Just a few about what the angels are, what they want, and in what sense the play is about angels and their relationship with America.<\/p>\n
Part One: Millennium Approaches<\/p>\n
Joe, a Mormon lawyer living in New York, has this take on America of 1985 (as Reagan is president), talking to his wife Harper, p26:<\/p>\n
\nThings are starting to change in the world. For the good. America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations. And people aren\u2019t ashamed of that like they used to be. This is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored. That\u2019s what President Reagan\u2019s done, Harper. He says, \u201cTruth exists and can be spoken proudly.\u201d And the country responds to him. We become better. More good. I need to be a part of that, I need something to lift me up. \u2026\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Later he speaks to (arch-villain) Roy Cohn, p54:<\/p>\n
\nThose who love God with a open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God\u2019s easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are. \u2026 I wanted to be one of the elect, one of the Blessed. You feel you ought to be, that the blemishes are yours by choice, which of course they aren\u2019t.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because Joe has secrets and struggles: like Roy Cohn, he\u2019s a closet gay.<\/p>\n
Prior Walter, a 30ish gay man in New York with AIDS, hears a voice, a premonition of the angel, which says, p62:<\/p>\n
\nSoon I will return, I will reveal myself to you; I am glorious, glorious; my heart, my countenance and my message. You must prepare. A marvelous work and a wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sword and broom of Truth!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the very next scene a lawyer associate of Cohn\u2019s rhapsodizes about the Republican agenda (sounding exactly like Republicans today), p63:<\/p>\n
\nWe have a new agenda and finally a real leader. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench\u2014Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. \u2026 It\u2019s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In long monologue Louis, Prior\u2019s Jewish boyfriend (who has left Prior, unable to handle the disease), ponders democracy in America, which he supposes is less about tolerance than power, and how race is really just a political question. P92:<\/p>\n
\nRacists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It\u2019s not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist\u2014only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there\u2019s only the political\u2026\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(This is the only explicit reference in the play to the play\u2019s title.)<\/p>\n
At the end of the first play, the angel arrives, dropping through the ceiling of Prior\u2019s room, p119:<\/p>\n
\nGreetings, Prophet;
\nThe Great Work begins:
\nThe Messenger has arrived.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe second play, Perestroika, opens with an ancient Russian Bolshevik, sermonizes about doom and the potential for change. He concludes,<\/p>\n
\nThen we dare not, we cannot<\/i>, we MUST NOT move ahead!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Later, Joe the Mormon lawyer, defends his worldview to Louis, p34-35:<\/p>\n
\nSince you believe the world is perfectable you find it always unsatisfying. But you must reconcile yourself to its unperfectability by being thoroughly in<\/i> the world but not of<\/i> it. It\u2019s the end of a nineteenth-century socialist romanticist conflation of government and society, law and Justice, idea and action, irreconcilables which only meet at some remote horizon, like parallels converging in infinity. The rhythm of history is conservative. Change is geologically slow. You must accept that.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Angel finally explains to Prior what\u2019s going on, p49ff:<\/p>\n
\nANGEL:
\nIn creating You, Our Father-Lover unleashed
\nSleeping Creation\u2019s Potential for Change.
\nIn YOU the Virus of TIME began!<\/p>\nYou Think<\/i>. And You IMAGINE<\/i>!
\nMigrate, Explore, and when you do:<\/p>\nPRIOR:
\nAs the human race began to progress, travel, intermingle, everything started to come unglued. Manifest first as tremors in Heaven.<\/p>\nANGEL:
\nHeaven is a City Much Like San Francisco\u2026\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith earthquakes mirroring heavenquakes. And so, <\/p>\n
\nANGEL:
\nHe began to leave us!
\nBored with His Angels, Bewitched by Humanity,
\nIn Mortifying Imitation of You, his least creation,
\nHe would sail off on Voyages, no knowing where.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd on April 18, 1906, the day of the Great San Francisco Earthquake,<\/p>\n
\nANGEL:
\nHE Left<\/i>
\nAnd did not return<\/i>.
\nWe do not know where HE has gone. HE may never<\/i>\u2026\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nPrior is relating all this, his visitation or dream of an angel, to his friend Belize: \u201cIt\u2019s all gone too far, too much loss is what they think, we should stop somehow, go back.\u201d To which Belize replies, p52:<\/p>\n
\nBut that\u2019s not how the world works, Prior. It only spins forward.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Angel goes on:<\/p>\n
\nBefore the boiling of blood and the searing of skin
\nComes the Secret Catastrophe:
\nBefore Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible,
\nIt will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.
\n(Coughs)
\nYOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY!<\/i> YOU MUST STOP MOVING!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe ultimate conservative agenda.<\/p>\n
\nForsake the Open Road:
\nNeither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow.
\nIf you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress:
\nSeek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic:
\nYou cannot Understand, You can only Destroy,
\nYou do not Advance, You only Trample.
\nPoor blind Children, abandoned on the Earth,
\nGroping terrified, misguided, over
\nFields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain:
\nHOBBLE YOURSELVES!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd the Angel gives Prior a book.<\/p>\n
\nVessel of the BOOK now: Oh Exemplum Paralyticum:
\nOn you in you in your blood we write have written:
\nSTASIS!
\nThe END.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nMany scenes, trials and tribulations (including the death of Roy Cohn) later, Prior ascends to Heaven and faces a row of Continental Principalities, who \u201cmaintain surveillance over Human Mischief,\u201d and gives the book back.<\/p>\n
\nPRIOR:
\nIt just\u2026 It just\u2026 We can\u2019t just stop. We\u2019re not rocks\u2014progress, migration, motion is\u2026 modernity. It\u2019s animate<\/i>, it\u2019s what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it\u2019s still desire for<\/i>. Even if we go faster than we should. We can\u2019t wait<\/i>. And wait for what? God\u2026<\/p>\nHe isn\u2019t coming back. And even if he did\u2026
\nIf He ever did come back, if He ever dared<\/i> to show His face, or his Glyph or whatever in the Garden again\u2026 if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see\u2026 how much suffering His abandonment had created, if He did come back you should sue<\/i> the bastard. That\u2019s my only contribution to all this Theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe terrible things including, of course, AIDS.<\/p>\n
\nPRIOR:
\nI haven\u2019t done<\/i> anything yet, I\u2026
\nI want to be healthy again. And this plague, it should stop. In me and everywhere. Make it go away.<\/p>\nI want more life. I can\u2019t help myself. I do.
\nI\u2019ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but\u2026 You see them living anyway.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd so Prior rejects the Angel\u2019s plea for the abandonment of modernity. And lives.<\/p>\n
In the final scene, four years later in 1990, Prior addresses the audience.<\/p>\n
\nThis disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won\u2019t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
\nBye now.
\nYou are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
\nAnd I bless you: More Life<\/i>.
\nThe Great Work Begins.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nEnd of play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a few about what the angels are, what they want, and in what sense the play is about angels and their relationship with America. Part One: Millennium Approaches Joe, a Mormon lawyer living in New York, has this take … Continue reading