Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives Vanessa Campagna/ We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.[1] José Esteban Muñoz Two decades have passed since Tony Kushner’s opus, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1993), premiered on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre, yet the questions raised by the play are no less a part of the current zeitgeist than they were when the play debuted. Through its protagonist, Prior Walter, Angels in America poses audiences with provocative and poignant questions including: Does a queer engagement with the future exist? If so, what does queer futurity entail? What are the terms and conditions of the “citizenship”[2] Prior demands for himself and his fellow queers? These questions evoke two of the play’s major themes, history and futurity, and initiate conversations about queer lives. In the twenty years since Angels in America debuted, these themes and conversations have become increasingly integrated into American public discourse. The Defense of Marriage Act[3] has been repealed, the United States Supreme Court defeated Proposition 8,[4] and marriage equality measures have passed in nineteen states. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell[5] legislation was dismantled by President Obama, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act[6] has been presented to nearly every Congress since 1994. To borrow from John M. Clum, “the place lesbians and gay men are allowed to hold in contemporary American society,”[7] is a concern that prevails in post-Millennium America. We see this concern in Kushner’s play-world as well. Prior’s forward-thinking and resilient spirit is very much still alive; in addition to political initiatives, New York’s Signature Theatre staged a critically-acclaimed revival of Angels in America in their 2010-2011 Season. Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company staged productions of parts one and two (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, respectively) in 2013. In view of the play’s longevity and its thematic relevance to the current historical moment, the time is ripe for scholarship that continues to critically examine the play. This study explores the interplay between history and future that seems inherent in the work, and attempts to reveal potential answers to the major questions the play poses. A large portion of this study investigates the ways that Kushner’s play functions metadramatically to work against past representations of gay lives and create openings for future, decidedly queer representations. By placing Angels in America in conversation with earlier plays from the gay and lesbian repertoire, I aim to cultivate deeper insight to the history that Kushner’s drama addresses, challenges, and ultimately subverts. In turn, the queer future imagined and demanded by Prior is contextualized and more fully illuminated. The conceptual framework of this study is motivated by recent works from Theatre and Performance Studies scholars Dustin Bradley Goltz and Sara Warner. Goltz’s Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity (2010), analyzes over one hundred films and twenty- 1 / 16 Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu five television programs[8] to argue that queer futurity does not yet exist because the heterosexist monolith holds a monopoly on the future. Integral to Goltz’s discussion of queer estrangement from the future is literary theorist Kenneth Burke’s concept of the tragic frame. To summarize, the tragic frame is a symbolic structure that uses victimage to purify or impose order upon embodied experiences. Drawing from Burke, Goltz contends that, both on and off the screen, homosexuals are cast as the sacrificial scapegoats whose narratives are routinely and systematically censored, if not altogether purged. The singular alternative to the tragic frame is assimilation through heteronormativity. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) characters avoid condemnation to the tragic frame, and subsequent victimage, if—and only if—they perform a “normalized” representation of homosexuality. As Nikki Sullivan notes, the assimilationist ambition is that homosexuals will be “accepted into, and [will] become one with, mainstream culture.”[9] Only through the adoption of heteronormative semiotics and participation in heteronormative institutions do LGBT characters escape punishment and receive the endowment of life, or futurity. Assimilation, however, does not secure queer characters—nor, by proxy, their real-life counterparts—a future unto themselves, but merely a corner in which they can exist within the future of heteronormativity. At the crux of Goltz’s work, then, is the liberationist cry for gay narratives (and, more broadly, gay futures) existing “beyond the tragic cycle,”[10] and its stark binary of assimilation or punishment. Sara Warner offers a similar thesis in Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (2012), which critiques homoliberalism, the “conservative program for social assimilation… the economic, political, and social enfranchisement of certain normative-leaning, straight-acting homosexuals.”[11] Warner asserts that queer theories, the equality movement championed by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, and myriad performance traditions share a preoccupation with tragic narratives that center upon a history of victimage. Too often, she notes, homoliberalism is identified as the idyllic rejoinder to a painful history. Like Goltz, Warner calls for decidedly queer narratives—for, comical and cunning interventions that make a mockery of discrimination and the experience of social exclusion. These antics provide a creative outlet for the outrage, alienation, and sorrow that attend queer lives in the form of dramatic displays of revelry and rebellion.[12] The work of scholars like Goltz and Warner is representative of the vibrant and complex conversations circulating in the Academy and society at large about queer histories and futures, and—as relating to Theatre and Performance Studies—representations of queer lives and futurity. Goltz’s and Warner’s theses echo and bolster the claims made by Kushner’s Prior two decades earlier, as the character grappled with the dichotomies of death/life and history/futurity, and envisioned (and demanded access to) queer citizenship. Like Goltz and Warner, Prior imagined alternatives to the tragic queer history. Kushner said in an interview with Mother Jones’s Andrea Bernstein, “The fundamental question is: Are we made by history or do we make history—and the answer is yes.”[13] This philosophy of history is epitomized in Prior, who recognizes the impact history has had on him and other queers and, in turn, fights to re-appropriate space for reimagined lives and futures (or new histories). To that end, Angels in America can be read as an example of the kind of narrative called for by Goltz and Warner. Certainly, Prior Walter was not remarkable for surviving to the play’s final curtain; countless openly gay male characters had already done so. As early as 1958, Joe Cino (an openly gay, retired dancer) founded the Caffe Cino, a performance venue in Greenwich Village that gave rise to now-celebrated, gay playwrights 2 / 16 Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu like Doric Wilson and Lanford Wilson. At the Caffe Cino, dramatists not only allowed their openly gay characters to live, but created these characters as complex human beings, and showed them in a positive light (examples include, Doric Wilson’s And Now She Dances! [1961] and Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright [1964]). Although Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) aroused criticism for what some perceived as depicting internalized homophobia, it remains a highly regarded play in the gay repertoire. Among defenders of the play is John M. Clum, who praises the work for its daring: “For the first time, mainstream audiences [saw] gay men talk openly about their sexual predilections, dance together, kiss, and retire upstairs for sex.”[14] Moreover, Clum celebrates the play as one that, “more than any other single play, publicized homosexuals as a minority group,”[15] in need of liberation and empowerment. Kushner has noted that The Boys in the Band “was really [his] first intimation that there was a world beyond Lake Charles, [Louisiana],”[16] his hometown. Perhaps The Boys in the Band was the play that made Kushner realize that “more life” was possible for himself—if not a life under a different set of circumstances, perhaps on a different set of terms? The 1970s and 1980s gave rise to various other gay characters who survive to the play’s end; exemplars include Ken Talley from Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1978), Georges and Albin from Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Ned Weeks from Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1984), and Stephen from Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata (1989). The critical qualifier, however, is that relationships dominate these characters’ lives, for better or for worse, and they exist within plots that center on “traditional” values like family and monogamy. Despite the ways in which the plays queer “normative” themes and engage their complexities, the heteronormative paradigm is present and the characters are therefore saved from ultimate condemnation. Angels in America departs from the trajectory of its progenitors in that Prior does not become a victim of the tragic frame, but neither does he submit to hegemonic ideals and practices. Prior not only lives, but he lives on his own terms. In this sense, the play not only reimagines queer lives in America, but functions metadramatically to redirect historical representations of queer characters in the American drama.