Belize, Hannah, and Harper, one wonders if apparent conversions might not be better understood as assertions of an identity “essential” to the self that has been temporarily suppressed. Belize, like Louis, moves in a circle, giving up drag only to reembrace it; his forgiving Roy Cohn alongside their agonistic relation echoes his simultaneous antagonism and concern for Louis. Hannah is perhaps poised, from her earliest moments in the play, to move away from her Mormon “demographic profile” (2:104): Sister Ella Chapter tells her, “you're the only unfriendly Mormon I ever met” (1:82). Harper's identity as a “Jack Mormon,” her “always doing something wrong, like one step out of step” (1:53), may similarly be seen as conditioning the change she ultimately makes in her life. Roy, though “defeated” (2:114), moves one last time to assert his power, using the pathos of his impending death to reaffirm “clout”: “I fooled you Ethel … I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I WIN!” (2:115). Indeed, the last words he speaks while alive in the play exactly echo his first (cf. 1:11 and 2:115).

At the same time that the play displays each of its characters undergoing major changes, it thus also asks whether these in fact represent real changes in the self or, rather, express or reaffirm a preexisting, stable identity. This double movement is especially evident in the treatment of the changes that Joe undergoes. On the one hand, we may see Joe as radically transformed in the course of the play. On the other, we might legitimately ask whether his behavior, even as he comes out and becomes involved with Louis, really changes. Isn't the concealment of his homosexuality from Harper simply replaced by the concealment, from Louis, of his Mormonism, the meaning of his work as chief clerk in the Federal Court of Appeals, and his connection to Roy Cohn? Just as much of Millennium Approaches is devoted to Harper's uncovering of Joe's homosexuality, so Perestroika traces Louis's discovery of Joe's concealed religious and political identities. Harper and Louis in essence “out” Joe's secrets, but Joe himself continues to behave much as before, returning repeatedly to Roy and, when his relationship with Louis fails, trying to return to Harper.

SKIN AND BOWELS

The problem of identity and its possible conversion is worked out in Angels in America particularly through a dialogue between external and internal self, a thematics of skin and bowels. Skin recurs repeatedly in the play as necessary to the integrity of a self, both macro- and microcosmic. Thus, Harper, in her opening speech, sees the “ozone layer” as “the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself” (1:16-17). “Safety from what's outside” is central to her positive vision of the millennium, and the flip side of that vision is the failure of protective covering: “the sky will collapse” (1:18). Harper also makes clear that “people are like planets, you need a thick skin” (1:17), and the decay of the ozone layer is matched at the level of individuals by the loss of bodily integrity attendant upon AIDS, a loss marked in the play (as in the popular imagination) particularly by the skin lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma (1:21). Harper's “systems of defense giving way” (1:17) reappear in Henry's description of the action of HIV, which depends upon both a failure of the skin and damage to the internal “skin” of immunity (see 1:42).

Susceptible to decay and invasion, the skin becomes a complex site—protective, yes, but also the place at which the self is endangered and at which one self may threaten another. Prior self-protectively insists that Louis not touch him, but immediately after, having “shit himself” and bled, he must warn Louis away: “Maybe you shouldn't touch it … me” (1:48). His breached, fragile skin presents pain and danger both for himself and for others. Elsewhere, the vulnerability of skin is recognized in ways not directly connected to physical risk. Louis, feeling guilty for having abandoned Prior, warns Joe not to touch him: “your hand might fall off or something.” And, when Joe in fact touches Louis, he sees himself as violating a certain dangerous boundary: “I'm going to hell for doing this.” As this scene also demonstrates, however, skin and the crossing of its boundaries provide the opportunity not only for wounding but for connection—here, the sexual connection between Joe and Louis: “I … want … to touch you. Can I please just touch you … um, here?” (1:116). Later Joe will also imagine the dissolution of a political boundary between himself and Louis: “Freedom is where we bleed into one another. Right and Left. Freedom is the far horizon where lines converge” (2:37). And the “ragged” skin that Harper imagines precariously protecting the earth, in her most hopeful vision, becomes a place of human interconnectedness:

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

(2:144)

Here Harper sees the merging of human efforts across the barrier of self, the paradoxical coming together of those who have lost bodily integrity, whose own protective skins have been stripped from them, to replenish the skin of the world.

Implied, of course, in the image of a skin that insures integrity but is vulnerable, that guarantees separate identity but allows interconnection, is a depth, the contents that the skin holds together and that are threatened by its potential collapse. The decay of the ozone layer helps make possible a more general “dissolving of the Great Design” (2:134), which the Angel comes to announce and which Prelapsarianov recognizes as “mad swirling planetary disorganization” (2:14; also see 2:45). A cosmic “searing of skin” and “boiling of blood” (2:52), external and internal destruction, occur simultaneously. And, for the individual, the attack on protective skin—most strikingly, the damage to the immune system in AIDS—leads to an emptying out of bodily contents: Roy says, “Now I look like a skeleton” (1:111).

