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

by Isaac Butler

I’m sure Angels was just one of many grants we gave that year. We give grants widely because you never know. It’s like when I hear all these interviews with people at Google and they talk about all those projects they invested in that don’t work to get to the thing that does work.

To think that then the U.S. government was part of the support of that is exactly why I’m so proud to work at a place like the NEA. To do work that speaks to every person in this country.

Tony can’t imagine a God you can’t argue with. That’s part of what makes the play bearable.

One show, there was a group of students from Brigham Young! Like the Mormon kids! And this beautiful, corn-fed girl said to Stephen Spinella, “Everyone in my life, my family, my church, my school, my entire society, has taught me to hate you, and I love you.” And she burst into tears. And Stephen burst into tears and they hugged. And I thought, If we’ve done nothing else, we changed that young woman’s life.

Tony has patience. And “patience” is, of course, a synonym for “blown deadlines.”

CRISTINE MCMURDO-WALLIS (Hannah at American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, 1994–95): On an excursion for character study, I ended up in the Richmond District at the Holy Virgin Cathedral. It was July in San Francisco and foggy and freezing and so I went across the

street to a little Russian restaurant for some brandy and some soup. The owner was an older gentleman whose father had been a Cossack in the czar’s army. I told him I was an actor and playing a Bolshevik. He replied, “Oh. Is easy play Bolshevik. Just act drunk and bang things,” whereupon he banged the table with his fist.

CHALFANT: Hannah’s basically monosyllabic. In this play in which people speak in paragraphs, Hannah is lucky if it’s a ten-word sentence for most of the play. I was younger and more ambitious and worried about these things then and I thought, Oh, I’m just disappearing. But it wasn’t true. I realize now, and wish I had then, because it would have saved me a lot of anguish, that she said exactly as much as she needed to say. Everything’s going on inside, behind—there’s this wonderful Greek expression, “the fence of your teeth.” Hannah’s fence of her teeth was a portcullis.

MERYL STREEP (Hannah on HBO, 2003): I just wanted to be awakened and be shaken. That first phone call is how people are gonna decide who she is. Like they said in drama school, the first time you come onstage you make an impression, the audience decides who you are. And then you proceed to dismantle those assumptions.

CHALFANT: All the scenes between Ethel Rosenberg and Roy were battle scenes, between someone who was used to winning and someone who wasn’t.

ANDREW GARFIELD (Prior in London, 2017, and New York, 2018): When I first heard Sue and James do the Kaddish in rehearsals, it was one of those moments where something in your soul gets woken up. That ancient language just does something, and the whole ritual, the ritual of forgiveness, the beauty of that scene—the way that Sue delivers it, it makes me want to cry thinking about it, there’s so much, fuck— (Starts to cry.) See what I mean, it’s crazy!

DONNELLAN: 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.

DONNELLAN: I’m much happier with the unstageable than the realistic, I have to say. I

don’t think I was put on this world to move people around furniture.

LEIBMAN: Growing up in New York, you’d see Cohn in restaurants, and you’d see him at 54. You felt like you knew him but you didn’t. But Donald Trump did! Birds of a feather flocked together! Sons of bitches.

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.

MICHAEL SCOTT RYAN (Joe in San Francisco, 1991): Late in rehearsals, after the scene where Joe comes out to his mother over the phone, Tony was very moved. He asked how, despite being straight, I knew what such a moment felt like. He was appreciative, not condescending. I answered that everyone has fought away unearned shame at some point, becoming a little truer to themselves.

GRANT: As every night I would get slapped by Marcia and the audience would applaud, it would dawn on me that I was not sort of the moral hero of the play.

I was wondering, is being an obedient Republican the only unforgivable sin? Tony Kushner: It would certainly classify as an unforgivable sin.

SPINELLA: It was a very long journey. With every loss of somebody, you lost something of yourself, because plays are not machines. You don’t just change the cogs. They’re ecological systems. One change here is going to have an effect on the whole system.

Group

Jeff King, Cynthia Mace, we were in a lot of pain. To be in a production like this that’s wildly successful, and you’ve done a lot of work and you’re part of the story, but you’re still disposable. There was no consoling us at some point. As I used to tell people, it was the most wonderful, horrible experience you could have, all over one production.

