Politics of Tony Kushners Angels in America Essay Example

a dialectical vision of history. Brecht's insistence on socially conscious, proletarian drama is also evident in Kushner's depictions of normal people in politically charged crises and particular individuals exposed to deprivation and suffering. Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht (Versuche uber Brecht, 1966) influenced Kushner's theatre.Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1969) particularly inspired Angels in America. In the core of this essay, Benjamin uses a strange visual allegory for the presentation of his theories on history written within the context of the Nazi advance across Europe.

According to Worthen (2004: 1208), by gazing at Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (1920), Benjamin develops a parable of history in his ninth thesis: A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.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 storm 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. Munoz (2004) compares the angels, “In Benjamin's metaphor, the angel of history stands for both the absence of the idea

of a future and the intolerable situation of a present.

Trapped between a past and a horrific future, the angel just passively gazes at the catastrophe of the history of humankind. Thus, paradise becomes a real tempest that gets caught under his wings and pushes him into an unknown future. This way, Benjamin's angel looks like a bird of bad omens rather than a prophetical messenger. The philosopher's upset and pessimistic view on history and progress is at the basis of Kushner's plays. But the playwright succeeds in getting over Benjamin's thesis and not only improves it but also reverses it”. Kushner’s characters give their opinion about a disastrous and apocalyptic vision of history and its future by recalling the AIDS epidemic, racism, homophobia, and the dismantlement of the world: "ROY: I see the universe, Joe, as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity but instead of grains of sand its shards and splinters of glass" (Act 1 scene 2), "WOMAN: In the new century I think we will all be insane" (Act 3 scene 4), "ETHEL ROSENBERG: History... is about to crack wide open, Millennium approaches" (Act 3 scene 5). Kushner believes in a dialectical order of the universe and therefore of history. When interviewed by Andrea Bernstein on his play Slavs' and about his vision of history, Kushner points out that "You can't stay back.

The fundamental question is: Are we made by history or do we make history-—and the answer is yes" (1995). David Savran states that Kushner's concept of history and politics in Angels in America is connected with "Enlightenment epistemologies" and that the plays "champion rationalism and

progress, Kushner seems to establish a kind of neo-Enlightenment approach in his play because of the constant allusions to "progress", "change", "modernity" and "motion". (1995: 258). I believe what Kushner suggests is that history is needed to know where to begin.

Real history is the one that has not yet been written, the one to be created from the past and the one which pushes us forward to improve it; the same one which prevents us from repeating it or becoming trapped. For example, in one of his hallucinations, Prior meets two of his ancestors—Prior 1 from the Middle Ages and Prior 2 from the 18th century—who were also victims of another epidemic (the plague) and whose function is to make the audience reflect on the repetition of history and the necessity of facing together both the disease and the prejudices it entails. It is precisely from his characters' personal history that Kushner designs his dialectical explanation of the changing world America is. As Roman points out: "Kushner's plays open up the microstructures of the characters' interactions in order to comment on the macrostructures of social institutions, political philosophies, and competing historiographies" (1998: 210). In both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, the playwright makes his characters recall their people's pasts, origins, and roots.

Rabbi Isidor recalls the great Jew migrations from Europe to America; Prior lays claim to his WASP lineage; Mormons Joe, Harper, and Hannah feel proud of their ancestors had crossed the continent, and Belize remembers how black people were taken as slaves from Africa. Kushner, on the other hand, achieves this dialectical relationship by mixing them with one another in intermingling stories. In this respect,

Prior—a WASP club designer with AIDS—is partnered with Louis—a leftist Jew word processor—who leaves Prior to getting involved with Joe—a closeted Republican Mormon clerk—-who, in turn, is married to Harper—a valium-addicted housewife. Meanwhile, Joe admires his mentor, Roy Cohn, who is a closeted Republican Jew lawyer with AIDS; Hannah—Joe's Mormon mother—happens to meet Prior and becomes one of his best friends. However, both Prior and Harper meet in their hallucinations provoked respectively by fever and valium; and finally Belize— ex-drag queen and Prior's best friend and former lover— who works as a nurse for both Prior and Roy Cohn, who suffer from AIDS in hospital.

In a decade (Reaganite America) in which masculinity is tightly linked to power and politics, the playwright deconstructs the "essence" of what is being a 'real man' in America by exposing these characters' features. Joe Pitt and Roy Cohn, disciple and mentor respectively, who relate to each other in terms of ‘masculinizing’ the Law: "ROY: Law's a pliable, breathing, sweating organ" (Act 2 Scene 6). Convinced Republicans, neither of them can cope with their homosexuality, which is constantly repressed until Harper questions Joe and Roy is diagnosed with AIDS, even then he still asserts: "Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys" (Act 2 Scene 2). Kushner then, by queering these characters, not only proposes a reversal of the traditional effeminate gay role, but also an eroticism of the daddy-son relationship within the homophobic, Reaganite American law circles. Millennium Approaches opens with Rabbi Isidor Chelmelwitz's sermon-like history lesson he urges the audience: "every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one

you cross.

.. In you that journey is" (Act 1 Scene1). The journey, the motion is what really counts as a personal commitment with history of ever-changing and moving. But he even adds "you do not live in America, no such place exists" (Act 1 Scene 1) as if reminding us and warning that a nation's history is never finished: it is daily built up by everyone. The characters in Kushner's plays seem to live out of the past into the present.

They cannot see, and for all their efforts they cannot predict the future. They depend, therefore, on their knowledge of the past to create a rational pattern that leads from present to future. The main theme of the play for me is the opposition of stasis and change; do you remain in the same place and accept your circumstances or do you fight for change? Kushner implies that American democracy and politics must resist the reactive impulse of remaining the same. Rather than constantly seeking a haven in an idealized, 1950’s past, America needs to embrace even those changes that frighten some people, namely the growth of a politically active and culturally accepted gay and lesbian minority.

Bibliography

1. Bernstein, A. (1995), Interview with Tony Kushner http://www. other ones. com/arts/qa/1995/07/bernstein. html Fisher, J. (1995)

Reviewed work(s)

1. Angels in America. Part II.
   Perestroika by Tony Kushner, Theatre Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, Gay and Lesbian Queeries pp. 291-293

Published by

1. The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/3208489 ​Munoz, A (2004),
   ​Tony Kushner's Angels in America or how American History Spins forward, ​University of Barcelona Publication Roman, D. (1998),

Acts of intervention

1. Performance, Gay Culture, and Aids, Indiana University
   

Press. Savran, D.(1995) Am
alence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How "Angels in America" Reconstructs the Nation, Theatre Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, Gay and Lesbian Queeries (May 1995), pp. 207-227

Published by

1. The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www. jstor.org/stable/3208484 Stefanovic, S. (2000),
2. Linguistics and Language volume2, Kushners Political Theatre, Factor Universitatis. Worthen, W. (2004),
3. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama (fourth edition): Tony Kushners Angels in America, Thomson