Buried depth, and particularly a depth of internal organs, of heart and blood and bowels, is in the play as constitutive of humanness, of human institutions, and of the world as is the protective skin. Though the skin may be breached, life stubbornly holds on: “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” (2:136). The human being is, at least in part, a “DISGUSTING SLURPING FEEDING ANIMAL” (1:104), and the life of that “animal” in the world, including its institutions, involves a messy corporeality. Thus, in Roy's view “the Law” is not “a dead and arbitrary collection of antiquated dictums” but, rather, “a pliable, breathing, sweating … organ” (1:66); “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).¹⁰ Roy's perspective on the world is the opposite of Harper's, though it too makes the leap from macro- to microcosm; Roy looks at things from their bloody “heart” rather than their celestial skin: “Unafraid to look deep into the miasma at the heart of the world, what a pit, what a nightmare is there—I have looked, I have searched all my life for absolute bottom, and I found it, believe me: Stygian” (2:81).

Though the depths Roy describes mirror his own “brutal” and opportunistic misanthropy (2:81), the play also shows how such depths participate in loving human relations. If connections among people occur through the skin, true attachments depend upon a deeper, more intimate, mingling. Louis describes “smell” and “taste” as the “only two [senses] that go beyond the boundaries … of ourselves” and that thus allow an interpenetration of self and other: “Some part of you, where you meet the air, is airborne. … The nose tells the body—the heart, the mind, the fingers, the cock—what it wants, and then the tongue explores” (2:17-18). Desire is a matter of the whole body, its depths as well as its surfaces. As Harper suggests, “life” is “all a matter of the opposable thumb and forefinger; not of the hand but of the heart; we grab hold like nobody's business and then we don't seem to be able to let go” (2:122). Even when the heart's grasp fails, as Harper also recognizes, the rest of the body continues doggedly to desire: “When your heart breaks, you should die. / But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don't get it, they just want him” (2:20).

While transformation of the self, and of the world, is sometimes imaged in the play as operating on the skin's surface—“If anyone who was suffering, in the body or the spirit, walked through the waters of the fountain of Bethesda, they would be healed, washed clean of pain” (2:147)—equally crucial to the play's conception of conversion is a penetration of the self's depths. The heart that serves as “an anchor” for Harper must, the Mormon Mother insists, be left behind (2:71). The cosmic repairs that the Angel undertakes represent an attempt to transform the “battered heart, / Bleeding Life in the Universe of Wounds” (2:54), by paralyzing life's messy process, emptying out the self and the world. And the play several times brings internal and external change together. At the same moment that Roy advises Joe to live differently in the world by exposing himself, baring his skin (“don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone” [1:58]), Louis self-destructively yearns to be penetrated (“fuck[ed],” “hurt,” “ma[d]e [to] bleed,” [1:54], even “infect[ed]” [1:57]). Roy himself will later ask Belize to “squeeze the bloody life from me” and to “open me up to the end of me” (2:76).

When Louis returns to Prior to “make up” with him (2:83), Prior insists that neither external nor internal change alone is sufficient to demonstrate Louis's conversion. He accuses Louis of presenting a surface that reflects no depth: “You cry, but you endanger nothing in yourself. It's like the idea of crying when you do it. / Or the idea of love” (2:85). But he is also suspicious of claims to internal change that fail to manifest themselves externally. When Louis tells him not to “waste energy beating up on me, OK? I'm already taking care of that,” Prior responds, “Don't see any bruises” (2:83), and, having exacted from Louis the confession that he is “really bruised inside” (2:88), Prior insists on external proof: “Come back to me when they're visible. I want to see black and blue, Louis, I want to see blood. Because I can't believe you even have blood in your veins till you show it to me” (2:89). Louis, having been beat up by Joe (2:111-12), “made … [to] bleed” (2:127), indeed returns to Prior with “visible scars” (2:141), which stand for a change in his way of being in the world. In the economy of the play it is not enough for Louis to leave Joe; he must also confront him, in the scene that leads to violence, with what he has discovered about Joe's decisions for the Court of Appeals, his relation to Roy Cohn, and his consequent entwinement in the history of McCarthyism. Louis's making external of his own internal change here operates through his “outing” of Joe's secrets, and, just as Louis's internality—the fact that he does “have blood in his veins”—is made literally visible, so the violent injustices of Joe's concealed political history are brought out in the violence he visits on Louis, a violence later explicitly approved by Roy: “Everybody could use a good beating” (2:127).

