Queering Religious Spaces in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

  Queering Religious Spaces in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, that horrific urban zeitgeist, polarized the political and religious environment of the late 20^thcentury. Concurrent with the tsunami of Reagan conservatism and the ascent of the religious right, the virus elicited responses across cultural fault lines that shaped discourse in the following years. Religious conservatives contended that the virus resulted from the wrath of God, giving rise to the colloquial moniker WOGS (Wrath of God Syndrome). In response to what much of the gay community considered a cruel reaction, victims of the AIDS epidemic gave in to a “scripture-phobia and a refusal to do anything with spiritual heritage” that resulted in spiritual malaise and an aura of hopelessness (Lipshitz 225). Amongst the LGBTQ community, spiritual belief and practice was a relic of the past; those individuals who communities of faith had so long eschewed found their only relief in acerbic humor, as exhibited through Tony Kushner’s Prior, or nihilism. Cultural and temporal distance from this all too recent health crisis can make it easy to forget just how terrifying the enigmatic infection was. Tom Crewe, in his beautifully articulated review column for the London Review of Books, reminds us with poignancy and lucidity: Aids starts with the deaths. With the dying. At first there was only confusion, incomprehension. Bodies that quickly became unintelligible to themselves…Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold. (para. 1) The utter Otherness of this affliction—one that haunted the ostracized and highlighted one’s social and sexual deviance—contributed only in part to its horror. It was also an agonizing way to die. Enter Tony Kushner. As a gay man, he knew cognitively and emotionally the horrors that his friends and his partners faced. He knew the polarization, the apathy, and the isolation. For him, “the personal is the political” (“Notes on the theater” 20). His theater takes up the mantle of Bertolt Brecht and dialectically engages with contemporary politics to induce change in the audience resulting in politically-motivated theater. Reprising Brecht yet again, he wanted the audience to know that they were watching theater—not reality. Kushner writes in the “Notes About Staging” that accompany the text of the plays, “The moments of magic…ought to be fully imagined and realized, as wonderful theatrical illusions—which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly thrilling, fantastical, amazing.” Kushner toed the line between audience cognizance of the “manufacturedness” of it all and suspension of belief thanks to some on-stage magic. The manufactured spaces obtain significance in Kushner’s theater as the play revolves around space. In Angels of America Kushner engages physical and cognitive space through the interplay of religion and sexuality to construct an ethical imperative of care for the Other. Theda Wrede, in the introduction to the Rocky Mountain Review’s special issue “Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21^stCentury,” cites Judith Butler: “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (10). Transposing Butler’s analysis from gender to other constructed identities—sexuality and religion—creates theoretical grounding for this analysis. Given that identity construction demands performance within space, the spacial dynamics of Angels of America ought to reveal performed constructs. Further, since Kushner accentuates the political aim of his theater, it seems natural to infer that identities which he performs throughout his play would possess socio-political qualities. From these performed qualities, we may derive an ethics of action, even more natural in a play with prominent religious themes. First, it is important to consider how to frame questions of space within Angels of America.Fundamental to the act of analyzing and reflecting on space is understanding that “space is never neutral but always discursively constructed, ideologically marked, and shaped by the dominant power structures and forms of knowledge” (Wrede 11). Wrede cites the Marxist critical theorist, Frederic Jameson, who contends that “our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages are dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time” (11). The opposition between space and time suits itself to theater, as time is easier to manipulate than space. The physical dimensions of the stage demand that space be carefully constructed to impart an effect; time, however, can be skipped, ignored, and even fabricated to meet the demands of the play. Foucault’s 1967 lecture, “Of Other Spaces” offered innovative means of questioning and approaching the question of space that is salient to our analysis. First, he considers the medieval hierarchy of space the most fundamental of which was the opposition between “sacred places and profane places” (“lieux sacrés et lieux profanes”; my trans.; 13). However, he transposes this opposition to the metaphysical in which he considers the “supra-celestial opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place in its turn opposing the terrestrial place” (“les lieux supra-célestes opposés au lieu céleste, et le lieux céleste à son tour s’opposait au lieu terrestre”; my trans.; 13). This schema that divides the supra-celestial, the celestial, and the terrestrial engages the liminal, metaphysical experiences of space that Kushner imposes on the text. The most revealing element of Foucault’s discourse pertains to the descralization of time as opposed to space. Foucault contends that, as opposed to time that was desacralized during the 19^thcentury, “contemporary space is perhaps not entirely desacralized” (“l’espace contemporain n’est peut-être pas encore