“Not About Mormons: One Reader’s Response to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America”
Review
Original Review Date: January 2003
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Title: Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
Author: Tony Kushner
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Genre: Play
Year Published: 1993
Number of Pages: 136
Binding: Paperback
ISBN10: 1559360615
ISBN13: 978-1559360616
Price: $11.95
Title: Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
Author: Tony Kushner
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Genre: Play
Year Published: 1993
Number of Pages: 158
Binding: Paperback
ISBN10: 1559360739
ISBN13: 978-1559360739
Price: $12.95
NOTE: This review was originally published in Irreantum, Winter 2003/Spring2004, pp. 135-138.
About a year ago, I was engaged in an online conversation with a friend of mine (not LDS) who teaches a university course about sexuality and textuality. Have you, he said, seen Angels in America, which has several Mormon characters? I’ve read about it, said I, but never actually read or seen it.
And so I read the play (actually two plays in one, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika), and was duly impressed with its craft and competence. Yet despite the deft and interesting use of Mormon elements and characters in the play, I ended the experience without much sense of intersection with my own sense of the experience of Mormonism. And there is, I think, a good reason for that.
Angels in America, as I see it, is not really about Mormonism at all. That is to say, even though it uses symbols from Mormon history and theology and features Mormon characters, it’s not about what it means to be Mormon, even Mormon and gay. Similarly, it’s not about Mormon beliefs or how those beliefs intersect with other ideas and belief systems within the play, such as Marxist approaches to class.
Mormon Characters
When it comes to his characters, it seems to me that Kushner is using Mormons iconically—a rather different thing from presenting them realistically. Not that his Mormon characters aren’t realistic, but I don’t think they’re realistic in their Mormonness. By and large, they don’t act like Mormons, they don’t describe their beliefs in terms that would be terribly familiar to most Mormons, and their religion doesn’t seem to impact their day-to-day lives in the ways that it does for most active Mormons.
The characters don’t seem much affected by Mormonism socially. There are no callings, no home teachers. When Joe’s mother arrives in New York, worried about Joe, and is not met by him at the airport, she doesn’t call his bishop, doesn’t call on local church members. Instead, she wanders around and eventually asks directions to the Mormon Visitor’s Center, which becomes from then on the locus of all things Mormon in the play—as if the connection of Mormons to their religion and each other is best represented through movies and mannequins.
It probably fits Kushner’s purposes to have his Mormon characters disconnected and isolated; but even though members of the Church may feel isolated internally, if they are active members of the church they will, in fact, be part of a community, whether they feel at home there or not. Being Mormon is like being a member of a close extended family: you really can’t rid yourself of people asking how you’re doing and coming over and visiting and such unless you make an active effort to push them away (and often not even then). None of this is evident in the play.
Similarly, Joe’s internal anguish—the struggle to repress his homosexual feelings, and their conflict with his religious values—seems well drawn to me, but also generic. They’re the sort of feelings that anyone from a sexually restrictive religion might possess. But if you’re Mormon, being part of a family is more than just a badge of normality; it’s part of your essential purpose for existing, a key element of your eternal identity. Surely part of what makes being Mormon and gay so poignant is the sense that choosing a life of homosexuality isn’t just a sin; it’s also giving up who you are and what you are meant to be as a child of God. That added dimension of inner conflict and loss could well be incorporated into a play that was about what it means to be Mormon and gay; but that isn’t this play.
Mormon Themes and Ideas
When it comes to the historical and symbolic references to Mormonism (e.g., angels, elements of the Joseph Smith story), my sense is that Kushner uses these elements mythically and poetically, partly as a distillation of a particular type of idea of what it means to be American. They tie into Kushner’s structure of ideas—but the meanings Kushner gives them make them more a riff than a representation of what those elements mean to Mormons.
Thus, for example, his play has angels coming to earth with a modern message. Their message (that humans should stop moving around and changing things so much, so that maybe God will find his way back to heaven) may reflect Kushner’s take on religion in general, at least conservative religions like (as most people see it) Mormonism. But in the end, it has little or nothing to do with the message of the Restoration. It’s not even a terribly effective critique of that message. Nor, I think, is it particularly meant to be.
My friend made the comment that he thought Kushner had some important things to say about religion and sexuality in Angels in America. Well, maybe. But the (theoretical) Mormon take on sexuality is actually radically different from that of most religions, at least most contemporary Christian religions, making that critique (in my view) somewhat off base for Mormonism.