The play of surface and depth in Angels in America is particularly crucial in the depiction of Joe and his problematic conversions. At a moment when he is still fighting against his homoerotic feelings, Joe thinks of these as constituting something “deep within” that might be concealed or even expurgated: “I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it” (1:40). Joe's model of identity, the wished-for perfection of the “saints,” is one in which internal and external selves correspond simply, unconflictedly, to each other: “Those who love God with an open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God's easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are” (1:54). (This is the flip side, or the positive image, of Roy's identification with “lower” life forms like HIV and “pubic lice,” beings “too simple” to be killed, self-identical and transparent to themselves: “It [HIV] knows itself. It's harder to kill something if it knows what it is” [2:28].)

But, while Joe sometimes imagines that he has conquered his buried secret, made inside and outside concur, this is at the expense of both inside and outside. Joe sees his internal battle, his “secret struggles” (1:54), as leading not to a plenitude encompassing “heart” and worldly behavior, as with the “saints,” but, rather, to an emptying out of the self, a “killing” of internal identity that leaves the external devoid of meaningful content: “For God's sake, there's nothing left, I'm a shell. There's nothing left to kill” (1:40). Joe's disavowal of an unwanted depth, his attempt to hide and kill his secret self, in fact fails. The “heart” has a power that cannot simply be denied or suppressed: “I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing” (1:77). Joe's disavowed depth makes itself known not just internally but externally; he develops a “bleeding ulcer” (1:106) that forces the messiness hidden inside to appear on the surface, with blood coming from his mouth (1:80).

One kind of attempt to convert the self, through the stifling of an unwanted internality, thus fails, and Joe moves toward a different sort of self-conversion—“I can't be this anymore. I need … a change” (1:73)—another attempt to make external and internal selves concur, but this time through a “coming out” that would bring the heart to the surface. For such a conversion to occur, however, Joe imagines that his skin, the “outside” that “never stood out” (1:53) and that has concealed his disavowed depth, cannot remain: “Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning” (1:72-73). But, just as the attempt to disavow his buried homosexuality involves a violence against the internal self, so Joe's coming out, his shedding the skin of his prior life, involves a violence against the self and its history: “I'm flayed. / No past now” (2:75). Here the skin represents the individual's connections and commitments in the world—“everything you owe anything to, justice, or love” (1:72)—and Joe's imagination of shedding his skin is an attempted disavowal of such commitments. In order to stay with Louis, Joe declares himself ready to shed his “fruity underwear,” his “temple garment”—“Protection. A second skin. I can stop wearing it.” When Louis objects—“How can you stop wearing it if it's a skin? Your past, your beliefs” (2:73)—Joe reiterates his willingness to shed not just this “second skin” but “anything. Whatever you want. I can give up anything. My skin” (2:74).

Though stripping off one's skin and strangling one's heart seem diametrically opposed models of conversion, each depends upon a radical denial of part of oneself—whether the depth of uncontrollable desire or a surface of connections and commitments, whether the repressed content of a secret self or the historical sediments of the self's past. Indeed, Joe's first fantasy of shedding his skin follows immediately upon his imagination of a certain emptying out of depth:

It just flashed through my mind: The whole Hall of Justice, it's empty, it's deserted, it's gone out of business. Forever. The people that make it run have up and abandoned it. …

I felt that I was going to scream. Not because it was creepy, but because the emptiness felt so fast.

And … well, good. A … happy scream.

I just wondered what a thing it would be … if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.

It would be … heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and …

Very great.

(1:72)

