Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika (1992)

In Part 2 of Angels in America, our characters have to deal with terrible decisions. Roy becomes very sick and pulls all sorts of strings to get AZT. Joe and Harper separate. Louis is afraid of seeing Prior and develops a relationship with Joe. Belize continues to be the voice of reason for everyone.

The lives of the characters are so filled with fear, anxiety, self-loathing, denial, and more fear. We have seen a little of how tragic and difficult the life of homosexuals were then.
This play was produced by HBO and after reading it, I intend to find it and watch it again. ( )

Woooowwwwww.

Despite its rather long duration for a play, comprising some seven hours acted all out, this is very tightly written. Each little scene, every bit of dialogue, has some reach or development or meaning to it. The characters are passionate and dynamic. All of them matter. All are played by the same little group of actors.

This play goes over a lot, and I'm not really sure I can give the play its proper due with my meager summaries. Politics, gnosticism, love, class, how God has abandoned us to the Republicans and spread plagues and hellfire, and prophecy, and all sorts of fun things.

You really ought to read this, gay or not, whatever you are, I'm not going to smack a label on it. There's something here, as there is in many of the great works, about a common thread of humanity. ( )

As Part II opens, the Angel attempts to make Prior the prophet of a message of non-progress, non-movement, and non-mingling, saying that the constant transformation has "upset heaven" and, indirectly, caused G-d to flee heaven. Belize finds this message proto fascist and Prior's appearance as a prophet disturbing. Belize and Prior follow Louis so that Prior can take a look at Joe, who he calls the "Marlboro Man," and these trips land Prior in the Mormon Visitors Center in New York. Hannah, Joe's mother, has moved to New York from Utah after her son Joe tells her over the telephone that "he is a homosexual," and then asks ir his father loved him. Prior walks into the Mormon Visitor Center and collapses, and Hannah ends up helping him to get to the hospital, where they quickly become friends. Hannah shares with Prior a belief in angels, who she calls "prayers with wings," and they are visited by an angel who is enraged that Prior is not promulgating the prophecy of non-progress and non-movement. Hannah tells Joe to demand that the angel bless him and not to let go until the angel does so, recapitulating the scene from Genesis where Jacob wrestles with the angel to earn the blessing of "od ha'im" (more life). Prior goes to heaven and rejects the prophecy that the angels have given him, but also demands the blessing of more life. In the meantime, Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS and gets a stash of an effective anti-AIDS drug called AZT. When he dies, Belize insists that Louis thank him by saying the Kaddish over him, and he is assisted in doing so by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Belize gives the AZT to Louis, who therefore wins the gift of "od ha'im." At the end of the play, Hannah, Belize, Louis, and Prior have become close friends, and gather under the fountain of the Angel Bethesda to predict events in the Middle East. For her part, Harper, now recovered from her self-delusions, is seen taken a plane across the country and imagining angels holding hands to repair the rents in the ozone layer.
This is an epic work of enormous scope and vision that reveals the uncanniness and unpredictability of human lives by showing how unlikely people meet--whether they show up in each other's dreams or, indeed, an out gay man ends up at the Mormon Visitor Center. The conceit of the angels--and both Mormonism and Judaism believe in angels--is very effective, and the angels give hope even as their message of forced inertia cannot be accepted. ( )

I love seeing the development of the characters through to the bitter end, as it were, but I have to say that I also think Angels in America stands very well on its own. ( )

The second-part of the dramatic Angels in America. ( )