Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History

Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History CHARLES MCNULTY AIDS plays have come to be thought of as a phenomenon of the [980S, as Happenings were of the 1960s. Though the epidemic still rages, the bravely furious genre that began with William Hoffman's As Is and Larry Kramer's The Normal Hearl has for the most part receded into the paragraphs of theater history textbooks. Nicholas de Jongh identifies the central mission of these plays as the fight against "an orthodoxy that regards AIDS as a mere local difficulty , principally affecting a reviled minority.'" It is not entirely surprising, then, that the category has been said to have drawn to a close. The disease, after all, has been acknowledged, albeit belatedly, to be a widespread calamity ; only the morally deaf, dumb, and blind have resisted this assessment, and they most certainly remain beyond the pale of agitprop, no matter how artfully conceived. To make things official, an obituary of the genre appeared in American Theatre in October of [989: Recently, AIDS has fallen off as a central subject for new drama. It's no wonder. When, for instance. spectacle and public ritual are so movingly combined in the image and action of the Names Project Quilt. conventionallheater seems redundanl- at best a pale imitation of the formal, mass expressions that help give shape to real grief and anger. Time and again the spirited protestors of ACT UP have demonstrated that the theater of AIDS is in the streets.2 The cult of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, by far the most celebrated play of the 1990s, would appear, however, to have rendered all this premature. Subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Kushner's two-part epic features a deserted gay man with full-blown AIDS battling both heaven and earth. But Angels represents not so much a revival of the category as a radical rethinking of its boundaries. For the playwright, the question is no longer what Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 84 Tony Kushner's Theses 85 is the place of AIDS in history, but what of history itself can be learned through the experience of gay men and AIDS. Kushner's angels were inspired not from any Biblical ecstasy but from the great twentieth-century German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History."3 Benjamin, writing in the spring of 1940 in France only a few months before he was to kill himself trying to escape the German occupation, borrows Paul Klee's 1920 painting Angelus Novus to convey his rigorously anti-Hegelian understanding of the movement of history: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has 'been smashed. But a stann is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.4 The movement of history is conceived not in tenns of a dialectical narrative intent on progress, but as a steadfast path of destruction. All, however, is not lost. For Benjamin, the present represents a crisis point in which there is the opportunity to take cognizance of the homogeneous course of history, and thereby shift a specific era out of it.s For Kushner, a gay activist and dramatist enthralled by Benjamin's brooding analysis of history, the present crisis couldn't be more clear. Surveying five years of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, the playwright casts a backward glance on America's domestic strife, and with it something unexpected flickers into view -the revolutionary chance to blast open the oppressive continuum of history and steer clear into the next millennium. To realize this Benjamin-inspired vision, Kushner follows the lives of two...