Just as the strangling of the heart leaves a self that is only a “shell,” so the shedding of the skin depends upon an emptying out—a literalized heartlessness—that might leave the self “free” but also leaves it contentless, without past or history. Indeed, the impossibility or monstrousness of such a conversion is voiced not only by Louis but by Joe himself when he (homophobically) imagines, even as he claims “no past now,” that his sexual relation with Louis has given him a new past—“Maybe … in what we've been doing, maybe I'm even infected” (2:75)—and a past that reinvests him with an internality felt (as with his buried homosexuality) to be out of his control. And, just as Joe's disavowed internality reasserted itself through his bleeding ulcer, so his disavowed political and religious connections, supposedly shed as a skin, return in the form of blood. When Joe visits Roy, from whom he never makes a definitive break, to reveal that he is “with a man” (2:86), Roy orders him to return to his prior life: “I want you home. With your wife.” In order to reach Joe, Roy pulls the IV tube from his arm and ends up “smearing [Joe's shirt] with blood.” Whereas Joe, despite his coming out, continues to imagine (not unlike Roy) that the greatest danger to himself comes from his homosexuality (“maybe I'm even infected”), the real danger is shown to be from his continued connection to Roy and his refusal, despite his conversion from closeted Mormon Republican to out gay man, to grapple with the meaning of that connection. Belize warns Joe to “get somewhere you can take off that shirt and throw it out, and don't touch the blood,” an injunction that Joe cannot understand because Roy continues to conceal that he has AIDS, and because Joe himself continues blindly to dedicate himself to Roy (2:87). Though Joe claims that he has jettisoned his past, Roy's blood, and Joe's own political actions and commitments, continue to stain him; they are not so easily shed. One might indeed see Joe's skin as not sloughed off but, rather, pushed inward, replacing the secret of homosexuality with a heart that Roy can celebrate—“His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure! And he's a Royboy, one hundred percent” (1:64)—but that must now be concealed from Louis. Indeed, though the image of the bloodied shirt continues to represent the past as surface, this is also seen as depth, and a depth susceptible to infection; in revealing to Louis the relationship between Joe and Roy, Belize says: “I don't know whether Mr. Cohn has penetrated more than his spiritual sphincter. All I'm saying is you better hope there's no GOP germ, Louis, 'cause if there is, you got it” (2:95).

In the depiction of Joe and the changes he undergoes, then, two seemingly opposed models for conversion—the strangling of the heart in the service of the skin and the shedding of the skin at the demand of the heart—come together, each shown to be inadequate, a killing of vitality, a denial of the past. Joe's strongest statement of the desire for conversion—“I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again” (1:49)—indeed denies both internal and external selves, both the depth of feeling that for Joe is identified with his homosexuality and the history of the self's relations in the world. Joe attempts first to deny feeling then to jettison the past, but he makes no real attempt to think how both surface and depth, skin and heart, constitute the self. In his last scene in the play, as he attempts to hold on to Harper, to return to a life he had seemingly left behind, he once again disavows a certain past—“I have done things, I'm ashamed”—but which past, whether his commitment to Roy or to Louis, remains unclear. He claims to “have changed,” but, as he himself says, “I don't know how yet” (2:142). In some sense, for all his searching, Joe never finds a self of which not to be “ashamed”; for all his “changing,” he never grapples with the self or its past history in such a way as to effect real change. Late in the play Harper can describe Joe much as he himself did before his “coming out”: “sweet hollow center, but he's the nothing man” (2:122).

“TO MAKE THE CONTINUUM OF HISTORY EXPLODE”

If Joe's changes in the play represent failed rather than successful attempts at conversion, they nonetheless point the way toward a conception of what it would mean truly to undergo conversion.¹¹ This would involve grappling with an internality, a depth, a passionate desire, in such a way as neither to deny its power nor to follow it without consideration for its effects on others. It would also mean shedding one's skin, changing one's way of being in the world, without merely throwing off the “past” and the “beliefs” imbedded in that skin (2:73).

Perhaps the play's most powerful image of a conversion that goes beyond what Joe is able to accomplish comes in the Mormon Mother's response to Harper's question, “How do people change?” (2:79). Her answer suggests that real change is difficult, painful, and violent and that its difficulty arises precisely because it does not follow the easier paths toward conversion that others in the play attempt to pursue. It does not reach for a simple obliteration of the self (“break me up into little pieces and start all over again” [1:49]) or an emptying out of a disturbing depth; nor does it operate through a sloughing off of “everything you owe anything to” (1:72) or an embracing of (angelic) “STASIS” (2:54). Addressing Harper's question, the Mormon Mother suggests that change “has something to do with God so it's not very nice”:

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
HARPER:
And then get up. And walk around.
MORMON Mother:
Just mangled guts pretending.
HARPER:
That's how people change.

(2:79)

Nothing here is simply cast off or emptied out. The skin is breached and remains to be stitched up; the bowels are “mangled” but remain themselves. A prior self is not left behind—commitments remain, desiring continues, the history of the self travels on with it—and yet change somehow occurs through a violent rearrangement over which one may have no control but also through patching one's own wounds, living with what is “dirty, tangled and torn,” “pretending” to go on and thus in fact going on.

Harper herself moves into a new life and not by simply rejecting the past: “Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead” (2:144). Torn open by Joe's lack of love, “heartbroken,” she nonetheless “return[s] to the world” (2:121) and without denying her “devastating” experience or her pain:

I feel like shit, but I've never felt more alive. I've finally found the secret of all that Mormon energy. Devastation. That's what makes people migrate, build things. Heartbroken people do it, people who have lost love.