entièrement désacralisé”; my trans.; 14). To this conversation, Foucault adds a critical term: heterotopia. The opposite of a utopia, a heterotopia is a contested space wherein societal dynamics and conflicts manifest themselves. Within modern society, Foucault concerns himself primarily with heterotopies of deviation where we find those whom society terms as deviant (15-16). These heterotopies of deviation comprise the locus of Angels in America, as deviants, or Others, act out publically within space to construct identities of alterity. Kushner’s play homes in on the concept of place. Within New York City, characters inhabit critical societal spaces: courts of law, hospitals, places of worship, cemeteries, even Central Park. Further, nearly every character within Angels of Americatakes on the form of an Other: Mormons, Jews, angels, drag queens, the homeless, and the last living Bolshevik. Within the modern American society, no one of these people belongs to the norm. Rather, the characters ascribe to contested identities—those that must be reconciled to modern America: “Kushner assembles a group of people whose only commonality is their marginal status at the fringes of national culture: Jews, Mormons, women, African Americans, homosexuals. Though these groups are generally not connected to one another, their outsider status unites them” (Hutchinson-Jones 7). By placing Others, primarily homosexuals, in these quotidian yet essential places, Kushner implies that the sexual Others contest their identities within and thereby reconcile themselves to primary institutions within America. Though they may never attain normalcy (nor necessarily desire to) the Others become as ingrained within the American landscape as anyone else. In fact, Kushner seeks not so much to acculturate the Other into structures of normalcy as much as deconstruct the structures of normalcy by queering these spaces, recognizing the social deviancy (queerness) that always lay below them. The primary means by which Kushner accomplishes this goal is his queering of religion. Kushner constructs faith within the work through a homosexual lens, embracing rather than eschewing homosexuality. Within his new construction of homosexual faith, Kushner advocates for an ethic of caring for the Other. In terms of faith, perhaps the most salient question is whether Angels of Americais a Jewish play or a Mormon one Myriad scholars have culled Kushner’s script to discern its proximity to one of these faiths. While both orientations will receive their respective analyses, it is beneficial to consider the proximity between the two faith traditions. Judaism and Mormonism are two religions predicated on a mythology of wandering. Hutchinson-Jones further highlights these parallels between the two: “Kushner himself has noted the similarities of practice and belief between the two communities, including their shared focus on a text, emphasis on actions over beliefs, experience of diaspora, and emphasis on gathering” (“Jewish/Queer” 8).God called Abraham, Judaism’s patriarch, to leave his home of Ur to travel to a new land, and the Jews have travelled ever since. The opening lines of Angels in America: Millennium Approachescomprise an aged rabbi reflecting on the movement of his people as embodied by the recently deceased Sarah Ironson: “She was…not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the Jewish family…” (10). Kushner establishes this theme of movement and transience from the beginning which helps to frame our consideration of space. That space is not permanent but rather dialectic mirrors the complex identity negotiation of Others. Mormonism also models the theme of movement. A faith defined by the great movement westward, the peripatetic spirit of the Latter-Day Saints complements the Jewish model well. Steven Kruger notes that “there are times when even the Mormon characters seem to channel a Jewish sensibility, perhaps because both religions originary movement is a conversional one that involves a movement of dis- and relocation” (“Jewish/Queer” 91). Kushner also acknowledges the Mormon parallel as Harper interacts with the Mormon mannequins at the New York Mormon Visitors center: HARPER. Was it a hard thing, crossing the prairies? MORMON MOTHER. You ain’t stupid. So don’t ask stupid. Ask something for real. HARPER(A beat, then). In your experience of the world. How do people change? MORMON MOTHER. Well, it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. (200) While this excerpt touches several prominent themes of Angels in America, Harper, a wandering spirit herself, identifies with the itinerant Mormon mother and, having established that she too struggled with the journey, entrusts the mother with a deeply personal question. Harper’s recognition of solidarity and ensuing trust reflects on the fundamental role that movement plays in the Mormon, and by extension Jewish, identity. Thus, in understanding the spacial dynamics of these faiths, the act of movement plays a critical role. Wandering comprises an essential kind of movement that Kushner traces across the piece. The wandering of several characters—Joe, Harper, Louis, and Hannah—reflects their process of encountering and reconciling their selves to changing environments. Consider Joe. Throughout Millennium Approaches, Joe disappears for long stretches of time, claiming to go on walks. However, Harper finds his habit suspect, pressuring him to explain why he left. HARPER. Where were you? JOE. Out HARPER. Where? JOE. Just out. Thinking. (36) Both characters recognize that Joe’s wandering connotes more than a desire for exercise. Rather, the physical wandering and movement signifies a search for essence; for Joe, he wanders as he reconciles his homosexual identity, a reality he later reveals: “JOE. I come here [Central Park] to watch, Mom. Sometimes. Just to watch.” (78). He