Angels in America (37 page)

     
But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:

     
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

     
Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

     
At least I think that's so.

EPILOGUE:

Bethesda

January 1990

Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah sitting on the rim of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. It's a bright day, but cold
.

Prior is heavily bundled, and he has thick glasses on. He supports himself with a cane. Hannah is noticeably different
—
she looks like a New Yorker, and she's reading an issue of
The Nation.
Louis and Belize are arguing. The Bethesda Angel is above them all
.

LOUIS
: The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Ceauşescus are out. He's building democratic socialism. The New Internationalism. Gorbachev is the greatest political thinker since Lenin.

BELIZE
: I don't think we know enough yet to start canonizing him. The Russians hate his guts.

LOUIS
: Yeah but. Remember back four years ago? The whole time we were feeling everything everywhere was stuck, while in Russia! Look! Perestroika! The Thaw! It's the end of the Cold War! The whole world is changing! Overnight!

HANNAH
: I wonder what'll happen now in places like Yugoslavia.

LOUIS
: Yugoslavia?

PRIOR
(To audience)
: Let's just turn the volume down on this, OK?

     
They'll be at it for hours. It's not that what they're saying isn't important, it's just . . .

     
This is my favorite place in New York City. No, in the whole universe. The parts of it I have seen.

     
On a day like today. A sunny winter's day, warm and cold at once. The sky's a little hazy, so the sunlight has a physical presence, a character. In autumn, those trees across the lake are yellow, and the sun strikes those most brilliantly. Against the blue of the sky, that sad fall blue, those trees are more light than vegetation. They are Yankee trees, New England transplants. They're barren now.

     
It's January 1990. I've been living with AIDS for five years. That's six whole months longer than I lived with Louis.

LOUIS
: Whatever comes, what you have to admire in Gorbachev, in the Russians is that they're making a leap into the unknown. You can't wait around for a theory. The sprawl of life, the weird . . .

HANNAH
: Interconnectedness.

LOUIS
: Yes.

BELIZE
: Maybe the sheer size of the terrain.

LOUIS
: It's all too much to be encompassed by a single theory now.

BELIZE
: The world is faster than the mind.

LOUIS
: That's what politics is. The world moving ahead. And only in politics does the miraculous occur.

BELIZE
: But that's a theory.

HANNAH
: You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.

LOUIS
: Go know. As my grandma would say.

PRIOR
(Turning the sound off again)
: This angel. She's my favorite angel. I like them best when they're statuary. They commemorate death but they suggest a world without dying. They are made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, they weigh tons but they're winged, they are engines and instruments of flight.

     
This is the angel Bethesda. Louis will tell you her story.

LOUIS
: Oh. Um, well, she was this angel, she landed in the Temple Square in Jerusalem, in the days of the Second Temple, right in the middle of a working day she descended and just her foot touched earth. And where it did, a fountain shot up from the ground.

     
When the Romans destroyed the Temple, the fountain of Bethesda ran dry.

PRIOR
: And Belize will tell you about the nature of the fountain, before its flowing stopped.

BELIZE
: If anyone who was suffering, in the body or the spirit, walked through the waters of the fountain of Bethesda, they would be healed, washed clean of pain.

PRIOR
: They know this because I've told them, many times. Hannah here told it to me. She also told me this:

HANNAH
: When the Millennium comes—

PRIOR
: Not the year two thousand, but the capital-M Millennium—

HANNAH
: Right. The fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told him I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.

LOUIS
: Not literally in Jerusalem, I mean we don't want this to have sort of Zionist implications, we—

BELIZE
: Right on.

LOUIS
: But on the other hand we
do
recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist.

BELIZE
: But the West Bank should be a homeland for the Palestinians, and the Golan Heights should—

LOUIS
: Well not
both
the West Bank and the Golan Heights, I mean no one supports Palestinian rights more than I do but—

BELIZE
: Oh yeah right, Louis, like not even the Palestinians are more devoted than—

PRIOR
: I'm almost done.

     
The fountain's not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes. But in the summer it's a sight to see. I want to be around to see it. I plan to be. I hope to be.

     
This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

     
Bye now.

     
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

     
And I bless you:
More Life
.

     
The Great Work Begins.

END OF PLAY

Notes

Acknowledgments

For
Millennium Approaches

From the first edition, published in 1993:

I received generous support during the writing of this play in the form of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gerbode Foundation, and the Fund for New American Plays/American Express. Further financial and abundant emotional support came from my parents, Bill and Sylvia Kushner, Martha Deutscher, and Dot and Jerry Edelstien. Joyce Ketay the Wonder-Agent, and her associate Carl Mulert have been awesomely protective and farsighted; and from Jim Nicola of New York Theatre Workshop I have gotten wonderfully smart advice.