It’s possible that part of what attracted Kushner about using Mormonism was an awareness of the tension between Mormon doctrine, which makes sexuality an attribute of divinity, and Mormon practice, which is pretty repressive on the subject of sex. His angels, for example, prompt intensely sexual reactions. I suspect that if Kushner knew much about Mormon theology (which he may well—I understand that he did study Mormonism before writing the play), he may have felt it was particularly appropriate/ironic to make the stereotypically repressed closeted gay be from a religion that theoretically accepts and even embraces sexuality, but that culturally is (as he would see it) just as repressive as any other religion. But none of that irony comes out in the play—nor could it, since Mormon ideas about sexuality are not portrayed as in any way different from, say, Baptist teachings. Similarly, there’s no engagement with the peculiarly Mormon ideas that make homosexuality not merely a sin but also an eternal dead end. The strikingly heretical Mormon idea of humans becoming gods doesn’t get mentioned. In short, there’s no engagement (as I see it) with the ideas of Mormonism, as opposed to its symbols.
Poor Old Joe
Which brings me to the aspect of the play that I found most puzzling: that is, the rather stern judgment that is made of Joe, the closeted gay Mormon who leaves his wife to come out over the course of the play. While most of the major characters—including Joe’s ambiguously Mormon mother Hannah—become part of a community that is created by the end of the second play, Joe is sent off and we hear no more about him. Even Roy Cohn, the embodiment of evil in this play, has the Kaddish said over him by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. But Joe is alone, left with his wife’s command to “Go exploring.”
It’s unclear to me exactly why. His coming-out scene with his wife Harper is paired with the scene where Louis leaves his lover, who is dying of AIDS, because he can’t handle his sickness. And yet the two cases seem hardly equivalent. It is (at least arguably) Harper who rejects Joe, Harper whose dream-images of terrifying men with knives are revealed as symbols of her feelings about her husband. By Kushner’s own ideology, it would seem logical that accepting his homosexual feelings would be a step forward for Joe, not an act on the same level of moral bankruptcy as abandoning a terminally ill partner. And yet in the end, Louis is allowed to return to the others, while Joe is cast out.
At first, I wondered if the message was simply that for someone who has been what Joe has been—a writer of repressive court decisions for conservative judges—there is no forgiveness. Eventually, I decided that probably wasn’t the case, though it’s hard for me to tell what it might mean instead. The best I was able to speculate was that perhaps the problem is that Joe is trying for a superficial transformation—changing one skin, one identity, for another—when true change comes at a higher cost and takes longer than that.
Which brings me to the notorious garment-stripping scene, where Joe responds to Louis’s shocked rejection of him when he discovers Joe is Mormon by stripping off his clothes and (specifically) his garments, stating, “Whatever you want. I can give up anything. My skin.” One can’t help but wonder: Why is Joe still wearing them anyway? and, Is Louis really so unobservant that after a month together, it still hasn’t occured to him to ask Joe about his “fruity underwear”? At a more substantive level, one must admit the justice of Louis’s challenge: “How can you stop wearing it if it’s a skin?”
Symbolically, the scene works. In fact, I think that for myself as a Mormon, it may work better than it does for most members of the play’s audience, and better than it’s meant to—because, to me, it represents a very real price Joe has paid. Not a sign of shallowness, but of profound pain.
This is not to say that Joe is completely sympathetic. In fact, over the course of the play, Joe’s character becomes, in my view, considerably less attractive. He turns into a mouthpiece of Roy Cohn’s philosophy (which sounds considerably less convincing from him than from Cohn), and in general seems to have lost his prior identity without yet having anything to replace it. So perhaps it is fitting that he be left to wander on his own until he has discovered or decided who he is going to be.
In a way, it’s comforting that in Kushner’s world, being gay—even acknowledging your gayness—isn’t enough to make you one of the good guys. Conversely, being Mormon isn’t enough to damn you, as the example of Hannah—one of the most consistently positive characters in the play—shows. On the other hand, Kushner’s political judgments have nothing of gray about them: issues are black and white, right and wrong are clearly known, and while Kushner may undercut his characters’ certainties he never seems to doubt his own. His endorsement of difference may embrace quaint middle-aged ladies who believe in angels, but does not really extend to serious consideration of ideas that are different from his. Mormonism, conservatism: neither is really allowed a presence or voice in the play, despite their constant conjuration. It is no dialogue that the play presents, but rather a carefully scripted set of calls and responses.
Angels in America is an interesting and well-written work. Possibly even brilliant, although I suspect that those who don’t share Kushner’s beliefs and prejudices will find less in it than those who do. It’s an important work, from the perspective of Mormon letters. But not, ultimately—in my view—one that has much specifically to say to, for, or about Mormons.