Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (46 page)

rteous combustion
seems rigorously apposite in the description of Prior's exploding and imploding body. Yet,
Angels in America
wants also to measure the extraordinary velocities and forces now unleashed in this "New Age," wants to see them as expansionist as well as destructive, no less visionary than the opening of the seals. Kushner breaks with realism because the brave new world he is out to chart requires a new stage altogether, one that does justice to the cosmos as well as the id, one that houses private fantasy and political landscape as well as medical dilemma. At times a new code is needed to graph these changes; at other times, a truly older code will do, which is why Kushner chooses, at key moments, to go into Hebrew, to signal that these unheard-of transformations have been adumbrated in the past, are part of the Book.

Kushner's construction of plague has an unprecedented power— utterly beyond the discrete representations of Sophocles, Defoe, Dickens, and even Camus and Bergman—because he centralizes the human body as the war zone itself, the actual terrain for the planetary yet somatic battle. The body is a source of art, wit, and control, as we see in the play's raffish exchanges and pungent dialogue (never perhaps more
saftig
than when Belize, the former drag queen, is on scene), but it is also the site for unparalleled devastation, as Prior comes to learn. And this somatic disaster tests love as nothing else can; Louis fails the test. Prior puts it in sweet living-space terms: "Apartment too small for three? Louis and Prior comfy but not Louis and Prior and Prior's disease?" (1.74).

Perhaps the key to Kushner's vision is his sense, at once lyrical and clinical, of the body as the locus of pleasure. Here is why the sexual element—powerfully present in the formulas of Sophocles and Dickens but nonetheless discrete—is at last foregrounded as the ultimate logic of modern plague. It is very simple: people infect each other sexually. Sexual congress is the most powerful engine in the history of human civilization—the fabulous Angel spells it out: "Not Physics but Ecstatics Makes the Engine Run" (II.39)—
and Angels in America
confers on sexual

attraction its rightful place at the center of things. Hence, the seduction scene between Louis and Joe is cued precisely to the mobility of somatic contact, a contact that starts in the air before finishing in the flesh:

LOUIS: Smell is ... an incredibly complex and underappreciated physical phenomenon. Inextricably bound up with sex.

JOE: I . . . didn't know that.

LOUIS: It is. The nose is really a sexual organ. Smelling. Is desiring. We have five senses, but only two that go beyond the boundaries ... of ourselves. When you look at someone, it's just bouncing light, or when you hear them, it's just sound waves, vibrating air, or touch is just nerve endings tingling. Know what a smell is?

JOE: It's . . . some sort of. . . No.

louis: It's made of the molecules of what you're smelling. Some part of you, where you meet the air, is airborne. (II.30)

Theory quickly becomes praxis here as Louis moves up to Joe, close, breathes, and murmurs "Little molecules of Joe . . . ," inhales deeply, says, "Up my nose. Mmmm . . . Nice. Try it" (II.30). Joe now inhales as well, and the lesson continues, moving from smell to taste, quite wonderfully recasting the infection story of noxious bodily transmission as a much older fable still, one of sensory and erotic stimuli, of bodies playing out their timeless mating rituals, now seen up close under the microscope. Kushner offers us something like a poem of the earth, makes us understand the
elemental nature
of human attraction, helps us to actually catch sight of the busy quasi-molecular force field in which desire operates:

louis: . . . First the nose, then the tongue. joe: I just don't. . .

LOUIS: They work as a team, see. The nose tells the body—the heart, the mind, the fingers, the cock—what it wants, and then the

tongue explores, finding out what's edible, what isn't, what's most mineral, food for the blood, food for the bones, and therefore most delectable.
(He licks the side of Joe's cheek.)
Salt.
(Louis kisses Joe, who holds back a moment and then responds.)

LOUIS: Mmm. Iron. Clay.
(Louis slips his hand down the front of Joe's pants. They embrace more tightly. Louis pulls his hand out, smells and tastes his fingers, and then holds them for Joe to smell.)

louis: Chlorine. Copper. Earth. (II.31)

This view of sexual desire and sexual coupling is properly elemental, chthonic, and it is the cornerstone of Kushner's play, serving as a basis for the incessant shape-shifting and fusing that constitute reality. The myth of individual hegemony is cashiered, and in its stead, we see a world of interacting bodies, a kind of olfactory and tactile (and emotional and moral) traffic that announces linkage and connection everywhere. One wants to say that his dramaturgy is in this service, a dramaturgy that produces shared dreams and hallucinations, that goes about "familializing" his characters, so that Harper and Prior are almost as much a couple as Louis and Joe (something the double scenes make unmistakable), so that Hannah, the Mormon mother, is pulled from Salt Lake City to New York to play her structural role with Harper. And so that even Roy Cohn, the play's consummate individualist, makes the rounds, is regarded as a putative missing link between Joe and Louis.

The reality of Kushner's play is connection, connection that may start as airborne and genital but then oudasts sexual cohabitation, goes beyond sexual desire altogether. The guilt-ridden Louis tells Emily about Mathilde's fidelity for William the Conqueror: "She waited for him, she stitched for years. And if he had come back broken and defeated from war, she would have loved him even more. And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him" (I.53). Kushner's play may centralize desire, but its view of loyalty has an Old Testament severity to it. Louis comes to understand

the enormity, the unforgivability, of his betrayal of Prior, just as Joe finds that he has to walk back into the marriage that he has walked out of.

