The great work continues. Several scenes in this epic of gay life colliding with America’s laws, mores, madness, and confusion, are as thrilling as any in modern theater history. The lacerating Roy Cohn returns, as do Prior, Lewis, Harper, Mrs. Pitt, Belize, and the angel. Ironically, it is only when said angel (Ellen McLaughlin) appears that Tony Kushner’s breathtaking fantasia tumbles back to earth. Her dull spiel about mankind being better off regressing, capped by a silly wrestle with Prior and completed, later, in an unsatisfying -- even cringeworthy -- debate with fellow angelic bureaucrats, proves anew that unless you’re Pirandello, it’s best to avoid dramatizing metaphysics.
Heavenly hogwash aside, that still leaves three hours of genius-level drama. The relationships Kushner set up in Millennium Approaches now pay off in perfectly orchestrated odd couples: evil, hypocritical homophobe Roy Cohn being cared for by gay, black nurse Belize; gay Prior having his life saved by his “ex-boyfriend’s boyfriend’s Mormon mother,” Hanna Pitt (Kathleen Chalfant); homosexual “virgin” and Roy Cohn appointee Joe Pitt falling in love with Jewish, guilt-stricken liberal, Louis.
On one level, Kushner is merely giving us the first rule of playwriting: conflict. On another, he’s able to show how no sin goes unpunished -- or unforgiven. Still, I must contradict Louis’s pronouncement that “there are no angels in America.” Anyone who writes passionately about who we are, how we are, and what we could be is certainly an angel.
