Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes 689to and try to live in New York City. And as stated
before, Roy Cohn is a closeted and hypocritical
homosexual who embraces and works toward policy
that furthers the alienation of communities that
do not conform to generally accepted behavior.
Eventually, each character has to reconcile his or
her role in American society, and this ends with
Prior, Louis, Hannah, and Belize coming together
to work toward a “new” community of memory and
acceptance. The play is further complicated with the
appearance of the Angel who announces to Prior
that God is gone from Heaven. This adds a sense of
the spiritual alienation of a modern America.
In addition to the social and political issues, the
characters of the drama are individuals who serve
to represent people in various stages of alienation,
or estrangement, from themselves and others, emo-
tionally and physically. The two characters that have
the most difficult time navigating through life for
the extent of the play are Prior and Joe Pitt, who is
a Mormon married to Harper and struggling with
his sexual identity. For all the characters, though,
relationships are tenuous and are broken while new
relationships are formed. The relationships are sev-
ered due to the different characters’ emotional and
physical barriers that are the cause of estrangement
with each other and in some cases with themselves.
Louis plays a major role when looking closely at
the characters of Prior and Joe. Louis leaves Prior
because of his inability to handle the emotional and
physical issues of having a partner sick with AIDS.
Joe struggles with his sexuality as it goes against
his religious beliefs, and the struggle to repress his
homosexual desires harms his marriage. Eventually,
Louis forms a purely physical relationship with
Joe after abruptly leaving Prior, and for Harper,
her already fragile mental and emotional state are
further harmed as she learns of Joe’s actions. The
cycle continues as each character’s personal struggles
affect the next.
Prior, as a man who is separated from his former
life, his former partner, and society because of his
sexuality and illness, finally realizes that he cannot
simply exist, he must do something. As he rejects
his role as prophet and in turn chooses life over
death, he reveals, “I’m thirty years old . . . I haven’t
done anything yet . . .” (131). As a prophet, he has
no opportunity to do anything—he would exist as
a memory. But he is part of a marginalized com-
munity that is politically impotent and in desperate
need of a voice that merges memory and progress.
And in the end, it is Hannah, Joe’s mother, joining
Louis, Belize, and Prior at Bethesda Fountain, who
articulates the social and political statement of the
drama that the characters embody. She says, “You
can’t live in the world without an idea of the world,
but it’s living that makes the ideas” (144). This
is the essential issue—action without thought or
thought without action—that Prior reconciles with
the words, “The Great Work Begins” (146). Alien-
ation, or estrangement, whether personal or political,
takes many forms and in all cases is destructive for
the individual as well as the community.
Brian Stileshope in Angels in America
Tony Kushner presents his audience with an Ameri-
can landscape that is, at best, socially and politically
ambivalent, and at worst hostile to its citizens who
lack a recognized social identity. Set primarily in the
second half of the 1980s, the prevailing conservative
climate offers little hope to the play’s characters who
are either gay and dealing with the HIV plague or
dealing with moral conundrums of identity. Despite
the personal problems and bleak reality of these
characters’ lives, the work concludes with the words,
“The Great Work Begins” (146). For the characters
gathered with Prior Walter at Bethesda Fountain,
the sense of working, or progressing, toward a bet-
ter future offers hope of a benign future, one that
is more accepting socially and politically for people
that have long been pushed to the outer fringes of
social consciousness.
The play loosely centers on the character Prior
Walter, a 30-year-old homosexual man whose
health is rapidly deteriorating due to the effects
of HIV. Of any of the characters, he has reason to
despair; he knows he is going to die as he has seen
many of his friends suffer that fate. Furthermore,
when he tells Louis, his partner of four years, Louis
quickly abandons him. As Millennium Approaches
ends, the first of the two plays that make up Angels
in America, an Angel arrives in Prior’s bedroom and
announces her presence. And as Perestroika, the