![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksThis bus has free wifi. Nifty. Review of the book I read Saturday, July 16th.
I read both parts: Part I is called Millennium Approaches and Part II Perestroika. Kushner insists that they are separate plays and that one is a sequel to the other and they have different tonalities and so on, but I'm sorry, the first does not have sufficient arc by itself; I really feel these have to be considered as a unit.
So this is a serious attempt to engage with AIDS, and a serious attempt to engage with the turn of the century, and a mystery play, and a meditation on America, and all that jazz. Surprisingly enough, it basically lives up to its ambitions.
I consider the protagonist to be Prior Walter, the man who is starting to die: KS, pneumonia, all the rest of it. An angel appears to him, literally, and tells him that he is to be a prophet. Very sensibly, he declines, with force.
And there's his lover, who is still healthy, who can't take the prospect of watching him die, and leaves, unforgivably; and the man his lover takes up with, a conflicted Mormon lawyer; and a friend who is a medical orderly and drag queen and basically made of pure awesome. There's a Mormon mother-in-law, there's the dying and raging Roy Cohn, still convinced the best thing he ever did was getting Ethel Rosenberg executed, there are the angelic principalities of each continent. It's a complex knot of theology, politics, and absurdism, and it is very funny, as Kushner intended and acknowledges in the foreword. (I think the funniest single moment is when Prior, in the hospital, is asked by his nurse who the lady with him is, and he says "That's my ex-lover's new boyfriend's Mormon mother." The nurse blinks and says "Even for the eighties in New York, that's weird." Which it is. But also touching, and deriving from a completely logical set of circumstances, if you were there.)
There's a dimension of this that does not lend itself well to being read, in that there's a whole lot of double and triple-casting; the nurse, for example, is the same actress as the Angel of America. There is so much doubling that it is not possible for me to keep track of all of it, not having seen a performance. Each of the angels is someone else from the cast, for instance.
But the overall impression, even knowing I wasn't tracking some of what was intended, is still one of great brilliance, complexity, and emotional depth. Belize, for instance, Prior's medical friend, keeps having people say nasty racist things to him because they are in pain in other ways, and there's a moment where he mutters to himself "My problem is that I'm trapped in a world of white people." And the thing is, that literally is his problem, because he's in this play, which is trying to be a reflection among other things of the way America sees itself at the time of writing, which means a Token Black Guy who doesn't get any depth. Which Belize isn't, but what we are seeing is the world of this play, which is except for him white people, and in which he is stuck. And the play acknowledges that, in lines that seem throw-away.
Or the scene in which Prior Walter's ancestors, also named Prior Walter, come to him to prepare the way for the angel-- the angel thoughtfully dug up the ones who died of plague, so that they would have something in common-- and it's not the same plague, it's not the same issues, she got it wrong, he and his ancestors have nothing to say to one another. (In fact the angel's problem with understanding humanity can be summarized by the fact that she presents as aggressively and sexually female to her prophet, who is a gay man, despite the fact that it is textual that she is hermaphroditic: but the way she impresses herself on his mind is as female, and you can't prove she even knows about his sexual orientation. Angels. Frickin' ineffable annoyances sometimes.)
And the way the play handles Mormonism is fascinating; it's clearly here as a contrasting American angelic revelation, and the politics of the religion are damaging to the people who interact with it, but the one who really believes and has faith uses her faith to be astonishingly competent and kind. Nuanced, is what I'm saying, in a play with a lot of extremely valid anger.
So yeah. I'm sure I'm late to this work; it's one of the great landmarks of AIDS literature and won all kinds of prizes and there is a well-regarded HBO miniseries and you don't need me to tell you how good this is. But it really is.
I read both parts: Part I is called Millennium Approaches and Part II Perestroika. Kushner insists that they are separate plays and that one is a sequel to the other and they have different tonalities and so on, but I'm sorry, the first does not have sufficient arc by itself; I really feel these have to be considered as a unit.
So this is a serious attempt to engage with AIDS, and a serious attempt to engage with the turn of the century, and a mystery play, and a meditation on America, and all that jazz. Surprisingly enough, it basically lives up to its ambitions.
I consider the protagonist to be Prior Walter, the man who is starting to die: KS, pneumonia, all the rest of it. An angel appears to him, literally, and tells him that he is to be a prophet. Very sensibly, he declines, with force.
And there's his lover, who is still healthy, who can't take the prospect of watching him die, and leaves, unforgivably; and the man his lover takes up with, a conflicted Mormon lawyer; and a friend who is a medical orderly and drag queen and basically made of pure awesome. There's a Mormon mother-in-law, there's the dying and raging Roy Cohn, still convinced the best thing he ever did was getting Ethel Rosenberg executed, there are the angelic principalities of each continent. It's a complex knot of theology, politics, and absurdism, and it is very funny, as Kushner intended and acknowledges in the foreword. (I think the funniest single moment is when Prior, in the hospital, is asked by his nurse who the lady with him is, and he says "That's my ex-lover's new boyfriend's Mormon mother." The nurse blinks and says "Even for the eighties in New York, that's weird." Which it is. But also touching, and deriving from a completely logical set of circumstances, if you were there.)
