Anthony Kushner’s Angels in America
Plot Summary
Part One: Millennium Approaches
The play is set in New York City and takes place between October 1985 and February 1986. The play begins during a funeral, where an old rabbi honors the deceased woman’s entire generation of immigrants who sacrificed their lives to form a community in America.
Soon later, Louis Ironson, the deceased’s grandson, finds that his lover Prior Walter, the last member of an old stock American family, has AIDS.
Louis becomes unable to cope as Prior’s sickness worsens, and he abandons Prior, who receives emotional support from their friend Belize, an ex-drag queen and hospital nurse. Belize also deals with Louis’ self-inflicted guilt and countless explanations for leaving Prior on its own.
Joe Pitt, a Mormon Republican clerk in the same courthouse where Louis works, is offered a job in Washington, D.C. by his mentor, McCarthyist lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn. Joe is hesitant to accept because his agoraphobic, Valium-addicted wife Harper refuses to move.
Harper feels Joe does not love her as much as she loves him, which is verified when Joe admits to being gay. Harper retreats into drug-fueled escapism fantasies, including one in which she crosses paths with Prior despite the fact that the two had never met in real life.
Caught between Roy’s pressure and his growing crush on Louis, Joe drunkenly comes out to his conservative mother Hannah, who reacts dismissively. Worried for her son, she sells her Salt Lake City home and flies to New York to assist in the rehabilitation of his marriage.
Meanwhile, a drug-addled Harper has abandoned their apartment following an altercation with Joe, wandering the streets of Brooklyn, believing she is in Antarctica, as Joe and Louis begin an affair.
Meanwhile, Roy Cohn learns that he has advanced AIDS and will die soon. Instead of publicly admitting he is gay or has AIDS, Roy pretends he has liver cancer.
Faced with the potential of disbarment for borrowing money from a client, Roy is determined to win the case so that he might die a lawyer in good standing, and he attempts to place Joe in the Justice Department for his own gain. As Joe declines his offer, Roy explodes and collapses in pain.
As he waits to be taken to the hospital, he is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he prosecuted for espionage at her trial and who was executed after Roy unlawfully pushed the judge for the death penalty.
Prior begins to hear an angel’s voice ordering him to prepare for her coming, and he has visitation from two ghosts who claim to be his forefathers, informing him that he is a holy prophet.
Prior is unsure whether these visits are the result of an emotional breakdown or if they are genuine. The angel breaks through Prior’s bedroom ceiling at the close of Part One, proclaiming that “the Great Work” has begun.
Part Two: Perestroika
A terrified Prior recounts his meeting with the Angel in Belize at a friend’s funeral. The Angel tells Prior that Heaven is a magnificent city similar to San Francisco after disclosing the presence of a mystical book beneath the tile in Prior’s kitchen.
He went on to say that God, who is portrayed as a vast blazing Aleph, created the cosmos by copulation with His angels, who are all-knowing yet incapable of creating or changing on their own. God, tired of the angels, gave mankind the ability to change and create.
Because of mankind’s advancement on Earth, Heaven experienced earthquake-like shocks and physically deteriorated. Ultimately, on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, God left Heaven. Prior receives a message from the Angel that says, “Stop moving!” in the belief that if man stops moving, Heaven will be restored.
Belize believes Prior is hallucinating his own fears of abandonment, but Prior believes his illness is the prophecy taking physical shape, and that the Angel can force him to deliver her message only if he dies.
Roy arrives at a hospital in Belize, where his condition rapidly deteriorates. He uses his political muscle to obtain a private cache of the experimental medicine AZT at the expense of withholding the drug from drug trial participants.
Cohn is increasingly lonely in the hospital, with just Belize, who despises him, and the ghost of Ethel for company.
Joe pays a visit to Roy, who is nearing the end of his life, and receives a final, paternal blessing from his mentor. As Joe admits to Roy that he has left Harper for a man, Roy reacts violently in fear and wrath, demanding him to return to his wife and cover up his indiscretion.
Prior visits a Mormon visitor’s center to investigate angels, where he meets Hannah, who is helping and caring for Harper, who has gradually returned to reality but is now profoundly depressed. Harper and Prior experience a spark of recognition from their common dream, and they see Joe and Louis united in a vision.
Prior confronts Joe about Louis with Belize in tow, and Joe recognizes Belize as Roy’s nurse. Louis begins to withdraw from Joe, regretting his actions, and seeks Prior’s forgiveness, which Prior vehemently refuses.
