Show and Tell #2!: "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches"

My favorite play, Angels in America, is a two part “gay fantasia on national themes” by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright Tony Kushner. However, for this show and tell post, I will only concentrate on the first part of the play titled Millennium Approaches. First written and workshopped in 1990, Millennium Approaches had productions in London (1992) and Los Angeles (1992) before being performed on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993. This production earned Kushner his Pulitzer Prize for Drama and first Tony Award for Best Play. Both parts of Angels in America were adapted into an HBO miniseries in 2003 directed by Mike Nichols. This information was garnered from the production notes at the beginning of my copy of the script. This play can be purchased online on sites such as www.amazon.com or in most major bookstores.

Millennium Approaches tells the story of seven individuals living in New York City from October 1985 to January 1986 during the height of the AIDS crisis and in the middle of Reagan’s tumultuous tenure as President. Early in the play, Prior Walter, a gay designer, discloses to his boyfriend, Louis Ironson, that he is dying from AIDS. Louis, who is HIV negative, struggles with the prospect of losing his lover to illness and considers abandoning the relationship. Throughout the play, Prior hears the disembodied voice of an Angel. At the same time, a Mormon couple, Joe and Harper Pitt, fight over whether or not Joe should move to Washington D.C. for a better job opportunity. Harper’s addiction to Valium makes her hallucinate frequently, and Joe struggles with his own same-sex attractions. Towards the end of part one, Louis and Joe leave their respective partners and begin to find comfort in one another. The play ends with the Angel appearing to Prior in all her glory and proclaiming him to be a prophet. Other major characters include a conservative lawyer with AIDS, a former drag queen named Belize, and Joe’s doting Mormon mother who comes to live with Harper after Joe leaves her.

One interesting dramaturgical choice that Kushner makes is that, despite there being eight actors who play the eight main roles (this includes the Angel), there are twelve other supporting roles that are also played by the eight actors, creating what Kushner calls “an actor-driven event.” Kushner goes so far as to dictate which actor should play which roles, often creating some interesting dichotomies. For example the actor playing Prior also plays a man in Central Park that Louis goes to have anonymous sex with after he has left Prior’s hospital bed. However, the act is abandoned when the condom breaks and the man fears contracting HIV. Essentially, the man has Louis experience a lesser form of the rejection that Prior will feel when he realizes that Louis has left.

Another interesting and excellent dramaturgical choice Kushner makes is having two scenes play out on stage at the same time. In scene eight of act I, Joe and Harper discuss Joe’s latent homosexual feelings while Louis theorizes about justice and hypothetically asks Prior what would happen if he abandoned the relationship. The scenes play out at the same time, but the couples take turns having their own conversations. However, later in scene nine of act II, Louis tells Prior that he is giving up on their relationship at the same time Joe tells Harper that he is a gay man. Because the tension and energy is higher, the lines frequently overlap each other as each individual struggles to cope with the difficult situations that they are facing. To list another example, Harper’s hallucinations and Prior’s fever dreams brought about by his illness also occur simultaneously at one point, bring the two hurting characters into a safe, almost celestial world where they can experience the “threshold of revelation” (scene 7, act I).

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia of national Themes. 1995. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Print.