Battle Between the Earth and the Sky

               Navigating through the world that Tony Kushner created in Angels in America can feel like a roller coaster. You can be sitting alongside a patient with AIDS covered in lesions and blood or even feces and sperm and within the same scene you are elevated into a world that could only be compared to the Wizard of Oz. Kushner incorporates a lot of dichotomies into his play and he seems to enjoy playing with our ideas of reality and the traditional structures from which we organize our society. By incorporating almost gruesomely honest scenes of the human experience along with fantastical fictitious scenes that defy the “laws of reality”, Kushner is speaking to the very real bodily human experience and the idealized spiritual reality. While Kushner frames these other-worldly experiences as a sort of escape for the characters, the moments of magical realism are still far from perfect. Just as Kushner is illustrating the injustices of the physical world (the space that we all share) he is making a statement about the imperfections in the spiritual or fictional world (the space that we create for ourselves). Despite pointing out some of the obvious flaws of the spiritual world, this space is also one where the actors receive a sense of justice and they can have revelations for how they may obtain justice for themselves in the real world. The fictional space that Kushner creates for multiple characters adds another dynamic where the characters and audience members are given the freedom to explore hard and complicated real world issues without the restrictions and limitation of the real world.

                Harper is just one of the fabulously contradictory characters that Kushner dreamed up to include in his play. She is the sex deprived, stay at home wife of Joe Porter who strictly adheres to her Mormon upbringing and beliefs while dealing with a minor (to severe) pill addiction. In her pill induced hallucinations Harper is often whisked away to worlds of Antarctic wonderlands and queen dressing rooms. Despite being an isolated house wife in reality, her hallucinations allow her to develop a close and meaningful relationship with Prior who is a proud gay man with AIDS.

These characters meet in a fantastical dressing room with Prior covered in drag make-up before his fight with AIDS becomes too apparent. Despite not knowing him, Harper is quick to see past Prior’s secrets, she tells Prior, “This is the very threshold of revelation sometimes. You can see things….”  On the other hand, Harper and Prior have already discussed the “limitations of imagination” as Harper also explains that this “escape” is really only “the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth.”

The conversation between Prior and Harper exposes “revelations” as a process that helps the characters come to terms with reality and not one that can create a new reality. To further illustrate the point, Prior confronts Harper with the fact that her “husband is a homo” in this revelation. Harper acts immediately and confronts Joe about their relationship and his love for her. Even overdosing on pills will not allow Harper to escape reality and, ironically, instead her hallucinations often give her the strength to deal with reality.

 Prior also often finds himself in situation where reality and fiction are fighting and he is stuck in the middle. The increased severity of his fight with AIDS and the abandonment of his two year partner Louis invites lively and terrifying “dreams” to enter his reality. During his fight with bloody stool, lesions on his body, fevers, and infections Prior is visited by a strong a powerful angel with eight vaginas and a bouquet of phalli. Gender and Cultural Studies scholar, Danyelle MeiKaplan, provides an her interpretation of these apparitions as Kushner making the statement “that far from being rendered worthless and unwelcome, the AIDS-afflicted body becomes the chosen site for angelic or divine visitation, ultimately serving as the arbiter of progress, positive change and hope.” Despite his condition and his damnation in society, Prior has been selected by the angels as the Prophet who will carry their gospel.

In the end, Prior rejects his role of the Prophet as he has found more value in continued life on earth instead of spreading the angels’ message. Prior tells the angels, “I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much worse but… You see them living anyway.” He realizes his “addiction to being alive” which motivates him to stay attached to the pain of living on earth. Prior’s battle between heaven and earth ultimately brings him justice because he is able to find a purpose for living in the injustices of the world.

By queering the line between reality and fiction and/or the spiritual and the physical, Kushner is exposing the good and the bad on both ends. In our society, spiritual and fictional spaces are often idealized and made to be desirable, but Kushner is suggesting that the ideal is to obtain a balance between both worlds. Probably unintentionally, Kushner is relating to an indigenous idea that Gloria Anzaldúa presents in the book Borderlands which believes that justice can be found in balance with the earth and the sky. In the Mexican flag an eagle conquering a snake is represented; Gloria asserts that the snake is symbolic of the earth/female energy while the eagle means the sky/ male energy. The imbalance of power between these two forces is believed to have led to the conquest of the Patriarchal society of the Aztecs and all subsequent injustices. Kushner demonstrates that even Mormons, Jews, Republicans, Liberals, gays, and addicts in America must also come to a balance between the spiritual and the physical to obtain justice for themselves.