Belize informs Louis of Joe’s relationship with Roy, whom Louis despises for his conservative politics and shady actions.
As a result, Louis investigates Joe’s legal past and confronts him about a series of hypocritical and homophobic judgements written by Joe himself. When the argument turns physical, Joe punches Louis in the face, effectively terminating their relationship.
Roy suffers and declines until Ethel Rosenberg delivers the fatal blow as he lies dying: he has been disbarred after all. Roy appears to confuse Ethel for his mother, pleading with her to soothe him, and Ethel sings a Jewish ballad as Roy appears to die.
With a rush of enthusiasm, he exposes that he has duped her, viciously declaring that he has finally beaten her by making her sing. He then collapses and passes away. Belize compels Louis to visit Roy’s hospital room after his death, where they steal his supply of AZT for Prior. He requests that Louis say the Kaddish for Roy.
Ethel helps Louis through the prayer, symbolically forgiving Roy before departing for the hereafter, unseen by the living.
Prior collapses from pneumonia when visiting the Mormon center after his argument with Joe, and Hannah hurries him back to the hospital. Prior tells her about his vision and is startled when Hannah accepts it based on her Latter-day Saint theology believe in angelic revelations.
The Angel reappears in the hospital, angered that Prior disregarded her message. Prior wrestles the Angel, who relents and unlocks a ladder into Heaven on Hannah’s instruction.
Prior ascends into Heaven and informs the other angels that he refuses to convey their word because humanity will perish unless progress is made, and asks them for more Life, no matter how terrifying the thought may be. He returns to his hospital bed, where he awakens from his vision, his fever gone and his health improving.
He apologizes to Louis but refuses to accept him back. Meanwhile, Harper quits Joe and travels to San Francisco from New York.
The play ends in 1990. Prior and Louis are still separated, but Louis and Belize stay close in order to support and care for Prior, and Hannah has gained a new perspective on her dogmatic convictions, allowing her to accept her son as he is and form a connection with Prior.
Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah assemble in front of the Bethesda Fountain angel statue to debate the fall of the Soviet Union and what the future holds. Prior mentions the legend of the Pool of Bethesda, where ailing people were healed.
Prior addresses the audience directly with the play’s last lines, declaring his intention to live on and informing them that “the Great Work” will continue.
What does the angel represent in Angels in America?
Angels are among the play’s most explicit and striking imagery. To begin, angels are hermaphrodites, meaning they are neither male nor female.
This is significant because Kushner’s play is about sexual identity: just as many of the characters in the play oscillate between homosexual and heterosexual behaviors (and masculine and feminine personae), the angels embody the ambiguity in all sexual identities.
But, by portraying a form of “ideal humanity” (neither masculine nor feminine, gay or straight), the angels come to signify the absence of actual humanity. Angels are immortal, have wonderful orgasms, and so on, but Kushner’s angels are bored, joyless, and, most crucially, unable to make free decisions.
Because of their perfection, angels’ lives are dull; only humans can feel the excitement of uncertainty. It’s also worth noting that the angels in the play could be wholly fictitious, the result of Prior Martin’s overheated imagination.
In this sense, angels represent humanity’s potential to be perfect—to dream or aspire to perfection—while simultaneously symbolizing the futility (and desirability) of really reaching that potential.
Themes of Angels in America
Community: Tony Kushner stated about his play, “The question I’m attempting to pose is how broad a community’s embrace is. How far does it stretch?” “Community” refers to both personal relationships between persons and political bonds that can be referred to as democratic citizenship.
In a nutshell, the plot of Angels in America revolves around the reality that both types of communities are destroyed and then rebuilt. Relationships end in Millennium, Roy twists and contorts the law, and the characters sink deeper into solitude and loneliness.
The physical destruction wrought by the Angel’s presence at the end of Part One symbolizes all of this wreckage. However, Perestroika re-creates community in unexpected ways, forging bonds between seemingly unconnected characters (Hannah and Prior, Prior and Harper) and rejecting those, such as Joe, who see law as unrelated to morality.
Louis’ confidence for democracy is foolish but not invalid—a democratic community can even weather an AIDS pandemic. Even Roy, the play’s most difficult character, is not abandoned to the wilds of isolation: his death unwittingly connects him to communities he had abandoned—gays and lesbians, people with AIDS, Jews—and he is reclaimed, albeit reluctantly, by those with whom he had tried to cut all ties.
Identity: Identity includes ethnicity, race, and homosexuality.
The theme of identity is inextricably linked to the play’s concept of community, because identity groups are one type of connection around which communities form.
