The Mixed Legacy of 'Angels in America'
Stephen Spinella and Ellen McLaughlin (Joan Marcus)
Charles Lupia
Much hoopla has been raised in theatrical circles lately over the twenty-five plus years that have passed since the Broadway premiere of the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This work, which ultimately comprises two long plays, is hailed as a monument of American drama, on par with the best work of O’Neill, Williams, and Miller.
But are these appraisals accurate? What originality does this work have? Angels is a large-scale work aspiring to present the gay movement and the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s. But other Broadway plays had presented gay issues before, including The Boys in the Band. And Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart had dealt with AIDS.
Angels’ unique contribution perhaps lay in Kushner’s depiction of its villain, Roy Cohn. A historical person notorious as Senator Joe McCarthy’s attorney, the diabolical Cohn was a gay man who, bizarrely enough, encouraged the persecution of gays.
As a side note, Cohn was also the attorney and mentor for our current president, Donald Trump. Trump has time and again acknowledged Roy Cohn as a major influence. Tony Kushner has been one of the very few people who has grasped the connection, although he has not yet come out with a play on the subject.
Angels is also interesting in its almost Old Testament presentation of angels. These spirits are not the cute presences of recent imagination, but rather fierce agents of cosmic justice.
Yet both the plays are much longer than they need to be. This comes from a lack of artistic discipline on Kushner’s part. He too often goes overboard in his subject matter into preaching.
The 1930’s playwright George Kaufman said that if a playwright is to send a message, he should send it by Western Union. While this quote irritated me for years, there is more than a grain of truth in it.
Plays should, as a matter of course, deal with important and often difficult subjects. The job of the playwright, as Aristophanes said, is to teach. But the playwright should not be telling the audience WHAT TO THINK. This is what Kushner has done time and again.
It’s rather the playwright’s job to get the audience TO THINK. As members of society, audience members should take on the job of thinking out complex problems. This was task was well understood by both Ibsen and Shaw.
The playwright achieves his or her task by presenting ideas and situations in their full complexity. A truly great play such as John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt does not thrust facile answers or opinions on the audience.
One of the main champions of Kushner’s work has been the critic Harold Bloom. Bloom, of course, places Kushner at the pinnacle of American drama. This is a telling connection, as Bloom has opined that Walt Whitman was the greatest American writer. Whitman, whatever his greatness, was a poet notorious, like Kushner, for failing to do his own editing. As a result, Whitman’s reader is forced to do the editing, and sort out the gold from the dross.
Since Angels premiered, Kushner has been considered an intellectual leader of the theatre. But with his lack of artistic discipline has also come a lack of intellectual discipline. As witnessed by his essays and speeches, Kushner has shown himself unable or unwilling to stay on any subject. He has been unable to develop ideas as Brecht or Miller did.
In recent years, Kushner has perhaps fared best as a scriptwriter for the filmmaker Steven Spielberg. I suspect that Spielberg, or others hired by him, have done considerable cutting. But even with Spielberg’s films, Munich was painfully long and preachy. And the successful Lincoln also showed Kushner trying to force his thoughts on the audience.
I take no issue with Tony Kushner’s politics. He has, for the most part, been on the side of enlightenment. He has shown considerable personal integrity in pushing the principle of inclusion.
But his artistic and intellectual work should be seen in the glaring light of true merit. His plays, in my opinion, are not on par with those of O’Neill or Williams.