Gordon Davidson and the staff of the Mark Taper Forum provided the play and its author with the best circumstances for development and production any artist could hope for.

Richard Eyre and the staff of the National Theatre made a timorous and occasionally querulous visitor to British theater feel at home. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod made the play dance.

Millennium Approaches
has benefited from the dramaturgical work of Roberta Levitow, Philip Kan Gotanda, Leon Katz and Ellen McLaughlin; K. C. Davis contributed dramaturgy, dedication and Radical Queerness.

Bill Anderson, Andy Holland, Ian Kramer, Peter Minthorn, Sam Sommer and John Ryan (of blessed memory) are everywhere in this play.

David Esbjornson helped shape the final version of
Millennium
and brought it, fabulously, to San Francisco.

Tony Taccone brought craft, clarity and menschlichkeit to Los Angeles.

For
Perestroika

From the first edition, published in 1994:

Abundant emotional support was provided by my aunt, Martha Deutscher. Dot and Jerry Edelstien, and Marcia, Tony and Alex Cunha made homes away from home for me. My assistant, Michael Petshaft, helped keep me sane.

Jim Nicola of New York Theatre Workshop has encouraged and advised me all the way, and so has Rosemarie Tichler of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Together they shed blood for the play, literally; they have won my purple heart.

Gordon Davidson has been the most open-hearted and-handed producer/shepherd any playwright could ever want, and the whole staff of the Taper has been sensational, fabulous, divine.

The National Theatre staff has also been immensely supportive, and I'm particularly grateful to Richard Eyre and Giles Croft for believing in the play even in its scruffiest stages.

I am also indebted to Rocco Landesman, Jack Viertel, Paul Libin, Margo Lion, Susan Gallin, Herb Alpert, Fred Zollo and the angelic hosts of brave and honorable producers who gambled on this outrageous experiment on Broadway.

Mary K. Klinger stage-managed the show both in Los Angeles and in New York, unshakable in the face of many tempests.

The play has benefited from the dramaturgical work of Leon Katz and K. C. Davis, as well as the directors and actors who have participated in its various workshops and productions.

Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantello and Ellen McLaughlin have made invaluable suggestions on shaping and editing.

David Esbjornson, who directed the play in its first draft in San Francisco, has listened to and commented on its stories ever since.

Tony Taccone made invaluable structuring suggestions during his work on the play in Los Angeles.

Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod directed and designed the play at the National Theatre in London. Their early insights and responses have been challenging and helpful and have goaded me to keep trying to make the play better.

George C. Wolfe has been an inspiring and indefatigable collaborator on this final stage of shaping the play; he's been brilliantly insightful, respectful and galvanizing. The last step was the hardest, and I wouldn't have managed it without him.

From the revised edition, published in 1996:

While making the most recent revisions in the text, I've been particularly indebted to Michael Mayer, Mark Wing-Davey, Brian Kulick and Tess Timoney.

For this edition:

In 2007 Rupert Goold and the Headlong theater production of
Angels
toured England and played for six weeks at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. The director, Daniel Kramer, in preparation for the production, asked me many questions, and engaged me in a series of delightful, pointed and challenging discussions, which got me back to work on
Perestroika
for the first time in several years.

In 2009, I saw the first revival of Ivo van Hove's 2008 production of
Angels
with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. As is so often the case in the work of this extraordinary theater artist, Ivo found a new, boldly imaginative form of stage life for
Angels
through a serious, meticulous, deep exploration of its text. Ivo and I didn't discuss alterations to the plays, but his production and his company's performances changed my understanding of what I'd written and powerfully impacted my thinking about further revisions for
Perestroika
.

Those revisions began in earnest when Jim Houghton and the Signature Theatre Company wanted to include
Angels
as one of the three plays for my Signature season, in 2010–2011. Because of Jim's enormous, indefatigable generosity, enthusiasm and patience, as well as the devotion and endless kindness of Beth Whitaker, Kirsten Bowen and the whole Signature staff, it was possible for me to dig into
Perestroika
, accompanied every step along the way by our director, the great Michael
Greif, and the dazzling company of actors he assembled. I was able to experiment with new scenes, talk and argue about them with colleagues whose passion, acuity and talent made exhilarating the scary business of attempting to improve a script that for many years had worked just fine. They bravely allowed me to flounder around, to fine-tune what worked before many preview audiences, and finally to come close to feeling that I'd truly completed a play—at least for the time being. My gratitude extends to Michael and every actor in the company, and most particularly to Bill Heck, who had to incorporate the largest number of changes and who was dedicated, energetic, gracious and fearless throughout.