soon after expounds on the significance of his walks. JOE. I’m losing ground here, I go walking, you want to know where I walk, I … go to the park, or up and down 53^rdStreet, or places where … And I keep swearing I won’t go walking again, but I just can’t…I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it’s like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I’m losing. (80-1) For Joe, walking physically expresses his sensation of wandering from his convictions—his Mormon faith and his wife—as he circles and approaches a deep reality centered in his being—his homosexuality. Ironically, however, his wandering movement reveals his fundamentally Mormon convictions. Just like his spiritual forefathers, Joe must wander the wide space around him to build a new home. Further, just as the Mormons wandered because of societal rejection, so must Joe wander after the Mormons rejected him. Harper wanders as well. While the metaphor of wandering seems a maladroit one for her, an agoraphobe, her personal wanderings transcend the earthly. Here, Foucault’s schema of the supra-celestial, celestial, and the terrestrial helps to understand Harper’s preternatural migrations. Harper experiences two distinct kinds of wandering visions: Mr. Lie’s and the angelic. Mr. Lie’s valium-induced expeditions belong to the celestial, used here to describe something other-worldly yet not necessarily divine. The angelic experience, such as Harper’s encounter with prior, clearly bears the mark of the divine—one infused with prophetic wisdom and revelation. Harper understands that her vision differs from her normal hallucinations: HARPER. I don’t understand this. If I didn’t ever see you before and I don’t think I did, then I don’t think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn’t be able to makeup anything that wasn’t there to start with, that didn’t enter it from experience, from the real world. (32) Compare, for a moment, her encounter with Prior to her trip to Antarctica à la Mr. Lies. There, she imagines a place she knew (at least cognitively) and filled it with familiar characters. Even the Eskimo Australismodeled her husband Joe. With Prior, however, she is transported to an unknown localespeaking with a man whom she had never met. And, most notably, Harper finally realizes her husband’s closet homosexuality. PRIOR. Your husband’s a homo. HARPER. Oh, ridiculous. Really? ...Well, I don’t like your revelations. I don’t think you intuit well at all. Joe’s a very normal man, he… Oh, God. Oh God. He … Do homos take, like, lots of long walks? (33-4) Not only does Kushner reinforce here Joe’s wanderings with homosexuality, he also establishes Prior as prophet and renders the dream space a sacred space. Recall Foucault’s observation that spaces have not yet been desacralized. Kushner highlights this reality by imbuing his dream spaces with the sacred. Within the sacred interactions between man and angel, Kushner reveals the ethical imperative of the play. Kushner’s construction of an ethical mandate comprises several mandates. First, he establishes Prior as a prophet or seer. In his interaction with Harper, Prior already exhibits the ability to see into the lives of others with uncanny insight. It is unnatural to recognize that a woman’s husband is gay without having ever met him. However, Prior’s circumstances prime him to carry out his prophetic role within the work. The narrative of Angels in Americastrongly parallels the narrative of Joseph Smith. Like Joseph, Prior is a social outcast. Prior embodies a liminal space that no other character in Angels in America even broaches. Of WASP heritage, Prior seems normal compared to the other characters. He also descends from a long line of Prior Walters: “LOUIS. Lots of Walters before this one. Prior is an old old family name in an old old family. The Walters go back to the Mayflower and beyond. Back to the Norman Conquests” (53). Thus, Louis does not bear the physical markers of Otherness that would create social ostracization. However, as Hutchison-Jones notes, “Prior’s WASP status also connects him to the American prophet whose experiences he will shortly recapitulate” (8). Angels begin calling out to Prior in scenes of ecstatic religious reverie. After talking to Harper, the Angel instructs Prior to “look up, prepare the way” (35) in a text that echoes Isaiah 40.3, “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” At the end of Millennium Approaches, the angel reappears, impressing upon Prior his imminent work, “Greetings, Prophet; The Great Work begins: The Messenger has arrived” (125). If, for Kushner, the narrative similarities between Prior and Joseph Smith did not manifest themselves clearly enough in the first play, he certainly underscores the parallel in his second, Perestroika. Here, the Angel appears not only emphasizing Prior’s prophetic duty, but also a book and “the Sacred Prophetic Implements” (161). The book, which Prior must dig up, is written in a foreign tongue and can only by read with peepstones, a certain parallel to the Book of Mormon, written in New Egyptian that Joseph Smith read by means of magic spectacles. Hutchison Jones wisely adds that “Prophetic tradition is clearly a part of both of the religions that Kushner is mining for his characters’ experiences, and Prior’s visionary experiences clearly derive from both Judaism and Mormonism” (12). The Jewish influence reveals itself both in Prior’s social positioning and his disease. Omer-Sherman comments that “In ancient Judaism, the prophet is not so much ‘seer’ (understood as one who merely predicts the future) but rather an often marginalized outsider who critiques society, sometimes anticipating disastrous consequences if society does not abandon its pursuit of certain practices” (“The Fate of the Other” 9). Thus, the AIDS virus helps to elevate Prior’s spiritual