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

by Isaac Butler

Be splendid tonight, be focused, have fun, make theater: That’s our way of repudiating the bullies, the killjoys, the busybodies and blowhards. We know the secret of making art, while they only know the minor secret of making mischief. We proceed from joy; they only have their misery.

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark,

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.

KUSHNER: Marcia Gay Harden said, when I told her everyone worried about where Joe was at the end, “Why aren’t they worried about Harper? She’s still lost.” I said, “No, she’s going to San Francisco.” And Marcia Gay said, “Right. She’s leaving her gay husband and she flies to San Francisco. She still doesn’t quite get it.”

KAZAN: I’m not a religious person, but I get nervous flying, and I say Harper’s entire speech whenever a plane takes off and whenever it lands.

GARFIELD: I had seen Mike Nichols’s HBO two-parter, when I was studying in drama school. It was one of those things that was just on loop, on repeat in our shared actor house. There were a few DVDs we would watch over and over and that was one. Uta Hagen’s acting class was another, Eddie Murphy Delirious was the third, Labyrinth was the fourth.

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.

We’re living in a time that seems to be screaming for a vast canvas and bold strokes and newly minted language. I think in addition to the brilliance of Tony and his collaborators, the play was made great by the cultural and historical moment that it rose to meet. So here, again, is our opportunity to rise to the occasion.

People say stuff about the cultural importance of the play, and I’m like, “I’ve got twenty pages to

memorize tonight, fuck off.”

If I don’t do Harper in Angels in America on Broadway when Donald Trump is in the White House, why the fuck am I an artist?

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Look, I’m a straight white man. I understand love, I understand shame, I understand guilt and mistakes. But I’m not a gay man, there’s a lot I can’t imagine. But in that moment, I got a little taste of what many of my friends must have gone through.

I remember being so shook by it and so—I don’t know what the feelings were, but I identified in a small way. And I remember Greg saying, “Mm-hmm, welcome.”

The laugh can’t be the goal, the line after is the goal.

SWIFT: Until one night at the Kennedy Center, when I went up on my crate and immediately my pin spot went out. And Robby

crossed up, grabbed my hand in the dark, helped me off my crate, and took me into his light. As we were crossing down we had this subterranean conversation where I said, “Don’t let go of me, we’re gonna arm wrestle through this scene.” And we did, and we held on, and I let him win on his last line, “I want more life,” and then I let him push me over. We called Michael Mayer and said, “We finally cracked the scene!”

MCLAUGHLIN: Why would anyone want the sheer misery of human life? It goes against all reason. But still, he says, that’s all I’ve got. It’s what I want. More life. Which is a deeply moving plea, the most fundamental human desire, something one sees at sickbeds and which all of us had witnessed in Sigrid’s last days, that primal desire for more, despite it all, just the raw yearning for that ineffable thing, life itself.

GARFIELD: That’s the great healing at the end of the second play for Prior. That’s why I think he feels equipped and allowed to say “I bless you,” because he’s allowed himself to be blessed. The woundedness that he walks with is as much a part of him as the quote-unquote fabulousness that is part of him. It’s all one, it’s all him.

SELLA: That moment in the epilogue is one of the most important experiences I ever had. This was a journey, over the course of eight hours, that they’ve been on with you. And to feel … I feel like I could cry about it … to feel a room of six hundred, seven hundred, a thousand people, leaning forward and looking up at you, and you knew that some of them had lived it, some of them had lost. It was extremely moving and sometimes I could barely get through it. Because I loved them.

GARFIELD: It’s a privilege to say those words at the end of seven and a half hours. There are some nights I feel like I earn it and some nights I feel like I don’t. And that’s OK, I think it’s inherent in the play, it’s inherent in the not-enoughness, it’s inherent in that Prior accepts the mystery of just having to show up with whatever he’s got and do the best that he possibly can.

MCARDLE: That little last spat between Louis and Belize is so important. It’s hopeful and these people have found a way to live together, but that spark is still there.

A group of friends arguing is a very queer alternative to a normative ending.

You create scenarios not because they’re the most likely thing that could happen but because they allow readers to work out private psychodramas.

PARKINSON: What has resonated with me throughout my life is the final line of the play: “The Great Work Begins.” I still think nearly every day in some way about the great work the play asks of us, and what it means for my own life.

ZOE KAZAN (Harper at Signature Theatre, New York, 2010): I think it’s mimetic. The play does the thing that it prescribes. It requires the same thing from the actors as it does from the characters as it does from the audience.

WESLEY MORRIS (critic-at-large, New York Times): All oppressed peoples want is to be left alone. You want to be included, but also not persecuted due to the attributes that made people want to enslave you, murder you, deny you rights, et cetera. You want to be visible, but you don’t want to be conspicuous. But the great thing about this play is that it demanded you be as conspicuous as possible.

I’d rather see a big fat mess that attempts something that’s out of a playwright’s reach than a neat little bundle that stays with me not at all.

The other thing Angels did was help make the claim that theater is something that belongs in the conversation about the great struggles of our time. It’s not just for the arts pages. It’s grappling with the big issues of who America is and what we would become. So while there’s no direct literary lineage, I look at a show like [Lynn Nottage’s] Sweat and I think its ambition is related.

MONICA PEARL (professor of English and American Studies, University of Manchester): 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.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA (playwright/performer, Hamilton and In the Heights): The notion of a country in political, physical, and spiritual crisis is

very relatable, very applicable to today. The notion that there are indigenous spirits and they’re pissed at us is very relatable. I think the metaphysical stuff couldn’t be more relevant. The spiritual crisis that’s suffusing the play feels very of the moment.

CYNTHIA MACE (Harper in Los Angeles, 1992): People wanted to see it when we did it because it was long and controversial. Now people want to see it because it’s long, and it’s magical, and it’s true. It will never lose its impact because we haven’t learned the lessons of it. Our ability to change is still challenged every day.

SIEGEL: The play could have made itself more relevant by being more angry and less easy to assimilate. There was more to the AIDS crisis than Kushner portrayed, and in many places in this country and in the world, gay survival is not anything that is guaranteed. Great social progress obscures the intense

pockets of hatred and resistance that are the backlash to it. The Pulse massacre in Orlando, sadly, is not a revelation. It’s a reminder.

The kinds of utopian hopes that I held twenty-five years ago, that for me were so associated specifically with Angels in America, are pretty much dead. Which of course is a good reason to turn back to the play.

Apparently, nothing good is happening, but good things are happening.

DAVID CROMER (director at the Journeymen, Chicago, 1998): I tell ya, I think the play is more terrifying now because it feels like the world is falling apart again. CALDWELL TIDICUE

JENNIFER ENGSTROM (the Angel at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, 2015): I feel like we are in a bizarro Part 3 of Angels in America, and the ghost of Roy Cohn is sweetly caressing the nuts of an American president who rides naked on horseback with Vladimir Putin.

“The Great Work Begins.” It’s always Beginning.