Book Review

Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America

Essays on Kushner's Angels

Tony Kushner in Conversation

Essays on Kushner's Angels. Edited by Per Brask. Winnipeg, Canada: Blizzard Publishing, 1995; pp. 154. $14.95 paper.

Tony Kushner in Conversation. Edited by Robert Vorlicky. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. 286. $42.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Larry Kramer writes that Tony Kushner, author of the acclaimed Angels in America plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, is "drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world" (quoted in Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness [New York: TCG, 1995]). Few contemporary dramatists have engaged as large an audience as Kushner has with these epic dramas; even the estimable Harold Bloom lists Angels in his canon of western literary culture, along with Shakespeare and the Bible. Controversy arises wherever Angels is performed, engaging communities in a critical dialogue over complex issues and the rights and responsibilities of artists. Looking within the broad scope of American politics, religion, history, and social relationships, Angels presents a poignant tapestry of the central human and spiritual issues of the second half of the twentieth century. Opposing poles of conservative and liberal, gay and straight, and transgressor and victim are set within Kushner's portrait of life in America in the midst of Ronald Reagan's presidency. He asks a variety of questions about this nation of diverse and often conflicted views and values. Can we face change? Is the United States rushing headlong toward disaster or a bright new future? What will the millennial apocalypse reveal?

Inevitably, scholars and artists have been drawn to Kushner's achievement, and a cottage industry of publications about Kushner has sprung up. Kushner himself has published a collection of some of his essays, speeches, and his play Slavs! in Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. A number of other books have since appeared.

Essays on Kushner's Angels has its strong points but is ultimately a disappointment. Though Per Brask states that his aim is to "get a sense of how [End Page 550] these amazing plays have fared in different contexts in the Western world" (11), he does not effectively carry out this goal. On the plus side, this slim volume features two interviews with Kushner: a brief exchange with Patrick Pacheco originally published in The Body Positive Magazine and a penetrating dialogue with David Savran from American Theatre in 1994, undoubtedly the most in-depth interview with Kushner available. Bent Holm recounts Danish productions at the Aarhus and Det Kongelige Teaters, both staged in 1995. Holm probes the difficulties of moving this distinctly American play to different cultural contexts, and Franz Wille's contribution follows suit by describing various performances in Zurich, Hamburg, Essen and Frankfurt. Ian Olorenshaw similarly looks at stagings in Sydney and Melbourne. Essays on Kushner's Angels would have been more useful had it focused more exclusively on a variety of international productions; two additional articles are of lesser interest. Patrick Friesen's "How Like an Angel Came I Down" offers a short, impressionistic riff on angel imagery that contributes little to a deeper understanding of the plays; Graham Dixon's "The Obscene Paradox" is somewhat more useful as a thorough examination of AIDS and issues of sexuality present in Angels.

Approaching the Millennium provides a broader and bolder collection of essays on Angels than the Brask volume. Geis and Kruger believe Angels has influenced everything from "dramaturgy to queer theory, from AIDS activism to Brechtian epic theatre"; they and their contributors approach Angels as "theatrical texts, as literary work, as popular culture phenomenon, as political reflection and intervention" (1). The first of the volume's four sections, "Reagan's Children: Angels, Politics, and American History," offers five penetrating essays that respond to "charged and conflicted" historical moments reflected in the play (3). David Román focuses on the impact of AIDS on American society on the eve of the 1992 presidential election. James Miller explores "queer analogies" in Kushner's depiction of the country, and Ron Scapp's outstanding essay, "The Vehicle of Democracy: Fantasies toward a (Queer) Nation," expands on Miller's foundation. Michael Cadden effectively discusses Kushner's "pinklisting" of Roy Cohn, one of the historical characters presented in Angels. Most essential is David Savran's astute contribution, "Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation," which deals with topics ranging from Kushner's interest in Walter Benjamin's articulation of the angel of history, to images of the Enlightenment belief in progress, American expansionism, and religious symbols (especially from Mormonism and Judaism).

The second section, "I I I I: Identities in Angels," features essays on essentialism and identity politics and on the ethnic, racial, and religious aspects of Angels. Framji Minwalla deals with race, focusing on the character of Belize, the black drag queen nurse, as what Kushner called the "Black Other" in a 1993 speech at the March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. Minwalla explores the "anxiety about ethnicity" (104) reflected by Belize, who sees himself as "trapped in a world of white people" (103). Alisa Solomon explores Jewishness and queerness as inextricably connected, while Allen J. Frantzen deals with Prior, associating stasis with Anglo-Saxon heritage. Co-editor Kruger's contribution, "Identity and Conversion," brings this section together by examining how different kinds of identity are challenged in the plays.