The reality of linkage and the value of loyalty acquire a special against-the-grain eloquence in Reagan's America.
Angels
is saturated with the egocentric assumptions of 1980s America, and the passages where Roy Cohn and his high-up lackey, Martin, try to lure Joe to Washington should be anthologized for their accuracy in conveying that peculiar American Zeitgeist. Kushner seems mesmerized by the muscular individualist creed of eighties America, and he sees the "fall of communism" as part of this ideological high-stakes game; AIDS enters this text in some sense as the missing "theory," the doctrine of connectedness that counters the egoist model. I say "mesmerized," because Kushner seems to live out both sides of his agon, in the sense that the most fascinating figure in his play turns out to be the archenemy, Roy Cohn.

Cohn, like Joe, is seen by us (and by his doctor) to be living a lie. He is dying of AIDS, but insists that it be called cancer. Whereas Joe's Mormon straightness is a mask that must crumble, Roy Cohn not only sticks to his guns (as it were), but goes on to claim the high ground in arguing that power allows you to rewrite the script, that the existential anguish suffered by someone like Joe—should I leave my wife to go to Washington? should I admit I am gay?—is an unnecessary bagatelle if you have enough chutzpah and clout. Thus, Roy explains to his doctor that one must not pay too much attention to labels:

ROY: . . . AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don't tell you that.

henry: No?

ROY: No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label

refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pis-sant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? (1.45)

Kushner's Cohn is a man of such pluck, resistance, and bile that he threatens to take over the play every time he appears. He is Me-phistopheles, the one who seeks to deny the tug of disease and death by sheer force of will, the power broker who personifies the American political id. He exposes the cultural pastime of identity politics as a charade, a house of cards, but he helps us understand the titanism of the moment, the raw creatural appetite that drives the political machine. Wanting Joe to move to Washington to provide some badly needed legal protection, finding that Joe is betwixt and between because of moral scruples, Cohn explodes with the best definition of politics that I have ever come across:

JOE: Well it is unethical. I can't . . .

roy: Boy, you are really something. What the fuck do you think this is, Sunday School?

joe: No, but Roy, this is . . .

ROY: This is . . . this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what it is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is
politics,
Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you're . . . What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You're on earth, goddammit! Plant a foot, stay awhile. (1.68)

Roy's corporeal vision of life and politics is of a piece with the play's views on both sexuality and plague, as if Kushner were exploring the

furthest parameters of a somatic, visceral view of things. The range here can be astonishing. Cohn's interest in Joe carries beyond desired favors and takes on tones of a father-son relationship, a form of spiritual and fleshly mentorship that Cohn believes in, has experienced at the hands of Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover,Joe McCarthy. And we can recognize strange Sophoclean echoes in this speech, reminiscent of the elegiac paternal theme in the
Philoctetes,
all of which confirms the linkage imperative of the play, a kind of bonding that is every bit as powerful as the paean to individual appetite that is front and center. Even Roy Cohn the militant individualist is familiarized by the text: Joe is his would-be son, Belize becomes his reluctant nurse, and Ethel Rosenberg—the nemesis he prides himself for having exterminated way back when—makes a return family visit, seeks to bring news of disbarring to the dying man but ends up instead as Roy's dead mother singing a Yiddish lullaby to her dying son:

roy: Ma? Muddy? Is it... ?
(He sits up, looks at Ethel)
Ma?

ethel
(Uncertain, then):
It's Ethel, Roy.

roy: Muddy? I feel bad.

ethel
(Looking around):
Who are you talking to, Roy, it's . . .

roy: Good to see you, Ma, it's been years. I feel bad. Sing to me.

ethel: I'm not your mother, Roy.

ROY: It's cold in here, I'm up so late, past my time. Don't be mad,

Ma, but I'm scared . . . ? A little. Don't be mad. Sing me a song.

Please. ethel: I don't want to Roy, I'm not your . . . roy: Please, it's scary out here.
(He starts to cry) (He sinks back)
Oh

God. Oh God, I'm so sorry . . . ethel
(Singing, very soft):

Shteit a bocher

Un er tracht,

Tracht un nacht

A gantze nacht:

Vemen tzu nemen Um nit farshemen Vemen tzu nemen, Um nit farsahem.

Tum-ba-la, Tum-ba-la, Tum-balalaike, Tum-ba-la, Tum-ba-la, Tum-balalaike, Turn Balalaike, shpil balalaike . . .

(Pause)
Roy . . . ? Are you . . . ?
(She crosses to the bed, looks at him. Goes back to her chair.)
That's it. (II. 113-114)

This spellbinding passage ends with Roy suddenly sitting up in bed and crowing to Ethel that he fooled her, that he just wanted to make her sing; but this moment of triumph is followed by his death. Ultimately the sequence has significance far beyond Roy's conscious designs because it displays the stunning shaping powers of Kushner's art: much like Prior and Harper enter each other's visions, empowered to do so by the strength of their feelings as well as the genius of the playwright, so too do we have a meeting of the spirits here, and it is strictly within the play's logic that the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, come back to punish her punisher, can become in her final incarnation Roy Cohn's Muddy, can come back to soothe him to his last sleep. It is also within the play's logic that the plague story be understood as a staging of American history and American myth, that the advent of AIDS and the Gay Movement—far from being some fringe phenomenon—constitutes a
revision
of the entire nation's experience. In this, Kushner displays a kind of ideological hunger, carnival vision, and sheer theatrical bravura that are far removed from the severity of Defoe's and Camus's stories, that take the Dicken-sian analysis of high and low into almost surreal territory.

Angels in America
is indeed a visionary text about the millennium. Tony Kushner makes us see that the plague theme reveals the absolute centrality of the
body
in all human affairs: love, death, politics. Plague leads to an encounter with otherness: with another form of sexual behavior, with a new set of family alignments, with a radical reconception