Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Tony Kushner
Introduction
Should plays have introductions?
I started writing in the early 1980s, at a moment in American theater when introductions and other presumably helpful apparatuses—incredibly detailed historical timelines, research documentation and theoretical notation—announced the unapologetic embrace by narrative theater-makers of an intellectual and political seriousness that had previously been at home in European theaters and among American experimental theater artists. Dramaturgs arrived for the first time on the staffs of not-for-profit regional theaters; with the advent of production dramaturgy in America came a new deluge of prefatory and introductory information, served up from enormous black ring binders to the casts of plays as they sat around a table in the first days of rehearsal, and then offered to audiences in their theater programs. Formerly these programs were slim pamphlets containing lists of the production’s personnel and short biographies, place and time settings, and restaurant ads. Staff dramaturgs were now instructed to jam-pack programs with poetry, imagery, critical theory and facts, messages from the playwright, director and artistic director. Before they’d opened their programs, audiences most likely would have passed through lobby displays revealing the historical truths behind the fiction to which they were about to be exposed. I was enamored of this extra-theatrical informational bombardment. As a young playwright, I loved reading Shaw’s prefaces, and I looked forward to having plays of my own to preface. I felt only slightly guilty observing theatergoers diligently, frantically trying to absorb this embarrassment of supplementary illumination before the house lights dimmed and the play began.
I’ve changed, and in recent years I’ve grown averse to anything that intrudes itself upon an innocent audience and the play it’s about to watch, or an innocent reader about to read a play for the first time. If the playwright has done his or her job, if the production team and cast are doing theirs, the text of the play and the experience of watching or reading it should be sufficient unto itself.
The moment a play begins, or a reader takes in the words of the script on the first page, is as exciting and scary as any plunge into the ocean ought to be. Disappointment, bewilderment, outrage, great terror, pity and joy may follow, but these are only to be encountered once the plunge is made. Introductory material is for reluctant dawdlers and lag-behinds. A dusty grammar school usher and a sub-sub-librarian take many pages to tell you everything known about whales before each steps aside (well, before each dies, actually) to permit you to hazard the extremely perilous, mind-, heart- and molecule-altering voyage that is Moby-Dick, in the course of which voyage you realize that neither the usher nor the sub-sub, nor you, nor for that matter the crew of the Pequod nor their lunatic captain knows Thing One about what a whale is. When it’s a damp, drizzly November in your soul, Ishmael tells us, plunge in without preparation! The sea awaits!
If you’re still reading this and haven’t skipped ahead to the first scene, it could be because you strenuously disagree with me about introductions, or you’re unconvinced or simply agnostic on the subject. You may be asking yourself why I’m continuing to write this introduction deploring introducing—a reasonable question. I suppose it’s because a good deal of time has passed since I wrote Angels, and, while I have no desire to introduce the two plays of which it’s comprised, I feel I ought to make mention of what’s changed. Maybe I haven’t changed as much as I hoped, or as much as I ought.
I began writing these plays—I thought at the time that I was writing a single play—in 1987, when I was thirty-one years old. The AIDS epidemic was in its sixth year, the Reagan administration in its seventh. It was a terrifying and galvanizing time. I finished the first draft of Millennium Approaches in 1988, and the first draft of Perestroika in 1990. So Angels in America is approximately twenty-two years old, and I’m precisely fifty-six.
This edition incorporates changes I’ve made to Angels over the past several years. Most of these changes are to be found in Part Two, Perestroika, which is now closer to complete than it’s ever been. I can’t quite bring myself to write that it’s complete. Since the day I finished the first draft of Perestroika, I’ve always known that it’s one of those plays that refuses to be entirely in harmony with itself. Some plays want to sprawl, some plays contain expansiveness, roughness, wildness and incompleteness in their DNA. These plays may, if they’re not misunderstood and dismissed as failed attempts at tidiness, speak more powerfully about what’s expansive, rough, wild and incomplete in human life than plays with tauter, more efficient, more cleanly constructed narratives.
Millennium Approaches has a taut, efficient narrative, and I’ve never seen any need to change it. In this edition it’s substantially the same play that was first published nearly twenty years ago, although as a result of the work on both parts of Angels for the Signature Theatre’s 2010 revival, a few minor alterations were made to it.
Significant changes have been made to Perestroika. I discovered what I believed to be a missing thread in its narrative, the substructural space for which, I realized, I’d laid in long before I knew what use to make of it. In this version, with a little help from my friends and a very long preview period, that thread has been woven in. I won’t specify to which moments I’m referring, because calling attention to them would undermine the effort made to integrate the new material. Of course there are two other published versions of Perestroika, and anyone with sufficient time and interest can make comparisons, but most people have better things to do with their time. Life, after all, is always shorter than we think.
I think a lot more about mortality at fifty-six than I did at thirty-one. At fifty-six, I’m more certain of my own mortality, as it presses nearer, and much more uncertain about the future existence of my species than I was when I started writing Angels. Time has vindicated some of the plays’ conflictedly optimistic spirit; progress has been made. Angels is not teleological, its apocalyptic forebodings notwithstanding. As the dead old rabbi says in Perestroika (in a scene relegated in this edition to the back of the book), hope, when it can’t be discovered in certainty, can almost always be located in indeterminacy, and Angels is a hopeful work.
Unfortunately, the passing years have been equally if not more confirming of the plays’ aforementioned apocalyptic forebodings, which loom darker and resound more ominously for contemporary audiences and readers.
Angels in America, more than twenty years old, survives, as do I. I’m utterly and happily in the dark about the longevity of my work, but I hope Angels outlasts me, I hope it will continue to be entertaining and of interest and use to people for years to come. I hope there’ll be people for years to come.
I’m writing this introduction the day before America goes to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama for president. This is the place from which it seems to me I’ve always written, perched on the knife’s edge of terror and hope. It’s familiar enough, though today the edge is sharper than it’s ever been, and the two worlds it divides, one of light, one of darkness, seem respectively more brilliant and more abysmal, more extremely opposed than ever before.
Whatever tomorrow brings,* the future—I’m reasonably certain of this—remains indeterminate.
Tony Kushner
November 5, 2012
* It turned out OK. (TK, November 2013)
THE CHARACTERS
IN MILLENNIUM APPROACHES
ROY