Angels in America as Medieval Mystery

Angels in America as Medieval Mystery BENILDE MONTGOMERY Although highly praised in the popular press when it first appeared and officially canonized soon thereafter by Harold Bloom,' Tony Kushner's Angels in America has now come under the scrutiny of critics of a more suspicious gaze. Among these less than enthusiastic critics are the notorious Arlene Croce, who, if only indirectly, includes Angels as an instance of "victim art"; Leo Bersani, who finds the play "muddled and pretentious"; and David Savran, who unravels the play's ambivalences to show not only that it is seriously at odds with its own apparent intentions, but that its immense popularity can be accounted for in the way it supports the "binary oppositions" of the status quo and thereby implicitly supports the Reaganite agenda that it would otherwise subvert.' More positively, however, Savran also notes that "the play deliberately evokes the long history of Western dramatic literature and positions itself as heir to the traditions of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, and others.") Among these others, I suspect that an important tradition to which Kushner is also the heir is that of the medieval mystery cycles. To read Angels in America in the light of this tradition may help dispel Savran's suspicion that Kushner is as much the victim of Enlightenment categories as are hispolitical enemies. It should first be noted that although Kushner was a student of medieval culture (he graduated from Columbia with a degree in medieval studies),' he has little interest in the specific Christian contents of the cycles. Indeed, in an early interview with Savran, Kushner makes his ambivalence about the Middle Ages clear. On the one hand, he dismisses them as "of no relevance to anything " only to praise them later on for the "great richness [thatl can come from societies that aren't individuated."5 Kushner's use of the Corpus Christi plays in Angels in America is consistent with this ambivalence. While he is interested in the cycle plays because of their dramatic structure and internal form, his own agenda demands that he distance himself from their theological contents in favor of what appears to be a highly secularized humanism. To use Modern Drama, 4J ( J998) 596 Angels in America as Medieval Mystery 597 Thomas M. Greene's language, Kushner "force[s] us to recognize the poetic distance traversed,,6 between the hierarchic world of the cycles and our own postmodem experience. If, as Savran suggests, Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History" (an essay written in '940 in an attempt to account for the emergence of Hitler's new order) is "the primary generative fiction for Angels ill America ,"7 we have an important instance of Kushner'S abiding interest in the question of redemptive history, an interest first apparent in his A Bright Room Called Day ('985). Kushner himself admits that his protagonist, Prior Walter, is named for Benjamin and that his angel is modeled on Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, discussed in Benjamin's essay. Significantly, however, the medieval mystery cycles are also attempts to come to terms with questions similar to those raised by Benjamin and of interest to Kushner. Developed in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during what Martin Stevens calls "some of the most disruptive upheavals of the social order," including economic depression and plague, the mystery cycles developed when, not unlike Benjamin four hundred years later, medieval Christians were fe-examining the nature and meaning of redemptive history in an effort to redefine their own newly emerging social order. The plays helped, as Stevens suggests, to create "a reinvigorated sense of morality.'" As such, the cycles would seem to be particularly hospitable to Kushner's postmodem didactic project, written at the end of the millennium and during the age of AIDS. Moreover, Benjamin's theory of redemptive history is similar to that expressed in the medieval cycles. A student of Jewish mysticism, Benjamin felt that "the moral duty of criticism was to 'redeem' the past, to save it from oblivion by revealing its concealed truth."9 Once revealed, the truth of the past, particularly as it is embodied in the "oppressed," might then provide some hope for...