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

by Isaac Butler

Camp was a building of a vocabulary of critical connoisseurship that was celebratory, that was ours.

I didn’t think that I was going to live, so what I did with those years really mattered, that was all I had. That’s why the Quilt was important to people, because we thought we’d be wiped out and our names would not be known.

What’s great about glitter is that it’s light and dark. You see the flicker of the light and dark simultaneously. What camp really let me do was be present with what was scary but also be present with incisive delight.

I think there is a way in which people take hatred and transform it into some kind of a style that is profoundly moving to me because it shows people’s enormous capacity, or the enormous power of the imagination to transform suffering into something powerful and great. For Jews, it’s called menschlikeit and for African Americans it used to be called soul and now I think for younger African Americans it’s called badness, and for gay people it’s fabulousness.

You know, when people say today “That queen gives me life”? When your soul is broken down, it can be replenished. This is part of why camp was so sustaining as a tactic.

The thing that is hard for people to understand now is how theater was a major part of people’s lives, partly because there were fewer distractions. Theater was viable for so many people, across so many economic barriers. That’s just not necessarily true anymore.

In a shitty version of this play, a cheaper, less intellectually sophisticated work of art, Roy gets AIDS but getting AIDS is the punishment. But Tony Kushner doesn’t use Roy having AIDS to mock and laugh at him. It’s Rosenberg and Belize—a Blatino and a dead Jewish lady—who do all the judgment and reckoning for him.

They can’t find their answers in each other, but I think it feels more comforting to be in a sinking ship with somebody. You can bail the water a little faster.

I answered that everyone has fought away unearned shame at some point, becoming a little truer to themselves.

For Joe the relationship with Louis is all-consuming even though it’s three weeks. It’s everything. I felt that as a kid when I first started going with guys. There was this one guy I was completely obsessed with. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. Joe has projected everything onto Louis, and it’s only been three weeks. Louis says no, I don’t want it.

That may be true in the eyes of everyone in the world, but it’s not true in my eyes. I am interested in my own life. I am interested in what happens to me after this. I care. I am not ready to accept that my life is over or that I can’t be the hero of my own life.

“I don’t want your comfort. I want your talent.”

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.

There are few things more pleasurable than being onstage and listening to an audience quietly turn against another character.

“May I give you a bit of advice? I think that you should, when you rehearse this scene, go full out. By that I mean fake sobbing, so that it’s too big, too much. Let it be as phony as you want it to be, but throw yourself on the floor. Don’t worry if you’re not feeling it, just do it. Until you understand the emotional level of the scene, which has to start very heightened, you won’t find the scene.”

The greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. Just fake it. And if you are a good enough actor, you’ll fill it in later.

More than anything that happened to me on Angels, that conversation was life-changing. It changes my approach to actors today. I want to release them from the pressure of reality. American actors have been fed this line that if you’re not feeling it, it’s not good. I don’t agree.

Then I thought, Oh right, that’s actually the point. The safety of that abstraction was titillating, but it wasn’t shocking. To actually see it was different.

They’d launch into the story, and you knew they were in the process of giving themselves permission to live in a bigger world.

Other teachers are asking, “What’s your protagonist’s objective?” and here’s a guy saying, “There’s a thousand years of thought out there and your job is to engage with it.”

On the simplest possible level, it really is shaped to get an audience to root for two boys to kiss, which I find fabulous.

I teach in the humanities department, so the subtext of everything is always: Why do we need art, literature, the humanities? I think teaching Angels is the best I do at providing an answer to that.

BELIZE Maybe … a queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness.

I think two things redeem characters onstage that don’t necessarily redeem them in the movies. One is funny lines, jokes. And the other is being the mouthpiece for the politics.

I am attracted to two voice types the most: mezzo-soprano and baritone. I find these two voice types the closest to the natural human voice range. Prior is a baritone. He is human. The Angel is a high soprano, which is a kind of a surreal voice type. There is your scale from real to imaginary.

They have a beautiful French word, tristesse. It’s, like, this is life. You can cry with it and laugh a little bit with that. Of course life has an end. It’s not sad in a tragic way. It’s not a tragedy. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the acceptance of the continuation of the world, whatever happens.

How great to play someone who gets broadsided by the mandate to be brave. Who wants that? Tony’s writing asks you to risk it and reminds you that it’s more expensive to be a coward.

Despite the perspicacious mind at work, the vast ambition at play, and vivid theatrical spectacle on display, the action of any given scene is really quite simple. One character wants love from somebody else who is reluctant to give it. I remind myself of this axiom every time I start a new play.

I think Tony constructed the perfect guy to go through all that. He became more tenacious the sicker he got. And he just got stronger and more confident the sicker he got.

But it’s like playing the king in Shakespeare. You don’t play being the king, everyone around you plays that you are king.

The laugh can’t be the goal, the line after is the goal. So I spent a lot of time trying to get people to deliver the lines not quite as jokingly as people do. Look, it’s different if you’re Nathan Lane, who is a fucking genius. He could get laughs in The Crucible, I bet. But for those of us who aren’t Nathan Lane, if you fail at the laugh and you’re not playing the moment, it’s embarrassing. If you fail at the laugh and you are playing the moment, it doesn’t matter because you have the moment.

PRIOR But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but … you see them living anyway.

I really love it, because it ends with a group of friends arguing. It’s a very queer ending. The normal or conventional closure for a story is that it ends with a couple. Normally a heterosexual couple, but we’re willing to take a homosexual couple if we’re very progressive. A group of friends arguing is a very queer alternative to a normative ending.

But to say “You are all fabulous creatures” is a way of encouraging people to reach their potential, to be there for one another, to create community. That’s what fabulousness does. It lifts me up, the person doing it, but it lifts everyone else up as well.

One way to understand what AIDS wrought is to relegate it to a historical moment and to tell stories about it to suggest that it’s ended. The other path was one that suggested that AIDS exposed all of the difficulties that were roiling under the surface anyway. Homelessness, drug addiction, oppression against gay people. That’s the queer strand. The queer strand has never been able to relegate AIDS into history because none of those problems have gone away.