Chicago Tribune - November 30, 2003
Chris Jones, Tribune arts reporter

For these are not those kinds of angels.

Like a weird religious thunderbolt aimed at the home of mob violence, urban promiscuity and existential funeral home japes, Mike Nichols' faithfully filmed and defiantly complete version of Tony Kushner's six-hour, Pulitzer Prize-winning theatrical epic, "Angels in America," makes its debut on Dec. 7 with the help of such marquee stars as Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker and Meryl Streep. Nichols' film blends cinematic realism with nods to the work's theatrical roots, but there's no powerful auteur vision on display to compete with Kushner's. Wisely perhaps, one auteur was deemed to be enough.

"Mike did this because he loved the plays," Kushner says. Nichols succeeded Robert Altman, who was attached to this project when "Angels" was headed for a theatrical release. But whereas Altman talked openly of a radical adaptation, Nichols has aptly noted that a primary aim here was the documentation of a contemporary classic of American dramatic literature.

Penned mainly in the AIDS-ravaged era of 1987-1990 and produced on Broadway in 1993 and, memorably, at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in 1994, "Angels" always has been a mess of contradictions. An irrefutably spiritual play from an otherwise secularist playwright, this "gay fantasia on national themes" blends historicism and fiction, AIDS politics and personal redemption, the fantastic and the fabulous. Its complex, multilayered plot involves the agonizing death of the real-life Roy Cohn (Pacino), the struggles of a young fictional man with AIDS and his self-absorbed lover, and the travails in New York of a family of Mormons trying to reconcile absolutes of faith with the messiness of life.

"Angels" is far more hostile to the legacy of Ronald Reagan -- as well as his family -- than a CBS biodrama could easily conceive. Aside from poking fun at Ronald Reagan Jr., "Angels" makes unflattering references to Ed Meese and Nancy Reagan. It makes an explicit link between religious ecstasy and sexual desire. It pokes fun at Mormon and Jewish rituals and doctrine. And yet, at its heart, the work betrays a palpable sense of longing -- for love, for guaranteed fidelity, for relief from a plague, and, above all, for a god and a heaven that makes some spiritual and political sense.

"It's a rejection -- or at least a critique -- of a completely rational response to the world as being sufficient," Kushner says of his work. "One has to make some place in one's epistemology for the irrational and the intuitive."

But even as the text of "Angels" has remained as constant as Kushner and Nichols could put into practice, given the transition from stage to film, both time and omnipresent American culture wars have moved onward to new battles and different dominant ideologies. "Angels" now finds itself floating in a strange new world.

For most liberal-leaning theater-goers in the 1990s, "Angels" referenced a conservative era that had been banished -- seemingly for good -- by Bill Clinton's initially optimistic pluralism. Yet for the vast majority of HBO's viewers, Kushner's "Angels" will arrive for their first time even as the debate over gay marriage rages coast to coast and religious conservatives have more political power in the White House than perhaps ever before. And while AIDS still claims lives (a recent report by a United Nations agency said that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has killed 3 million people worldwide in 2003) its once-omnipresent funerals have now retreated from the American urban consciousness.

These days, a gay Episcopal bishop notwithstanding, religious political discourse seems to come almost exclusively from the right -- especially where media critiques and cultural debates are concerned. Loud voices rise in favor of the 10 Commandments in an Alabama courtroom and the Judeo-Christian God as the bedrock of American life. Echoing a majority of American citizens, President George W. Bush recently referred to the "sacred" nature of the heterosexual marriage vow in response to the recent ruling in apparent favor of gay marriage by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And legislation was recently passed in Congress to limit an abortion procedure that many religious conservatives find abhorrent.

"There might be a few pockets left of religious leftist activism," says David Savran, a cultural critic at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. "You might see the odd article in The Nation. But when it comes to faith-based religious activism in politics, the right now completely dominates."

Voices from the left seem typically to be raised only to make secular arguments-- fights around notions of individual freedom, say, or the right to democratic descent, or the importance of the separation of church and state, or of the need for legal abortion.

Yet Kushner's "Angels" was penned at a moment in the AIDS epidemic when even a liberal agnostic (especially a gay liberal agnostic) was staring so much sudden death in the face that politics no longer provided enough solace. One needed a god to believe that death was not final.

Given all the funerals of artistic people, it's surely no surprise that the sudden trend toward spiritual themes in the drama of the late 1980s and early 1990s wasn't limited to "Angels." For example, Jonathan Larson's roughly contemporaneous "Rent" revolved around a premature AIDS death that becomes transcendent in a singular mix of spirituality and Broadway aesthetics.

And one could argue that TV shows about angels still are popular -- "Touched by an Angel" had rabid fans and the new "Joan of Arcadia" also appears to be finding a committed audience. But, still, Kushner's "Angels" unmistakably is touched by a particular kind of premature death and the need for an explanation from religion.

