The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America

by Isaac Butler

Theater was viable for so many people, across so many economic barriers. That’s just not necessarily true anymore.

If AIDS is a plague that is intentional on God’s part, then it’s horrifying. But in Angels, it’s due to abandonment and incompetence by the stacked bureaucracy of angels. That’s so terrifying. There’s no negotiation with the divine. But Tony being Tony, there is ultimately negotiation with the divine, because ultimately Prior asks for more life and gets it. Tony can’t imagine a God you can’t argue with. That’s part of what makes the play bearable.

as a parting gift, the Book of Mormon, with this very impassioned inscription: “If you think this is false, then this must mean that I and millions of other fools are stumbling around in the darkness.” Or something devastating like that. It was so daunting, and it took me like a year and a half to get around to starting to read it. And then I read it, and it’s—Mark Twain famously called it “chloroform in print.” It’s just terrible. It’s a terrible book.

Sometimes when you see images of New York, you think, Oh, it’s not authentic New York. It’s performed New York, from movies and television. But when you go to New York, you find that New York is performing itself. Everybody’s ready for their close-up.

ABRAHAM: A good trick, if you don’t like a guy, is to play him in a way that appeals to you, on whatever level. When you project this positive element, his charisma, it deepens him; he almost mesmerizes you with his extraordinary talent and charm. Some people are really evil, but they’re also really magnetic. You can’t help but jump into bed with them. You hate yourself in the morning, but it’s great the night before.

I mean, to be really honest with you, there are two schools of directing. You stand where you are and demand actors come to you, or you go to where they are and you charm, seduce, empower them to go on the journey in the direction that you think is correct.

WOLFE: I always say, when we are in previews, we are not the audience’s victim, they are ours. We’re learning and they are on the journey with us. You can’t let fear of judgment stop your journey.

WOLFE: I also liken it to a hot-air balloon. It’s, like, the balloon wants to lift but the basket is staying on the ground, and through the course of the preview period you find the right balance of timing and pausing and emotional moments and the way it’s lit and the way it’s blocked and the way it’s staged before it starts to actually lift. And that to me is the journey of the preview period: The balloon is already the balloon, and hopefully the balloon is already blown up and ready to go, and you just have to figure out how to get rid of excess weight so that it can float away.

CHALFANT: Everybody knew the night that the New York Times was gonna come. On that night George went around and talked to each of us separately. I don’t know what he said to anybody else, but he said to me: “Now, just be sure to be clear.” Brilliant! Because one of the things I pride myself on is clarity. And I thought, What?? God DAMN it. You want clear, I’ll give you clear. He must have said exactly the right thing, because each of us hit the stage on fire.

I’ve had people break up with me before and there’s a moment when a certain sound comes out of their mouth and you just know. Your peripheral vision disappears and you get tunnel vision and you know your life is gonna change. Tony had written that into the scene. It was a scene I understood very early on, and it never changed throughout the process.

DALE PECK (cultural critic): Angels asked a question that a lot of gay men, particularly middle-class white gay dudes, asked themselves. OK, for the past couple of decades, we have built a very vibrant subculture that was very much based around being outside the mainstream. This was our little world, and if you could afford to live there, and if you were not suffering, if you were not a woman, a person of color, if you were not trans and dealing with people thinking you didn’t actually exist, you could have a really good time there, and have a superior attitude. Ugh, straight people! So boring. Mainstream culture! So limiting. Here we are, having a fantastic time, not raising children, making a lot of money. It’s great! All that cultural work contributed to the familiarity and the normalizing of homosexuality in America, and the AIDS crisis threw all of that into jeopardy. The gay community responded to that with work that was very politically engaged. By 1991 you had the question: What are we fighting for now? Are we fighting for our own little community on the outside where we get to do our own thing? Or are we fighting to be American just like other Americans? Angels asked that question at the moment where we actually had to make that choice. We had to ask ourselves what that means. Being outlaws made us interesting. You could use that position to criticize mainstream society, to say what society can’t say, but you can’t live there forever, particularly once the mainstr...

NICK ORMEROD (designer in London, 1992–93): The great thing about classics is they’re about human beings, and the human dilemmas will always be the same, and human beings will always be the same.