ABSTRACT
tony kushner's 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, is very gay. And Jewish. It's about assimilation, self-loathing, men with lost souls, the betrayal of the faith, and the abandonment of a moral vision. Depending on who the viewer is, there are two versions of the play, playing simultaneously. There's the deeply moving, virus-infected, goyishe-gay-who-divinely-hallucinates and the Mr. Married Mormon, coming-out-of-the-closet-to-pill-popping, straight soon-to-be-happy-ex, Mrs. Mormon, AIDS version. Then there's the culturally lost, wandering-in-secular-exile, ambivalent treif, quasi-civil-libertarian-melting-pot-mess, full-of-self-deception, painfully revealing JEWISH version, located in the extremely bizarre triumvirate of Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, and the imaginatively invented totally believable (character of) Louis Ironson. Ultimately one plot informs the other as the characters move in out of their tightly woven, interrelated narratives. But Angels in America will always be my Jewish Fantasia on National Themes. It resounds in my ears like the long, hard, final sound of the shofar calling the People Israel to worship in a postmodern, Hillary Clinton-reconstructed, 190school-prayer-reinstated, third-wave, neo-Newt Gingrich era, in which, lying at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Jewish identity is in fragments, while lost Jewish (read male) souls seek solace in the exact same, singular, super-clean anus of a closeted, self-righteous, god-fearing married Mormon faggot. Yes, Angels is about Jewish male self-loathing in the twentieth century held tightly within the ever-expanding embrace of Miss Liberty's very tired, porous hands.