position. Omer-Sherman continues to observe that Kushner’s decision to paint an affliction as a positive “superhero” trait takes part in a long tradition of “masking difference with redemptive capacity” (9). Prior can save the world in part because of his AIDS. It is important to note that Kushner transposes this Jewish tendency onto a queer character, thereby queering the distinctly religious prophetic space. And, since Prior’s only trait of difference is his queerness, one can only read Kushner’s choice as equating the queer with the prophetic. To return to Kushner’s Brechtian tendency, everything about his decision here is political. He writes a queer character who transmits a prophetic oracle cast in queer imagery. Prior declares an ethical obligation to the Other—in this case, himself. In Perestroika, Prior confronts Louis for having abandoned him. First, he emphasizes his prophetic responsibility by predicting that Louis was currently sleeping with a Mormon, Joe: “PRIOR. Ask me how I knew / LOUIS. How? / PRIOR (Furious). Fuck you! I’m a prophet!” (218-9). Having established his spiritual role with characteristic flair, Prior laments Louis’ abandonment: “There are thousands of gay men in New York City with AIDS and nearly every one of them is being taken care of by…a friend or by…a lover who has stuck by them through things worse than my … So far. Everyone got that, except me. I got you. Why? What’s wrong with me?” (220). While Prior’s lament specifically applies to him loneliness, his objection reads as a broader political rejoinder—in the midst of our suffering, where has the rest of the world been? Omer-Sherman contends that Prior’s own name invokes the French, Jewish commentator Emmanuel Levinas whose principle of the “ethical anteriority of responsibility” echoes throughout Kushner’s work. Writing in the shadow of the recently passed Holocaust, Levinas argues for the “radical conception of absolute responsibility for the Other” (“The Fate of the Other” 157), a responsibility that supersedes ethics. If the synonymous denotation of anteriority and Prior did not establish the parallel between Levinas and Kushner fully enough, Omer-Sherman furthers his point, noting that, “there is a gravity in our relation to that Face [of the other] and this gravity Levinas calls responsibility or obligation, a reality in which we are always already obligated to the Other, priorto any action we might perform” (12). Prior inhabits the queered space of Jewish/Mormon prophet condemning contemporary American society’s failure to properly care for the suffering Other. Tom Crewe reminisces on the complete rejection that AIDS-infected gay men suffered during the Virus’ American zenith (or nadir): The NYU School of Medicine, the Beth Israel Medical Centre and Columbia Presbyterian all refused to perform dental work on Aids patients. Only one funeral home in New York, established at the time of the Spanish flu, was prepared to take the Aids dead. People with Aids lost their jobs, their health insurance; they were evicted from their homes. A man robbed a bank by passing a note to a cashier: ‘I have Aids, and I have less than thirty days to live.’ (para. 19) Those who stood in the societal position to aid or at least alleviate the sufferings of these gay men unequivocally refused to do so by reprising Pontius Pilate and willfully washing their hands of the whole affair. In light of this categorical disavowal of ethical obligation Tony Kushner writes his prophet—the queer prophet who ascended to celestial spaces to remind America of its ethical base. Without an obligation to the Other, those ostracized gay men were left to wander alone much like Kushner’s Joe. However, the sacralization of spiritual places by a queer seer acts to remind political America of its duty. In Reagan’s America, in which many believed the administration was acting to revive religious beliefs and traditional values Kushner speaks out to argue that prominent moral problems continued. Understanding modernity had left time and institutional practices desacralized and disenchanted, Kushner capitalizes on traditional, untouched notions of sacred, transcendent spaces to provocatively proclaim his moral, clarion call. Works Cited: Crewe, Tom. “Here was a plague.” London Review of Books, 27 Sep. 2018, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague. Foucault, Michel. « « Des espaces autres » », Empan, vol. n^o54, no. 2, 2004, pp. 12-19. CAIRN, www.cairn.info/revue-empan-2004-2-page-12.htm. Hutchinson-Jones, Cristine. “Center and Periphery: Mormons and American Culture in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.” Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage and Screen, edited by Mark T. Decker, Michael Austin. University Press of Colorado, Utah State University, 2010, pp. 5-36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgr9g.4. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York City, Theater Publication Group, 2013. ---.“Notes about Political Theater.” The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 19, No. ¾, 1997, pp. 19-34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4337551.
 Lipshitz, Yair. “The Jacob Cycle in Angels in America: Re-Performing Scripture Queerly.” Prooftexts, vol. 32, 2012, pp. 203-238. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “Jewish/Queer: Thresholds of Vulnerable Identities in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2007, pp. 78-98. ---.“The Fate of the Other in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.”MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 7, 2007, pp.7-30. Wrede, Theda. “Introduction to Special Issue ‘Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21^stCentury.’” Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 69, No. 1, 2015, pp. 10-17. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/24372860.