Final Essay

I want to start by quoting extensively from Michael Feingold’s review of the 2010 revival of Angels in America in the Village Voice. He begins by defining a “fantasia” and how it applies to the plot of the play:

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My musical dictionary defines a fantasia as a composition ‘in which the ‘free flight of fancy’ prevails over considerations of form or style.’ ... Musically speaking, Louis’s tormented relationship with his lover, Prior Walter, constitutes the work’s main theme, shifting keys and developing ever wilder dissonances as mounting stress over Prior’s AIDS drives the two men apart. Events produced by that stress ultimately reunited them, but not back in the original key: Their lives have been extensively reharmonized through much additional thematic material, like the chance workplace encounter that links Louis to the young lawyer, Joe Pitt---Mormon, Republican and closeted gay.

Joe’s story links them, on one side, to his indomitable mother, Hannah, and his unhappy, Valium addicted, “jack Mormon” wife, Harper. On the other, it pulls these fictional figures into American political history, New York-style, through Joe’s mentor, Roy Cohn. A homophobic queer dying of AIDS, which he denies having, the ultra-crooked, ultra-connected, ultra-conservative Cohn is haunted, in his dying hours, by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, like him a historical figure, electrocuted partly through Cohn’s connivance for a crime she didn’t commit....

...Angels chooses quirkily among its materials. We hear much about Louis’s family, but little about Prior’s... Joe Pitt might have been another play’s dramatic fulcrum: the closeted gay who summons the strength to come out to his mother and his wife. But the act’s consequences are murky: Joe never fully confronts his conservative politics; his fascination with Roy Cohn, odd to start with, continues. Louis, who might be expected to welcome Joe’s newly discovered self, instead hectors him about deeds in his closeted past, after which everyone simply drops him; even his mother apparently stops caring, instead evolving a new life with Prior’s circle. She get’s the angel’s kiss; Harper gets off Valium and gets Joe’s credit card; Joe gets limbo.

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In the italicized portion above, Feingold comes close to articulating my own criticism of the play and its ending: the treatment of Joe. One of the many things the play is doing is asking us to look at our ethical criteria: how we judge the morality, the “rightness” of various actions. One way it does this is by constructing a moral hierarchy among its characters, a scale which perhaps changes during the body of the play, but is clearly finalized by the end. We are not under any confusion, for example, about how we are to judge Roy Cohn: Louis’s accusatory aria on page 227, “He’s the polestar of human evil,” is crystal clear. And yet, in the play's extensive reclamation project of an ending, where everyone is gathered in and redeemed in some way----even Roy Cohn is granted the dignity of having the Kaddish said over him (and gets a throw-away comic cameo from Hell)----Joe is cast out. And I don’t think that is fair. I think its mistaken and odd, I think it goes against the play’s own moral logic. I’m not sure how I would explain it---it puzzles me and makes me question the play itself.

Here is your final assignment. Write an essay---of any length, but at least 3 and half pages, addressing your reaction to the play’s ending. What do you make of it? What do you think of looking at the “other play” Feingold alludes to: one in which Joe would have been the central character. Is Angels a kind of botched coming out story? Is that a fair assessment? How does the ending square with the play’s understanding of history (which if anything is an endorsement of change). Why can’t Joe (be allowed) change? These and other questions can be examined and possibly answered in your paper. Oh, one more thing, if this play is meditation on the 20thC gay experience, where are all the lesbians?

Due: Wednesday, May 13 in class.