Corpus Juris Tertium: Redemptive Jurisprudence in Angels in America

“In the beginning was the Word; . . . [then] The Word became flesh.”

—John 1:1,14

Law, at least the contemporary American concept of it, is a nerve running through nearly every organ and extremity of the body of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The abundance of Angels passages that addr ess or refer to the law demonstrates the subject’s ubiquity in the plays. Among other things, two of the plays’ central characters, Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt, are not only closeted homosexuals but also attorneys (Cohn is a seasoned practitioner, whereas Joe P itt researches and drafts opinions for a federal judge). Their presence, as I discuss in greater depth below, saturates the plays’ dialogue with the vocabulary and cultural referents of American legalspeak. Legal metaphor and allusion are also part of the everyday discourse of non-lawyers Louis and Prior: for example, Prior renders a “verdict” on Louis’s failings in love, ¹ Louis and Prior debate the merits of the judicial tasks of deliberating and rendering judgment (MA 38–39), and Lou i s’s masturbatory intellectualism includes speculations on the relationship among law, “Justice,” and the Constitution. ² Law enters into countless other lay settings as well; to name a few, Mr. Ties reminds Harper of the “by-laws” (MA 1 0 2) of the International Organization of Travel Agents, Belize speaks of the “law” of love (MA 100), Roy urges Joe to find some “law” that he can break (MA 110), and the “Law for real” busts Harper’s imagination (P 21). Legal places, s uch as the ironically named Hall of Justice in Brooklyn and Department of Justice in Washington, loom large in the plays’ landscape. Lastly, many of the plays’ pivotal dramatic moments are or involve momentous legal events, such as the trial of Ethel Rose nberg, Cohn’s disbarment proceedings, and Louis’s discovery of the conservative opinions that Joe Pitt ghostwrote for Judge Wilson.

In this essay I argue that law is more than subtext or local color. Instead, law is intricately intertwined among the “national” themes Kushner handles, significantly advancing the urgent and weighty messages about spirituality and apocalypse that Ange ls so poignantly delivers. Ultimately, law acquires the salient characteristics of a secular religion in the America that Kushner brings to the stage.

Many of the plays’ principal characters embody different types or distinctive components of law. We know this by the stark difference between Joe Pitt’s and Roy Cohn’s legal ethics: they disagree strongly about the “legality” and necessity of Cohn’s havin g accepted a loan from his client (MA 66) and about Cohn’s having engaged in private, ex parte conversations with the judge during the Rosenberg case (MA 108). (Cohn and Joe clash equally in lay ethics as well, as evidenced by their argument over Joe’s refusal to go to Washington without his wife Harper [MA 106–8]). Roy Cohn’s ogreish, grotesque, scene-stealing command of Angels demands that his character be first in an interpretation of law’s function in the plays.

Kushner employs Cohn, the “famous lawyer” (MA 112), as a stereotype of the successful lawyer in capitalist, materialist, litigious America. Like many of the other characters in the plays, however, Cohn’s stereotypicality is only superficial; in rea lity, he is a subversion, or more accurately for Cohn, a perversion, of the familiar type. Cohn’s lawyering is conspicuous for its mangling of truth, its shoot-from-the-hip, get-away-with-whatever-you-can impudence, and the ensuing lability of the governi ng rule of law. My focus here, however, is the extent to which Cohn’s lawyering differs from the garden-variety, ethically compromised practice of the stereotypical American lawyer. As many readers and theatregoers probably would concur, a skillful attorn ey, if paid to do so, can argue that black is white or the Pope is Jewish. Increased media coverage of sensationalistic trials has stimulated American appetite to near insatiability and encouraged popular belief that success as a defense lawyer in particu...