Finding Angels in a World of Loss
Finding Angels in a World of Loss
The angelic prophecy has been revealed, and it has been rejected—by its own would-be prophet, Prior Walter. The prophecy is to just stop: to stop moving and migrating and changing, and if that happens, maybe God will return. Prior finds this prophecy a farce at best, dangerous at worse. “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks—progress, migration, motion is… modernity . . . Even if we go faster than we should. We can’t wait. And wait for what? God…” (Perestroika 132). Such is the major theme of Angels in America, that by stopping and just waiting, nothing will change, nothing better occur. It is a world where institutions, where greater authorities, cannot be trusted to affect change for the better, as they have failed: God, the greatest authority and institution of all, tired of the world eighty years prior, and has departed with no sign of return.
In fact, every character in Angels is somehow abandoned or left behind by someone else. Prior has been abandoned by his boyfriend, Louis, who is too weak to watch as Prior’s condition worsens. Harper has been abandoned by her husband, Joe, who believes he has finally found love in Louis. Roy Cohn, the once-almighty power broker, has been abandoned by all professional circles, disbarred and left to die with a phone with no hold button. And finally, the world itself has been abandoned by God, in the face of a plague effectively wiping out a minority that has been ignored by those in power.
But to simply stop? “Turn back. Undo. Till HE returns again,” (53) the angel cries, yet to the prophet Prior, this seems to be a deathwish. As a gay man living with AIDS in the late ’80s, he knows that stopping and waiting for institutions and those in positions of power to step up and act is a worthless cause. In fact, there are two approaches to action in the face of this modern-day plague in its early years: Roy’s path and Prior’s. Roy calls upon the traditional instruments of power, to try to secure himself all of the newest drugs before anyone else can even see them in a trial. Even this attempt at abating his “liver cancer” proves futile, and he dies. Prior takes a much different route: he calls upon the angels in America.
The title of the play refers to more than one angel in America, yet of course, the angel America is but one figure (four emanations, albeit, however manifest in one). And the angel offers little help, but to tell Prior to simply give up and wait for God’s return. Who, then, are these “angels” in America? It is surely not Roy Cohn—the family lawyer for the deadbeat dad God—nor would it appear to be any of the Continental Principalities. Rather, the angels are those such as Prior, Belize, and even Louis, with his faults, who, though very much still suffering and still hurting, are able to find in each other, in the constant need for exploring which Louis references, a degree of freedom that, as Belize so beautifully put it, is out of reach for most as represented in the high note of the national anthem. Yet, in community, a sense of purpose and resolve is found, and this is the beauty of the play, and where the true angels are to be found.
Tags: angels, HIV/AIDS, homosexuality