When we opened and the reception was insanely rapturous, I had this moment where I thought: Oh my God, right now, Tony is launching onward and I am staying behind, and every person with the possible exception of my mother, including my girlfriend, cares more about their relationship with Tony than they do about their relationship with me. I had a moment in which I remember walking around the Plaza center and thinking, Who

I am now is a footnote in Tony’s story. This sounds melodramatic. But then I thought: 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. It didn’t make it any less painful, but it allowed our friendship to survive and flourish.

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

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.

The play would begin and then, once we hit Scene 4 and it was clear that Louis and Prior were a gay couple, there would emerge into the aisles people that we liked to believe were tourists, escaping the abomination. They did so politely, rustling their shopping bags from Macy’s or Lord & Taylor as little as possible as they fled. We always felt kind of bad for them, for everything they were missing.

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.

ISAACS: You knew you had a grenade in your hand with these laugh lines. Stephen Dillane [playing Prior] taught me an important lesson: If he got a great laugh one night, he would never do it that same way again.

WOLFE: I’m in heaven in that world. I understand that world, I know how to protect that world, I know how to nurture that world. Because every day something gets better. That’s the rule of that world: Every day something must get better.

KUSHNER: It’s also, you know, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album, or London Calling and Sandinista!—you know. You discipline yourself to write something that’s tight. And then you just let your brain splatter all over the page.

its bagginess is so great. So many people talk about not liking Perestroika. Like Michael Riedel, who has his head up his ass.

TACCONE: There’s a deeper soul in Perestroika. There’s an artist who is grappling with the deepest parts of himself. The scene in heaven where God has abandoned them, the brilliant monologue the Angel has that’s a description of the world, and Harper’s Night Flight to San Francisco speech—these are things that live on inside you.

But the worst thing in the theater is to aim low and miss.

ISAACS: Of course that monologue is all about Belize. For twenty minutes I’m talking, but for twenty minutes you’re thinking, When is Belize going to say something to him?

K. TODD FREEMAN (Belize in Los Angeles, 1992): Once I said that first “Uh huh,” and the audience broke out, we looked at each other just like “Oh, it’s on.”

WRIGHT: It’s Democracy in America, that’s the name of that scene. These things aren’t happening outside the room, they’re happening right here at this table. And we’re bringing these things together to collide at this table. Race and gender and responsibility and citizenship. Your responsibility to those you love and those who are of your community.

MANTELLO: I remember, very early on in L.A., Tony said, “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.” So if you approach it like an American actor, you know, My mother, I have to dredge

up something about sadness and all that, oh God, I’m not really crying, everyone knows I’m not crying—he was saying don’t do that. Until you understand the scope of it. 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.

EUSTIS: That last speech of Louis’s, it’s human brilliance. He’s figured out something as deep as Angels promised. What he’s doing in an astonishing way is forgiving himself. He’s forgiving himself by saying, “I still have to demand this from myself. I don’t get to damn myself and thus release myself from responsibility.” In doing that, Tony is putting together the great theme of the piece: what we owe to others, and what we owe to ourselves.

CROMER: Here’s what I believe about that play: We all want to believe that we are Harper and Prior, these magical wounded heroes who, despite cannons being fired at us, find in our weakness, our madness, our sickness, all this miraculous strength. We even want to believe

that if we’re a bad guy we’re Roy, the bad guy who says the cool shit. Most people are Joe and Louis. We are all Joe and Louis: We are weak and liars. And I love those characters for that.

preparation. And I don’t want to go in and become this nightmare

DEBORAH PEIFER (San Francisco theater critic): How funny is that! It’s an angel, you’d think they could just float through somehow, but of course she doesn’t, she crashes through the ceiling. That’s how change will come, not slipping through.

Divinity isn’t cozy to the Greeks. The gods are terrifying. They don’t understand human beings, they don’t want to understand human beings. They don’t love us. They don’t see every sparrow’s fall.

On some level, they loathe us, or at the very least they are indifferent to us, which is much more chilly.

What Is History? by E. H. Carr.

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.”