Like I said, Angels in America is a beautiful play: smart, poetic, real, magical, sexy. And it’s a great work to put on a syllabus, because no matter what your students wanna discuss, it’s in there.
I keep coming back to it year after year because it unsettles and saddens me. So much of the play is about love and transformation and life-changes and things falling apart: relationships crack, lovers outgrow one another, sometimes die. And it’s not just the Hedda Gabler/Titanic kind of splitting where one of the pair is clearly the martyr, the other a vandal. Kushner’s smarter than that; every character is likeable in his own way. Even Roy Cohn has a certain charm–although in real life he was the apparent reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler. What I mean to say is that there are no obvious solutions here. If these characters were placed on a deserted island by a major television network, viewers would have a hard time picking which one to boot off first.
If you’ve ever had someone suddenly taken away from you, the play’s narratives of love and tragic loss are particularly poignant. You remember that feeling you once had, that promise you made to yourself about never taking people for granted, and you’re slightly ashamed that you forgot it so quickly.
When you say goodbye to someone, even if you’re just going to bed in the next room, say it like you might never have the chance to say it again.
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