Although we are accustomed to thinking of white people as having no identity, all of the characters in this play are defined by ethnicity: WASP, Jewish, Mormon, and Black; additionally, the male characters are defined by their homosexuality. Even AIDS infection acts as an identification type, etched as plainly into the skin as race.
Identity may undoubtedly be divisive: Louis’s apathy about race, as well as his fear that Belize is anti-Semitic, drive a rift between them, while Prior’s AIDS infection is too big for Louis to overcome.
Kushner is also not romantic about the ability of identification to inherently unite individuals, as characters like Roy do their best to reject their participation in marginalized groups (though that denial is erased by his death). But, one lesson of Angels is that individuality does not have to be abandoned in order for communities to form—the melting pot does not have to melt.
Despite Prior’s reservations, Hannah embraces him as a gay man despite the fact that she is a Mormon. The characters are not compelled to put their disagreements aside in the epilogue. On the contrary, those distinctions act as a kind of glue that holds them together. They are diverse but interdependent.
Change vs. Stasis
The opposition between stasis and change is Kushner’s favorite theme from the first scene of the play. In a hopeless world, the impulse to block change—to preserve the past while ignoring or suppressing the future—is a natural reaction.
This anti-migration impulse is expressed by Rabbi Chemelwitz, Emily the nurse, Sister Ella Chapter, and, most magnificently, by the Angels, who order Prior to halt humanity’s continuous movement.
The Angel chose Prior as her prophet because of his family’s ancient, ingrained history and because (as Belize discovers) he secretly shares their emotions. But, as events show, that desire is literally reactionary—destructive, and at odds with the play’s progressive values.
Migration, which brought Prior’s family to America, as well as Belize’s slave ancestors and Louis’ immigrant ancestors, and carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah, is an unavoidable and ineradicable human drive.
Kushner implies, more broadly, that our democracy and national politics must resist this reactive impulse. Rather than seeking refuge in a romanticized 1950s past, America must embrace even those changes that frighten some people, particularly the rise of a politically active and culturally accepted gay and lesbian minority.
Angels in America characters
Mr. Louis Ironson
A “word processor” at the Federal Court of Appeals in Brooklyn. Louis exhibits several “Jewish neurotic” stereotypes: he is uneasy, ambivalent, and always guilty.
Yet, his remorse prevents him from abandoning his partner, Prior, when Prior has AIDS. One of the important maturations in the play is Louis’ moral journey from callous abandonment to true repentance and grief; his awakening of responsibility reflects the awakening that the drama intends to provoke in its listeners.
Louis’ utopian confidence in American democracy, while frequently foolish or self-absorbed, is similar to Kushner’s, to the point where some critics refer to Louis as a stand-in for the playwright.
Prior Walter
After Prior admits that he has AIDS, Louis abandons his boyfriend. When an Angel of God visits Prior, he becomes a prophet, but he finally rejects his prophecy and wants a blessing of additional life. The Angel is drawn to Prior because of his disease, which inscribes a sort of ending in his lifeblood, and because of his ancient Anglo-Saxon ancestry, which represents the idea of being rooted and stable.
But, he outwits the Angels by rejecting their concept of stasis in favor of the agonizing necessity of movement and migration. Prior is as sincere and moral as Louis is imperfect. His AIDS infection makes him weak and victimized, but he manages to transcend that victimhood by living and becoming the focal point of a new, utopian community by the end of the play.
Joe Pitt’s
Joe, a Mormon, Republican appeals court lawyer, struggles with his latent homosexuality, abandoning his wife Harper for Louis and being abandoned in turn by Louis.
Louis is initially intrigued to Joe’s beliefs but eventually turns against him because he is a conservative and a friend of the despised Roy Cohn. Roy’s immoral activities and his tragic love affair undermine his initial naiveté.
Joe’s journey in the play (from self-sufficient and strong to helpless and dependant) is the polar opposite of Prior’s. Because of his worldview, the play appears to desert Joe, excluding him from its image of an ideal society.
Harper Pitt
Joe’s wife is a Valium-addicted agoraphobe caught in a failing marriage who hallucinates and creates fictitious personas to escape her problems. Harper, who is continuously afraid, obsesses over knife-wielding men and the ozone layer as a subconscious stand-in for her own problems.
Nevertheless, after an unexplainable dream meeting with Prior, she discovers that her spouse is gay and begins to take charge of her own life. Harper ends the play the furthest from where she began: as an independent, confident lady newly in love with life and moving off to establish her own life in San Francisco.