"Really, it's the post-modern version of what it means to be a Christian or a Jew," says Deborah R. Geis, an associate professor of English at DePauw University and the editor of a major book of essays on "Angels."

The big questions

While Kushner's "Angels" has many complex themes, it returns constantly to two central questions. Can one find spiritual salvation from a cruel world without also taking on the ideological and historical baggage of a traditional religion? And, if so, what sort of spiritualism might that be?

For many theological thinkers, Kushner's loosey-goosey, morally questionable use of sexuo-politicized angels smacks of grazing at a buffet of self-serving moral relativism and an unwillingness to commit to the rules and responsibilities of life within a faith that either should be taken in its entirety, or not taken at all.

"American culture is flush with spirituality," says Michael Budde, the director of church-state studies at DePaul University, "but people seem allergic to the constraints and traditions of particular religious communities. So we end up with 50 different varieties of fast-food spiritualism. But I doubt if there's enough substance there to help people wrestle with deep theological questions."

Stuart M. Hoover, who researches the relationship of media and religion at the University of Colorado in Boulder, finds plenty of evidence for that trend.

"What's happening with contemporary religion, especially as it relates to the media," Hoover says, "is that people want to jump over the historical traditions because they see them as problematic. They'd rather look for meaningful resources that they then can authenticate for themselves."

In other words, an allegorically oriented TV show like, say, the cultish "Xena, Warrior Princess" can simultaneously satisfy both a liberal lesbian audience and a separate audience of evangelicals, because both groups can decide what they want the show to mean. The networks, Hoover argues, have now figured that "people will gather around shows about angels." And better yet, they've also figured out that they'll then form their own very different, idiosyncratic meanings -- a vague plurality that delights advertisers, who hate any and all controversy. As was proven with the recent flap over "The Reagans," pliable metaphors are better for network television than dogma, be it religious or political.

Similar themes

By that way of thinking, the religious themes of both "Angels in America" and "Joan of Arcadia" promote the same ideology -- a kind of liberal pluralism fused with some vague sense of a comforting religious force being out there, somewhere, believing pretty much what one believes oneself and, in a feat of omnipotence, also what one's neighbor believes in her own faith.

"And what's wrong with that?" says Savran. "Liberal pluralism is still a pretty powerful ideology in this country. Most educated, upper-middle-class people believe in it."

"I've always called myself an agnostic," Kushner says. "I mean that in the deepest sense that I can mean it, which is a genuine discomfort and an inability to say yes or no . . . there's doubt, curiosity, instinct and profound respect for the irrational with me."

But then again, Kushner is hardly the kind of writer you'd find on a network team. If "Angels" were to be broadcast on network television, it would be an incendiary teleplay.

In both the live and Nichols' straight-up filmed version, "Angels" may struggle profoundly with spiritual truths, but it's hardly vague in its politics. It castigates fundamentalism, anti-gay rhetoric and capitalist hypocrisy. It attacks Cohn's refusal to acknowledge his sexuality and his prosecution of Ethel Rosenberg (Streep). It rails against unfaithful lovers and government inaction in the face of AIDS.

Indeed, a strong argument could be constructed that the angel in "Angels in America" is not so much a religious icon as a political one. The 20th Century Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, after all, referred to a backward-flying angel of history. "It is a reference to the terror," says Kushner scholar Per Brask at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, "that goes with looking at the devastations of history."

Perhaps that's what Thompson is actually playing on HBO -- a Marxist metaphor and not a religious angel at all. Or maybe it's both. For religion and politics tend to blend in the Kushner opus.

What makes him tick

"There are three important things in my life that are big themes in my work," Kushner says. "I'm a Jew so I have to engage with what that means, which has to have something to do with God. There are still people in the world who call themselves Jews who have survived centuries of oppression and torture and genocide and that has a lot to do with devotion and faith. I cannot dismiss that. Then I am a gay man, so I have to think a lot about sexuality. Yearning and desire are very central to all religious questions. Sexuality and spirituality have a very profound relationship. And then I am an American in a society that's fanatically devoted to materialism. We've transformed desire in this country from desire for connection, desire for God, human desires to a fetishistic desire for things. I'm as corrupted in that sense as most Americans are." Hence, Kushner's probing for some kind of spiritual -- or maybe it's political -- relief.

Marx and utopia

"It's no coincidence that Karl Marx was a Jew," Savran says. "His notion of a utopia is not so far from the Jewish vision of the coming of the Messiah. And Mormonism envisages America as a garden of Eden where the Edenic potential has been lost."

Perhaps utopianism -- a concept with roots in both politics and religion -- is where this work finally sits. In a utopian world, after all, there would be a cure for AIDS. And as several religions declaim, it's only at the arrival of utopia (or Messianic coming) that the mysteries of God finally become clear.

Those are uncommonly weighty and spiritual themes for six hours of HBO in December.

But then again, "Angels" can be appreciated on numerous levels.

"We are where we have always been and probably always will be," Kushner says. "We have a lot of interesting questions."

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