There's a dimension of this that does not lend itself well to being read, in that there's a whole lot of double and triple-casting; the nurse, for example, is the same actress as the Angel of America. There is so much doubling that it is not possible for me to keep track of all of it, not having seen a performance. Each of the angels is someone else from the cast, for instance.
But the overall impression, even knowing I wasn't tracking some of what was intended, is still one of great brilliance, complexity, and emotional depth. Belize, for instance, Prior's medical friend, keeps having people say nasty racist things to him because they are in pain in other ways, and there's a moment where he mutters to himself "My problem is that I'm trapped in a world of white people." And the thing is, that literally is his problem, because he's in this play, which is trying to be a reflection among other things of the way America sees itself at the time of writing, which means a Token Black Guy who doesn't get any depth. Which Belize isn't, but what we are seeing is the world of this play, which is except for him white people, and in which he is stuck. And the play acknowledges that, in lines that seem throw-away.
Or the scene in which Prior Walter's ancestors, also named Prior Walter, come to him to prepare the way for the angel-- the angel thoughtfully dug up the ones who died of plague, so that they would have something in common-- and it's not the same plague, it's not the same issues, she got it wrong, he and his ancestors have nothing to say to one another. (In fact the angel's problem with understanding humanity can be summarized by the fact that she presents as aggressively and sexually female to her prophet, who is a gay man, despite the fact that it is textual that she is hermaphroditic: but the way she impresses herself on his mind is as female, and you can't prove she even knows about his sexual orientation. Angels. Frickin' ineffable annoyances sometimes.)
And the way the play handles Mormonism is fascinating; it's clearly here as a contrasting American angelic revelation, and the politics of the religion are damaging to the people who interact with it, but the one who really believes and has faith uses her faith to be astonishingly competent and kind. Nuanced, is what I'm saying, in a play with a lot of extremely valid anger.
So yeah. I'm sure I'm late to this work; it's one of the great landmarks of AIDS literature and won all kinds of prizes and there is a well-regarded HBO miniseries and you don't need me to tell you how good this is. But it really is.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 04:30 pm (UTC)I have still never written the post I threatened at the end of that, my problem with part 2, but I guess I can sum it up as, "What has Joe done wrong?"
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-24 05:24 am (UTC)The answer to the question 'What has Joe done wrong?' is 'Nothing. That's the point,' I suspect; I am still mulling over my thoughts about it.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-24 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-25 04:27 am (UTC)What I love about the live performances is not just the doubling in the cast, but the doubling on stage, where Harper and Joe argue at the same time as Prior and Louis, for example, and there's all this amazing energy and intersecting tension that just fell apart for me in the HBO version the second the camera cut away from Al Pacino. The dialogue is wonderful no matter what you do to it (I have chunks of it in my brain, the most inconvenient of which is Prior declaiming "the wine-dark kiss of the Angel of Death" everytime someone mentions Kaposi's sarcoma, which happens more than you'd think), but the first ever production of this I saw did an excellent job of staging, and that's harder (the half performance is one I walked out of due to appalling miscasting - Prior was good, but Louis was just atrocious, and Harper and Belize best forgotten - and staging decisions that failed to think about the piece as *theatre*. Plus, I was in a five minute parking zone).
no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 12:56 pm (UTC)-- Of course I'm sure it's pretty different staged, most plays are, especially plays as talky and surreal and symbolic as this one.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 05:23 pm (UTC)I think it's important, and beautiful, and... doesn't quite hold up, in 2011. Kushner himself has said that when performed, the conclusion of Perestroika doesn't work the way it used to. I would extend that to much of Perestroika's historicism. And the use of climate as a trope, especially in the second play, feels completely different to me now (I saw both parts in repertory earlier this year) than it did even when the miniseries came out, not all that long ago.
This play immediately became canon, and that's in large part because of how conservative it is. It's something you can appropriate and even contain, the way you can with "Howl" or On the Road.
I do think it works as well as it does because the politics--cultural or otherwise--has a balance in the fantastic; Kushner's most recent play is four hours and change of straight-up political language, and is intense in a very different sort of way.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-24 05:36 am (UTC)Agreed about the conservatism, although reading this did have the effect of making me very, very angry at Rent, which is like six times more conservative while a) desperately trying to pretend it isn't and b) having been written after this, geez.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-24 02:22 pm (UTC)If you're reading AIDS lit, have you done Rebecca Brown's The Gifts of the Body? I love most of her work, and that one in particular is something I find wrenchingly beautiful. It's also short, which might be nice, if you're looking for more in that direction.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 08:49 pm (UTC)I saw the HBO series of Angels in America only a few years ago, and thought most of it was terrific. Many of the characters and intersections of characters were just fabulously done: Ethel Rosenberg haunting Roy Cohn as avenging Jewish mother; the Mormon lady (astoundingly sensible); the drag queen Belize. Loved the surrealism. What I didn't care for was the angst-drowned betraying lover, who seemed to be a sort of anti-Mary Sue. And I didn't think Kushner could write exalted language well enough for the tongues of angels.
Nine
no subject
Date: 2011-07-23 03:35 am (UTC)I want to have seen him played by Jason Isaacs, opposite Daniel Craig.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-23 01:48 am (UTC)And "That's my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother" is one of my favorite lines ever written.