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

by Isaac Butler

What moves me about Angels is that it is unapologetically a play. It’s passionately theatrical. You can do it with $200. You should be able to do it on the sweetest, most old-fashioned stage. There’s a Christmas pageant quality to it. The tricks are not tricks, because you see the wire, you see all of the stuff as theater magic. It has more power. We lost hold of some of the sacredness of that experience as we went to the high theatrical effects that you can achieve with lots and lots of money.

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.

It’s the most interesting kind of political play—one that comes from a place not of knowing but of unknowing. Of finding the available truths intolerably inadequate, and trying, through all the means available to theater, to figure out what an adequate truth could be.

way of showing that something is funny and painful at the same time; so when you get Prior singing fragments from My Fair Lady, he’s trying to laugh so as not to be devastated.

“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.

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.

Gay people became more American but America didn’t become more gay.

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.

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.