Needless to say, in a time and society as deeply suspicious of overt spirituality as our own, it takes beaucoup de courage to write a play that addresses these matters openly.
Kushner gets away with it by treating the material not as tragedy but as divine comedy. Whether pondering the Tao of AIDS or debating with Talmudic intensity the relationship of man's law to divine justice, his characters almost compulsively undercut their emotions with campy gay humor and Jewish vaudeville shtick.
The playwright makes excellent use of the epic form, which provides a narrative structure on which to hang ideas like punching bags for the characters to batter from all sides. Like Wally Shawn, Kushner rarely uses characters as his own mouthpiece; rather than having someone say the right thing, he lets attractive characters speak in favor of Reagan's social policy or "tough love" and as Brecht advised leaves it to the audience to talk back.
I can hardly do justice in the space allotted to David Esbjornson's first-rate production or the generous, frequently astonishing acting ensemble.
For various reasons, the Eureka mounted a full production of Millennium Approaches and presented Perestroika as a work in progress. Kushner is apparently still working on the final version of the play, which will be seen in more complete form next season at the Taper in Los Angeles; it may be seen in New York at the Public Theater or New York Theater Workshop.
Certain scenes were almost fully staged, other read from chairs with scripts in hand, and still others not performed at all but simply summarized "Scene The Angel appears in black, Prior ascends to Heaven, and the Angel gives Hannah an orgasm".
Fifteen years till the third millennium. Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there'll be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what's outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe.
Maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or 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. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it's killing me. Lies: I suggest a vacation. The truth restored. Law restored. That's what President Reagan's done, Harper. He says: "Truth exists and can be spoken proudly. Harper Pitt: I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn't be able to make up anything that wasn't there to start with, that didn't enter it from experience, from the real world.
Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. Am I making sense right now? Prior Walter: Given the circumstances, yes. Harper Pitt: So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth.
Nothing unknown is knowable. Harper Pitt: I'm going to have a baby. Joe Pitt: Liar. Harper Pitt: You liar. A baby born addicted to pills.
A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are. Joe Pitt: Are you really Harper Pitt: No. Get away from me. Now we both have a secret. In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. That's what's so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can't dream that away. I want the credit card. That's all. You can keep track of me from where the charges come from.
If you want to keep track. I don't care. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. But while Heaven remains in a state of permanent rubble and decay, the real San Francisco was almost immediately rebuilt, becoming, as Prior tells Harper, a place of "unspeakable" beauty.
The San Francisco metaphor thus contrasts the untenable stasis of the Angels with the ceaseless energy and determination of human beings. The city also represents the longed-for ideal society the characters attempt to build in the epilogue. Westward migration has always represented hope in America, but earlier migrations like that of the Mormons only replicated the emptiness and isolation they sought to leave behind.
Now, in the last scene, Harper is migrating even farther west, as far west as she can go in America, to a place famous for its tolerance, loveliness, and left-wing politics, a city that is not coincidentally America's gay capital. Opens April Through July Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Addison St. Most Popular. Spinella, playing Roy Cohn, sees 'Angels' from both sides now.
As 'Angels' spins forward, original Harper looks back. Top of the News. Sensors in the East Bay measured wind speeds of 92 mph Sunday afternoon in a remote spot southeast of Livermore at an elevation of 2, feet, according to the National Weather Service. The share of vacant homes in the Bay Area has decreased.
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