Cohn, Roy
Roy Cohn, a well-known New York lawyer and power broker, was a real-life figure who Kushner adopted for his play. Roy is the play’s most cruel and repulsive character, a closeted homosexual who rejects other gays and is solely concerned with acquiring power.
His lack of ethics prompted him to illegally intervene in Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial, resulting in her execution. Roy embodies the polar opposite of community, the selfishness and loneliness that are all too common in American life. His malevolence, though, extends beyond mere isolation to true hatred and cruelty.
In the play’s moral finale, he is pardoned (though not exonerated) after his death (from AIDS) accidentally reconnects him to the LGBT community from which he had always distanced himself.
Belize
Belize, a Black registered nurse and ex-drag queen, is Prior’s best friend and, much to Belize’s chagrin, Roy’s caretaker. He is the most ethical and sensible character in the play, looking out for Prior, battling Roy, and rebutting Louis’s self-centered politics.
Belize feels less like an individual at times and more like a symbol of marginalized groups, especially when most of his past and personal life are kept from the spectator. Despite these omissions, he remains complex—filled with anger for Roy, yet with enough character and morality to forgive him.
Hannah Pitt
Hannah Pitt is Joe’s mother, who relocates from Salt Lake City to New York after Joe admits to being gay over the phone late at night. Hannah treats Harper harshly at first, but blossoms after meeting Prior, becoming his companion and friend. Earlier and a fantastic sexual encounter with the Angel thaw her icy temperament.
The Angel of America
A terrible, imposing supernatural apparition who descends from Heaven to give prophesy on Prior. The Angel seeks a prophet to reverse humanity’s migratory instinct, fearing that their incessant travel and change has caused God to abandon creation.
Prior successfully defies her disturbingly reactive, even lethal, cosmology on a visit to Heaven. Surprisingly, this reactionary nature is combined with a dramatic, Whitman-esque speaking manner and an overpowering, multigendered sexuality.
Rosenberg, Ethel
During the McCarthy era, a real-life Jewish woman was killed for treason. The ghost of the play’s Ethel reappears to take joy in the murder of her persecutor, Roy. Ethel despises Roy with a “needlesharp” fury, yet on his deathbed, she summons the courage to sing to him. Her reciting of the Kaddish with Louis expresses her gratitude.
Isador Chemelwitz, rabbi
Rabbi Chemelwitz, an old rabbi who delivers the eulogy during Sarah Ironson’s funeral, outlines the conservative process by which Jewish immigrants fought assimilation. Prior subsequently finds Louis in Heaven on his way to confront the Angels, as Louis seeks spiritual instruction from him.
Mr. Lies
Mr. Lies, a travel agent who resembles a jazz pianist, is one of Harper’s fictitious creations. She summons him whenever she wishes to escape her current surroundings, however Mr. Lies warns her that her power to flee reality is limited.
Henry Roy’s doctor, whom Roy threatens with death if he refers to him as gay. Henry senses Roy’s hallucination but eventually succumbs to it, consenting to list his official ailment as liver cancer.
Emily
A nurse who looks after Prior in the hospital. Emily is one of the characters who has the same anti-migration sentiment as the Angel; she tells Prior flatly to stay home.
Martin Heller
A Justice Department official and Roy’s political ally. Martin is basically cowardly, allowing Roy to exploit him in order to impress Joe and then accepting the abuse that Roy dumps on him, along with a threat of blackmail.
Sister Ella Chapter
Hannah’s Salt Lake house is being sold through a real estate agent. She, like Emily, advises her buddy to settle down and stay at home.
Prior I and Prior II
Prior’s ancestors are summoned from the dead to assist in preparing the way for the entrance of the Angel. Prior I is a medieval farmer, while Prior II is a smart and worldly seventeenth-century Londoner. Both guys died as a result of the epidemic.
Prelapsarianov, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich
The World’s Oldest Living Communist delivers the diatribe that kicks off Perestroika. Prelapsarianov critiques modern American life’s pettiness, as well as the meaninglessness of life in the lack of a ruling principle.
Mormon Mother’s
A dummy from the Mormon Visitor’s Center diorama who is hushed while her husband and son speak. The Mormon mother, on the other hand, comes to life and walks beside Harper, delivering hard realities about life and change.
Sarah Ironson
The funeral of Louis’ grandmother, Sarah, takes place in the first scene of Millennium. Prior runs into her while playing cards with Rabbi Chemelwitz in Heaven.