(2:122)

Here, of course, the play again connects one individual's movement to a broader social/political phenomenon, and, as in its treatment of individual conversion, it shows a real ambivalence about whether and how true historical change might occur. If Louis can claim that “both of us are, right now, too much immersed in this history … and there's no real hope of change” (1:91), just a few scenes later Ethel Rosenberg can announce that “history is about to crack wide open. Millennium approaches” (1:112). Again, as with individual conversion, there is deep skepticism about a project of historical transformation that would address either depth or surface alone. The Angel's project is ultimately shown to be bankrupt because it is an emptying out and arresting of the messiness that constitutes life itself. And, as Prelapsarianov warns at the beginning of Perestroika, the simple shedding of the past, without preparation of a new skin, without “the Theory … that will reorder the world,” without the deep, transformative work—“the incredible bloody vegetable struggle up and through into Red Blooming” (2:14)—necessary to prepare the new, will lead to dissolution:

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin? … Then we dare not, we cannot, we MUST NOT move ahead!

(2:14-15)

Something like the Mormon Mother's prescription for change, something that would slit open the skin of the present, grapple with the world's messy violences, with the deep traumas of its history, without obliterating or denying these, seems to be called for. As the play draws to an end, Louis argues, contra Prelapsarianov, that “you can't wait around for a theory” (2:146), but Hannah corrects him, in a way that brings together his and Prelapsarianov's ideas about how to change the world: “You need an idea of the world to go out into the world. But it's the going into that makes the idea. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory” (2:147). The new skin cannot precede the world's new demands; it can only develop as those demands—messy, traumatic, life-threatening but also the conditions of any new life—are lived.

One must “mak[e] a leap into the unknown” but a leap informed by theory and by the past (2:146): casting off the skin cannot be a rejection of the history that formed it. Indeed, the “leap into the unknown” with which Angels in America ends evokes Walter Benjamin's “tiger's leap into the past” even as it is a movement into the future.¹² As Benjamin suggests, the revolutionary move is to discover in the past those moments that speak to the present, resonate with it, allow the vision of history as an uninterruptible “continuum” to be rent. In some sense this is the work of Angels itself. Asking how to move forward in a world whose present and past are both deeply traumatic, it insists that whatever “painful progress” (2:144) might be possible will be achieved not by moving beyond trauma but by grappling with a traumatic present and by recalling past traumas as a way of being released from these, just as the play itself grapples with the crises of its present moment (AIDS, environmental disaster, Reaganism) and reinvents the vexed, complex, and disturbing elements of the past (McCarthyism, the Mormon experiment, family histories) in order to facilitate a movement beyond these into an uncertain but promising future.

Notes

1. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Cohn (1955; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 259. On Kushner's use of Benjamin, see Scott Tucker, “Our Queer World: A Storm Blowing from Paradise,” Humanist 53 (November-December 1993): 32-35; and the essays by David Savran, Michael Cadden, Art Borreca, and Martin Harries in this volume.

2. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 3; Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 3, 4. Future references will be given parenthetically in the text.

3. Joseph Smith, The Essential Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 28. Also see the more elaborate account in The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates: Taken from the Plates of Nephi, trans. Joseph Smith Jr. (1830; reprint, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1950), prefatory material: “Origin of the Book of Mormon.” Future references to The Book of Mormon will be given parenthetically in the text.

4. See Allen J. Frantzen, in this volume, for a reading of the play's depiction of Prior's ethnic identity.

5. Class identity is less fully interrogated through the depiction of the play's characters than are other identity categories, though the play certainly shows itself aware of the centrality of class in U.S. politics during the Reagan era.

6. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 186.

7. See Kushner's comments on the “interesting similarities between Mormonism and Judaism” (101), in David Savran, “Tony Kushner Considers the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: An Interview,” American Theatre 11:8 (October 1994): 20-27, 100-104, esp. 101-3.

8. I quote from the King James Version, The Holy Bible (New York and Scarborough, Ont.: New American Library, 1974).

9. Also see 2 Nephi 5:21 and Alma 3:6 in The Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith's own views on race and slavery seem to have shifted; see Smith, Essential Joseph Smith, 85-90, a letter of 1836 speaking against abolitionism; and 213-25, a statement of 1844 against the abuse of federal power that calls the “goodly inhabitants of the slave states” to “petition … your legislators to abolish slavery by the year 1850, or now” (221).

10. Roy's language here brings the play's doctrinaire McCarthyite/Reaganite together with its Bolshevik, Prelapsarianov (cf. 2:14).

11. This section's title is taken from Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263.

12. Ibid.