The third section, "Apocalyptic Imaginations: Kushner's Theater of the Millennium," explores the AIDS pandemic, the end of the Cold War, and, as Stanton B. Garner, Jr. suggests, the relationship of Angels to postmodern memory. For Garner, the plays are situated in the relationship between apocalyptic thinking and postmodernism "deeply informed by the rhetoric and psychosocial preoccupations of Cold War millenarianism" (175). Co-editor Geis examines the links between insanity and prophecy, noting the "thresholds of revelation" Kushner creates for the characters of Harper and Prior who, in Millennium Approaches' most transcendent scene, meet through mutual hallucinations. The strongest essay in the volume is Martin Harries's "Flying the Angel of History," which deals with the influence of Benjamin's angel and what he calls the anti-Brechtian aspects of Angels in its "return to the supernatural" (185).

The final section provides a fascinating though brief interview with director Robert Altman on plans to film the plays, although Altman has since withdrawn from the project. Arnold Aronson describes the pragmatic concerns of designing plays of such scope, Janelle Reinelt and Art Borreca argue for Angels as an American embodiment of epic theatre. Borreca focuses on dialectics in Declan Donnellan's National Theatre of Great Britain production. Nicholas de Jongh reflects on the play's sexuality and Kushner's refusal to separate the sexual from the political and social. Finally, Gregory W. Bredbeck concludes with a piece on the "liberation" of eroticism and what he calls "gay and lesbian civil rights" (271). His well-written study also deals with queer performance history by pointing to Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre as a significant influence on Kushner.

For Tony Kushner in Conversation, the most valuable of the three books, editor Robert Vorlicky [End Page 551] gathers interviews Kushner has given since becoming well-known in the late 1980s. What emerges is a portrait of a politically engaged playwright whose eloquence, outrageously wicked wit, forceful moral convictions, and dizzying intellectualism fuel a revolutionary vision. As the United States electorate has swung toward the political right, Kushner remains defiantly "left" and "out," emerging as an outspoken voice for his generation. He speaks for a broadened definition of morality and social progress while criticizing what he sees as a prevailing climate of reactionary conservatism. Kushner aims to represent marginalized communities: gays and lesbians, Jews, socialists, agnostics, political activists, and artists--traditional outsiders of American life.

Tony Kushner in Conversation includes twenty-one separate interviews as well as Kushner's responses to the Proust questionnaire and an interview he himself conducted with Liza Minnelli. Most of the rest are an assortment of television, radio, and print interviews and essays. The first is T. Szentgyorgi's profile of Kushner at the 1991 New York premiere of the pre-Angels drama A Bright Room Called Day; the last is Kushner's afterword in which he amusingly refers to himself as "the clackerer" in the interviews (268). Angels is well represented, but the collection extends to pieces associated with Kushner's other plays, such as Bright Room, and his free adaptions of Corneille's The Illusion and Ansky's A Dybbuk. Many also deal with Kushner's role as a political activist and commentator on the complex and controversial role of the arts in contemporary American society. The volume also provides interesting dialogues with writers such as Anna Deavere Smith. Speaking on the politics of the interview, Smith states that she and Kushner have been on an "adventure of challenging form and changing form" (245); he believes that they have created new forms by "drawing very strongly on the past and looking at what was interesting in the past, and then seeing how to develop it" (247). Equally compelling are dialogues with Susan Sontag, Frank Galati, Naomi Wallace, and a conversation with Carl Weber on Brecht. The best of these is by Craig Lucas, with Kushner discussing the development of Angels and examining it in comparison with Bright Room and The Illusion, as well as in the context of the socio-political ramifications of Clinton's election. This interview, conducted on the day of Clinton's first inauguration, views the latter more hopefully than do later interviews. Also featured is a brainstorming session between Kushner and Robert Altman on plans for the Angels films that deepen Altman's earlier comments in Approaching the Millennium.

Standing out among the selections in Tony Kushner in Conversation are two encounters with Charlie Rose, television's best interviewer. The first is an interview done shortly before Angels premiered in New York and the second is a testy Rose-moderated panel featuring Kushner, Andrew Sullivan, Donna Minkowitz, and Bruce Bawer debating the gay rights movement on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall. Tony Kushner in Conversation is a superb resource for anyone interested in Kushner from a variety of viewpoints and over several years. It is marred only slightly by what is not included, most particularly the aforementioned Savran American Theatre interview as well as assorted interviews from local newspapers and periodicals around the country. Also overlooked are Kushner's responses to various controversies on Angels that have sprung up at such diverse locations as the Charlotte Repertory, Catholic University, and Wabash College in the past couple of years.

All three books feature illustrations, but both Essays on Kushner's Angels and Approaching the Millennium would be improved by considerably more visuals to aid the reader in appreciating interpretive choices made in each case. Tony Kushner in Conversation includes a listing of Kushner's works, although details beyond a laundry list of titles would have been a useful inclusion. In his afterword to Vorlicky's collection, Kushner sees himself as "a Caliban gawping with horror at the newly dawning day" (276), but readers of these books will be introduced to the most exciting American dramatist since Tennessee Williams.

James Fisher
Wabash College

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