Friday, 4/4

RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ:

“Sharfer vi di tson a shlang iz an undankbr kind!”

LOUIS:

I don’t speak Yiddish.

RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Sharper than the serpent’s tooth is the ingratitude of children. Shakespeare. Kenig Lear.

(I, 5)

• Medieval Drama: The characters’ personal problems are treated as analogues of larger-scale moral, political, ecological, and supernatural problems.; heavy reliance on Biblical allegory and typological thinking.

• Realism and Naturalism: Vernacular dialogue rendered to resemble actual conversation; emphasis on domestic problems and individual psychology.

• Symbolism: Psychological content is conveyed through dream logic and symbols as well as through conventional dialogue. The use of sound and color in the Angel scenes recalls Expressionism.

• Brechtian Epic Theatre: The cross-gender multicasting serves as a V-effect; the mixture of actual (Roy, Ethel) and fictional (everyone else) figures blurs simple fact/fiction distinctions; political debates between the characters interrupt the plot; Perestroika ends with a direct address epilogue; “it’s okay if the wires show, and maybe it’s good if they do.”

• Hollywood Film: The short scenes that jump among multiple locations; the use of parallel scenes in a manner similar to cross-cutting or montage; quotations and visual references to classic films (Sunset Boulevard; The Ten Commandments; The Wizard of Oz)

"Do you cry for Roy Cohn? Part of the impulse to write Angels in America came from the way this man who I hated got an obituary in The Nation by Robert Sherrill that was completely homophobic. The question of forgiveness may be the hardest political question people face. If there's isn't something called forgiveness, if there isn't a statute of limitations on crime, if political movements proceed primarily driven by revenge, there will never be peace and progress. But forgiveness, if it means anything, has to be incredibly hard to come by. These plays are about, among other things, love, justice, and ambivalence.”

-Kushner speaking to Don Shewey in the Village Voice, 1993

LOUIS:

It’s the judge in his or her chamber, weighing books

open, pondering the evidence, ranging freely over

categories: good, evil, innocent, guilty; the judge in the

chamber of circumspection, not the judge on the bench

with the gavel. The shaping of the law, not its execution.

(I, 8)

JOE:

The whole Hall of Justice, it’s empty, it’s deserted, it’s gone out

of business. Forever. The people that make it run have up and

abandoned it.

LOUIS:

Creepy.

JOE:

Well yes but. I felt that I was going to scream. Not because it

was creepy, but because the emptiness felt to fast.

And…well, good. A…happy scream.

I just wondered what I think it would be…if overnight

everything you owe anything to, justice, of love, had really gone

away. Free. (II, 7)

BELIZE:

Justice is simple. Democracy is

simple. Those things are

unambivalent. But love is very hard.

(III, 2)

HARPER:

People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

(I, 3)

ROY:

Love; that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a

trap, too. Like a father to a son, I tell you

this: Life is full of horror; nobody

escapes, nobody; save yourself.

Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs

from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid;

people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live

in the raw wind, naked, alone…Learn at

least this: What you are capable of. Let

nothing stand in your way.

(II,4)LOUIS

Maybe because this person’s sense of the world, that it will change for the better with

struggle, maybe a person who has a post-Hegelian positivist sense of constant

historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very

powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the

time…maybe that person can’t, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things

are supposed to go.

(I, 5)

What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic history. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The Fabulous is not delimited by age or beauty. Style has a dialectical relationship to physical reality. The body is the Real. Style is Theater. The raw materials are reworked into illusion. For style to be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, physical insufficiencies—and just as importantly, one’s audiences must be made aware of the degree of transcendence, of triumph; must see both the triumph and that over which the triumph has been made. (In this magic of the Fabulous is precisely the magic of theater. The wires show. The illusion is always incomplete, inadequate; the work behind the magic is meant to be appreciated.)

• From “Foreword: Notes Toward a Theater of the Fabulous.” In Clum, John, Ed. Staging Gay Lives. Westview Press, 1996.

“Test out a dangerous idea, a

theme that threatens to destroy

one's whole value system. Treat

the material in a madly farcical

manner without losing the

seriousness of the theme. Show

how paradoxes arrest the mind.

Scare yourself a bit along the

way.”—Charles

Ludlum, “Manifesto: Ridiculous

Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly"

“This combination of

abjection and defiance

often produces a divinity-

effect in the subject, a

compelling belief that one

is a god or a vehicle of

divinity.”—Eve Sedgwick

and Michael

Moon, “Divinity” (1991).

"I don't believe we have a mystical function. I do believe the oppressed hold the truth in the society. The slave knows what the master can't know. You can approach that from the mystical-spiritual or the materialist position and believe the same thing. It's what Walter Benjamin calls the earthworm action of the oppressed. The people who are really making history are those tilling the soil of time and who understand how it works from a molecular, chemical point of view.”

-Kushner speaking to Don Shewey in the Village Voice, 1993

BELIZE:

Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That’s not purple up there, Mary, that color up there is (Very grand) mauve.

All day today it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it--can you smell it?

LOUIS:

Smell what?

BELIZE:

Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

LOUIS:

No…

(III, 2)

It’s irresponsible to give false

hope, which I think a lot of

playwrights are guilty of. But I

also think it’s irresponsible to

simply be a nihilist, which quite a

lot of playwrights, especially

playwrights younger than

me, have become guilty of. I

don’t believe you would bother to

write a play if you really had no

hope…

-Kushner, speaking to

David Savran, 1995