Soaring into "Angels in America"
To preface this, I’d like give a little background to an amazing piece of work that TJ Gainley’s Advanced Acting class recently brought to my attention, Angels in America: A gay fantasia by Tony Kushner. The fictional play caters to the history of the AIDS epidemic that effected members of what would later be called the LGBTQ+ community and drug abusers during the 1980s. It follows five deeply humanist characters who become entangled in each other’s lives in the most heartbreaking of ways; through disease and secrecy. This play is a beautifully tragic coming out story to some, a political satire to others, but to me it was simply eye opening. As a kid from inner city Cleveland I never really had much access to information about the LGBTQ+ community, and when you grow up rough you become rough and therefore less sensitive to information about other cultures and lifestyles. What I mean by that is for a large portion of my life I was extremely homophobic, and while that changed over the course of a few years, I wasn’t very educated on the subject. Angels in America is so unapologetic and informative in its telling of what it meant to be oneself in a time where authenticity could have you killed in so many different ways. I’d also like to point out that I’m the only black kid in my acting class, and that always affects what I take note of when we read certain things. Culturally and fundamentally, my sense of humor is different than that of my classmates, as is my appetite or taste in tragic art, and I say this to say that it would have been all too easy for me to dismiss this oral history through fiction as some sort of faraway concept, or simply just a sad play that didn’t apply to me at all, but I couldn’t because it did apply to me. I interpreted Angels in America as a call to action of sorts, to the Reagan administration who refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis for the majority of his service as president, to unsupportive parents who teach their children to erase the pieces of themselves that makes them who they are, and most importantly it’s a call to action to anyone who isn’t an ally. Angels in America does an amazing job at making the disease personal through excruciating detail and really cements the idea that AIDS far surpasses the threshold of which any one person should ever have to go through. Personally, my body has never betrayed me in this way, and my mother is a major support in everything I do, and I’ve never been socially repressed based on the contents of my sex life, so by the end of this reading I had some thoughts about my fortune as a heterosexual male in America. Those thoughts began and ended with “wow”. Amazement at the hate it takes to willfully ignore an entire people under stress for a decade, and amazement at how in some crazy ironic way it made for an amazing story. This play challenged me to check myself for not only bias, but also support, and with full knowledge of the fact that I am now capable of both, I now have one more reason to choose the latter.
Want to read Angels in America Yourself? Find it online or at your local library or email 19tatjul@hawken.edu for a free pdf.
Andrew Garfield in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia