Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (45 page)

PLAGUE AND THE BODY POLITIC:
TONY KUSHNER'S
ANGELS IN AMERICA

Plague comes to contemporary America in Tony Kushner's
Angels in America,
appropriately subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." This extravagant play may seem dated already, in that it captures the heyday of AIDS anxiety in 1980s' American culture, and its political references are to Reagan's America, "perestroika," and the momentous end of the Cold War. But Kushner's grasp of both plague and ideology goes deeper than that, sheds light on our themes in such a way as to spell out why these issues matter, and how it is that they illuminate central beliefs about self, illness, and art.

Kushner's play reworks all the motifs we have seen in the plague-text, from Sophocles through Defoe, Dickens, Camus, and Bergman: collective disease tells us, as nothing else quite does, who we are, what our values are, and how we behave in the face of both sickness and death. But in
Angels in America,
what was discrete in the other texts is now revealed in its "fit," its coherence. All of these texts seem to tell us that an epidemic ushers in some dreadful truths about sexuality, identity, and political order, but these truths remain murky. In Kushner's play, it all comes together with brilliance and chutzpah, yielding something like a gathering statement of plague's dimensions, how wide its sweep really is, how deep its take might be.

Let plague be reconfigured as AIDS, and presto: disease is sexual disease, disease is inseparable from sexual desire, but sexual desire now coded (by mainstream America) as deviant because it is homosexual. Kushner's "gay fantasia" is as much about sexual transgression as Sophocles and Dickens are, but it is also cued to the same epistemolog-ical crisis each of them records: who is who? how are we actually related? As Levi-Strauss observed of the Oedipus myth, "walking and behaving straight" are precisely what is at issue here. These tidings constitute a moral test.
Angels
tells the story of gay love's incursions and challenges: the breakup of the Pitt marriage because Joe is a closet gay; the breakup of the Louis-Prior relationship because Louis cannot handle Prior's AIDS. And all of these struggles are interwoven in a meditation about America: Reagan's America of the 1980s, the "me generation," and the maniacal egoism that characterized it. All this comes against a backdrop of millennium and apocalypse. The century approaches its close with unheard-of new developments: communism is dead, yes, but the enemy still burrows within, the membrane does not hold, the ozone is punctured, the family collapses, the bloodstream is polluted, the immune system fails.

Modern America wants none of this sickness discourse, as Roy Cohn, American icon dying of AIDS, confides to the ghost come back to haunt him, Ethel Rosenberg: "The worst thing about being sick in

America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for sick. Look at Reagan: He's so healthy he's hardly human, he's a hundred if he's a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he's out West riding ponies in his PJs. I mean who does that? That's America. It's just no country for the infirm" (II.58).
Angels in America
is very much about Reagan's America: its bluff and gnarly individualism, its culture of private enterprise, its "feel good" view of the American body politic.

This model is in trouble. The infirm are on the move. And the firm find they are infirm. Joe, the play's good-looking Mormon hero, the American "Ken" who is a chief clerk writing briefs at the (Republican) Federal Court of Appeals, has tried all his life to live the Reagan dream and finds that he has lived a lie. The straight and the narrow, the good and the true, work in Sunday school but not in the flesh, at least not in Joe's flesh. His entire life has been a war zone:

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling—just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is ... a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm . . . It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose. (I.49-50)

It is a poignant passage, evoking not only Joe's futile battle against his nature, but suggesting another reading altogether for the well-known story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, now
seen
as a body-to-body engagement of two males, with erotic dimensions that add a flavor of sexual excitement to the pain of "losing" the battle.

In "coming out," in moving in with Lou, Joe brings great pain to his wife, Harper, whom he still loves, even though their sexual relations

have been vexed from the outset of their marriage. Harper, given to Valium-induced dreams and hallucinations, imagines there are men with knives hiding in her apartment, and in a scene of great power, in which Louis's breaking with Prior is systematically spliced with the eruption of truth between Joe and Harper, Joe realizes the grisly truth of his wife's fantasies:

joe: As long as I've known you, Harper, you've been afraid of. . .

of men hiding under the bed, men hiding under the sofa, men

with knives. prior
(Shattered; almost pleading; trying to reach him
[Lou]): I'm

dying! You stupid fuck! Do you know what that is! Love! Do you

know what love means? We lived together four and a half years,

you animal, you idiot. louis: I have to find some way to save myself. joe: Who are these men? I never understood it. Now I know. harper: What? joe: It's me. harper: It is?

prior: GET OUT OF MY ROOM! joe: I'm the man with the knives. harper: You are? prior: If I could get up now I'd kill you. I would. Go away. Go away

or I'll scream. harper: Oh God . . . JOE: I'm sorry . . . harper: It is you. LOUIS: Please don't scream. prior: Go.

harper: I recognize you now. louis: Please . . . joe: Oh. Wait, I . . . Oh!
(He covers his mouth with his hand, gags,

and removes his hand, red with blood)
I'm bleeding.
(Prior

screams)
harper: Mr. Lies. MR. lies
(Appearing, dressed in Antarctic explorer's apparel):
Right

here. harper: I want to go away. I can't see him anymore. MR. lies: Where? harper: Anywhere. Far away. mr. lies: Absolutamento.
(Harper and Mr. Lies vanish. Joe looks

up, sees that she's gone.)
PRIOR:
(Closing his eyes):
When I open my eyes you'll be gone.

(Louis leaves.)
joe: Harper?

prior
(Opening his eyes):
Huh. It worked. JOE
(Calling):
Harper? prior: I hurt all over. I wish I was dead. (I.79-81)

Quoted at some length, this set of exchanges reveals something of Kush-ner's theatrical magic. Realist boundaries are sovereignly done away with. This scene of double betrayal speaks to the play's deepest moral issues, yet we also see how art speaks its very special tongue: Joe
is
the man with the knives, Harper
exits
this intolerable truth-prison (Kushner understands that Valium and travel agents serve the same purpose), Louis leaves the premises, and Prior emits the scream that goes through the house. Kushner, choreographing pain and ethics in a weird pas de deux, twins his figures and makes their single dramas prismatic, even familial. One remembers O'Neill's groundbreaking efforts to fashion a theater of entanglement and porosity, in which the Tyrone family's collective gestalt becomes ever clearer, in which each figure is embedded in and responding to others. Yet Kushner has gone still further down this road, certain that our escapist fantasies and our secret terrors in fact spill out onto the stage, can be seen and heard and even shared.

In Kushner's hands, the plague-text is inseparable from the pleasure-text, and with a kind of Strindbergian economy he shows that my freedom is your bondage, my joy your sorrow. Joe leaves Harper because he realizes he is gay; Louis leaves Prior because Prior has AIDS. Each of these relational disasters—as "natural" as the tug of gravity—is going to be plumbed for the moral truths they contain, truths of a very old order having to do with loyalty and human decency
"Sharfer vi di tson a shlang izan umdankbar kind''''
("Sharper than a serpent's tongue it is, to have a thankless child"), says Rabbi Chemelwitz early in the play, referring (in Yiddish) to Shakespeare's
Kenig Lear
and the rock-bottom sin at hand here: betrayal.

Artaud claimed that the plague-text is brutally unhinging and transformative in its surprises and revelations, but Kushner turns metamorphosis into a structural principle of everyday life: people you work with and think are straight turn out to be gay; private dreams you have turn out to be shared. The results can be delicious, as in the "mutual dream scene" where Louis's lover, Prior, meets Joe's wife, Harper, who is confused:

harper: Are you . . . Who are you?

prior: Who are you?

harper: What are you doing in my hallucination?

prior: I'm not in your hallucination. You're in my dream.

harper: You're wearing makeup.

prior: So are you.

harper: But you're a man.

prior
(Feigning dismay, shock, he mimes slashing his throat with

his lipstick and dies, fabulously tragic. Then)
The hands and the

feet give it away. (I.31)

These lovely stage directions reveal a theatrical imagination of the first order, one that is wise about the acculturated and produced body, wise also about the opportunities for wit and fun that song and dance may

provide. Once again, we see the malleability of Kushner's scheme, the kaleidoscopic shape-shifting (and even dream-hopping) that gay culture (and theatrical brilliance) bring to stolid realist appearances. Wit itself, in this play, may be thought of as a kind of last-ditch performance, a dance-of-death (to turn death into a dance is no easy matter), a yoking of disease and determinism into stylistic improvisations and vaudeville routines, whimsical sorties that flaunt life's richness and sweetness in even the narrowest straits.

But AIDS bids to demolish such maneuvering room, to annihilate the actor's song and dance, by positing instead a fiercely anarchic body that resists all control. Louis is available for Joe, at least in part, because his lover Prior is a dreadfully altered figure. Here is the inventory Prior gives to Emily, the nurse:

prior: Ankles sore and swollen, but the leg's better. The nausea's mostly gone with the little orange pills. BM's pure liquid but not bloody anymore, for now, my eye doctor says everything's OK, for now, my dentist says "Yuck!" when he sees my fuzzy tongue, and now he wears little condoms on his thumb and forefinger. And a mask. So what? My dermatologist is in Hawaii and my mother . . . well leave my mother out of it. Which is usually where my mother is, out of it. My glands are like walnuts, my weight's holding steady for week two, and a friend died two days ago of bird tuberculosis; bird tuberculosis; that scared me and I didn't go to the funeral today because he was an Irish Catholic and it's probably open casket and I'm afraid of. . . something, the bird TB or seeing him or ... So I guess I'm doing OK. Except for of course I'm going nuts.

EMILY: We ran the toxoplasmosis series and there's no indication . . .

prior: I know, I know, but I feel like something terrifying is on its way, you know, like a missile from outer space, and it's plummet-

ing down towards the earth, and I'm ground zero, and ... I am generally known where I am known as one cool, collected queen. And I am ruffled. (I.97-98)

Perhaps we can begin to put some of the pieces together here, to measure the startling cogency of Kushner's theatrical vision, and to see how "plague" has become, strangely enough, a sort of "open Sesame" for the text's diverse concerns: identity, apocalypse, and explosions of both somatic and cosmic character. Prior's body has gone on a rampage, producing liquids, excretions, and fuzz in new, unwanted places, and this body requires keepers and tenders. "For now" the passage twice says, to let us know that all physical reports are strictly temporary, that the body is on the move. This somatic outing borders on metamorphosis: the glands are like walnuts, and the bird tuberculosis has an almost Ovidian flavor to it, in addition to a scary sense of flight and flux, so that even the dead body in the casket is disturbingly active and on the move, a potent agent of transmission. Kushner is wonderfully literal about all this coming and going, and we are to understand that the dermatologist's stay in Hawaii presents an exodus that is not unlike the mother's being "out of it," or, for that matter, like Harper's own Valium trips, which are fabulously assisted by Mr. Lies. Thus it is rigorously appropriate that this scene closes with mention of a missile in outer space plummeting toward Earth, so that we understand the monstrous outings and mutinies of the body to have a cosmic character, to convey, indeed, that the hitherto stable world we knew—both body and planet—is out of control. Harper sensed as much, at the play's beginning: "People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining . . . beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart. . ." (1.16).

Plague as apocalypse was there in Sophocles, Defoe, Camus, and Bergman, but Kushner is out to show us new worlds and new vistas. To be sure, he respects the disasters at home, and Dickens's saga of
sponta-