What I’m reading: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

One of the advantages of having a bad memory: when I re-read a book, it often feels like I’m reading it for the first time.

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I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America  as a student at UC Irvine, though I’m not sure which course it was in. I know that I had a version of Contemporary American Lit in both my undergrad and grad student years; the play would certainly have qualified as “contemporary,” since it appeared just a year or two before I started at UCI. But I also had a few courses that focused on, or at least included, plays, so who knows.

Aside from the annoying, cantankerous critic Lee Siegel at The New Republic, who thought this “second-rate” play was immune from criticism only because its themes included homosexuality and AIDS, most critics raved about it (“The most ambitious American play of our times”; “miraculous”; “A victory for theater”). It also won a respectable number of awards, including multiple Tonys and a Pulitzer.

I’m really enjoying it. I finished Part One, Millenium Approaches, last night — what a cliff-hanger! — and will probably dig into Part Two, Pestroika, tonight.

I’ve taught several plays in my time — Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Wilde, Hwang — and have always emphasized the difference between reading a play “on the page” and seeing a play “on its feet.” A handful of shy students always complain when I assign them to stage a significant scene from a play, but most come around when they discover something that they’d missed when simply reading the script — or, better, when they discover that the script’s “words on the page” could remain exactly the same, yet their meaning could shift under the weight of a director’s or actor’s choices: by blocking, or tone of voice, or gesture, or prop — or even by material constraints (such as performing in a classroom with no budget). Fun stuff.

That’s why, when I finish Part Two, I’m going to chase it with the HBO miniseries, which stars (among others) Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson. I’ve had it on my hard drive for some time, but I never got around to seeing it. I think I was a little afraid of it: while it has its “falling-down funny” moments, as one critic put it, it’s also an emotionally devastating play. But I guess that 2020 has built up my tolerance: our Trumpian GOP’s worship of power echoes the character Roy Cohn in the play’s post-Reagan/Bush America, and COVID-19 rhymes with the play’s AIDS epidemic.

One reason I decided to read the play first, rather than going straight to the miniseries: I like staging the play in my head. I can’t read Ian Fleming without “seeing” one of the screen Bonds in my mind’s eye. I can’t read Tolkien without seeing Viggo as Aragorn or Sir Ian as Gandalf (neither of which is a bad thing). So I didn’t want to read the play with the screen version in my head. And for the most part, that’s worked, though there is one exception. I didn’t know which part Pacino played, but Cohn’s quickly lines took on Pacino’s voice — appropriately, it turns out, since Pacino does indeed play Cohn.

Of course, a screen version isn’t the same thing as a play, either. Kushner wanted the stage production to lay bare the theatrical nature of the play. He wanted the sets to be changed by actors and stage hands working together, without blackouts. He wanted the “magic” involved — hallucinations or ghosts, the appearance of an angel — to be both “fully realized,” but also “bits of wonderful theatrical illusion — which means its OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do….” I’ll be interested to see how that translates to screen, if it does.

I’m not sure why I decided to re-read Angels in America. Part of the decision was influenced by a “reading rotation” list that I keep, my attempt to make sure I read broadly. Part was influenced by the fact that I had the books on my shelf. But in the end, I think I just realized that, as unprecedented as 2020 has been, even 2020 has roots in and echoes from the past — and not even the distant past.

And I wanted to see how a smart and innovative playwright handled the grave issues his culture faced — and to experience, perhaps, as if on a first reading, a level of catharsis that would make Aristotle proud.