"The Angels of Fructification": Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and images of homosexuality on the American stage.

Fisher, James

Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?(1)

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Still obscured by glistening exhaltations, the angels of fructification had now begun to meet the tumescent phallus of the sun. Vastly the wheels of the earth sang Allelulia! And the seven foaming oceans bellowed Oh!(2)

--Tennessee Williams

For centuries, angels have been symbols of spiritual significance. Residing in a realm somewhere between the deity and his creations, they watch over humanity as unspeakably beautiful harbingers of hope and of death. Such rich and profoundly unsettling icons are central to Tennessee Williams's poem "The Angels of Fructification," in which his angels provide a vision of homosexual eroticism comparatively rare in his dramas. Williams was the theatre's angel of sexuality--the dramatist most responsible for forcefully introducing sexual issues, both gay and straight, to the American stage. The fruit of his labor is particularly evident in the subsequent generations of playwrights who present gay characters and situations with increasing frankness, depth, and lyricism. Such works bloom most particularly after the 1960s, and most richly in Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America, which has been described by critics as one of the most important American plays of the past fifty years.(3)

There are significant parallels to be found in Kushner's two Angels in America plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, and the dramas of Williams. Both playwrights feature classically inspired epic passions; both depict dark and poetic images of the wondrous and horrifying aspects of existence; both create a kind of stage language that is at once naturalistic and lyrical; both ponder the distance between illusion and reality; both explore the nature of spirituality from a grounding in modern thought; and both deal centrally and compassionately with complex issues of sexuality from a gay sensibility. Although Alfred Kazin has written of homosexuality that "`The love that dare not speak its name' (in the nineteenth century) cannot, in the twentieth, shut up,"(4) the emergence of Williams, and those dramatists like Kushner following in his footsteps, says much on a subject about which the stage has been silent for too long.

In reflecting on the history of homosexuals in American theatre, Kushner believes that "there's a natural proclivity for gay people--who historically have often spent their lives hiding--to feel an affinity for the extended make-believe and donning of roles that is part of theater. It's reverberant with some of the central facts of our lives."(5) It is not surprising that, in a society in which homosexuals were firmly closeted before the 1960s, the illusions of the stage provided a safe haven. Williams could not be as open about his sexuality in his era as Kushner can be now, and thus had to work with overtly heterosexual situations and characters. Williams's creative achievements grow out of a guarded self-awareness and desire for self-preservation, as well as the constraints of the prevailing values of his day.

Donald Windham believes that Williams "loved being homosexual. I think he loved it more than he loved anybody, more than he loved anything except writing,"(6) and Edward A. Sklepowich seems to agree when he writes that "Williams treats homosexuality with a reverence that at times approaches chauvinism."(7) In fact, Williams was often ambivalent about homosexuality--either his own or anyone else's--in his writings. Although his sexuality was well known in the theatrical community, it is unclear when Williams first "came out" publicly. His 1970 appearance on David Frost's television program seems the earliest public declaration. When Frost asked him to comment on his sexuality, Williams replied, "I don't want to be involved in some sort of a scandal, but I've covered the waterfront."(8) He also told Frost that "everybody has some elements of homosexuality in him, even the most heterosexual of us" (p. 40), but a few years later he wrote, "I have never found the subject of homosexuality a satisfactory theme for a full-length play, despite the fact that it appears as frequently as it does in my short fiction. Yet never even in my short fiction does the sexual activity of a person provide the story with its true inner substance."(9) A couple of years later, in an interview in the Village Voice, Williams made the point with bluntness: "I've nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn't the theme of my plays. They're about all human relationships. I've never faked it,"(10) and in 1975 he stated, "Sexuality is part of my work, of course, because sexuality is a part of my life and everyone's life. I see no essential difference between the love of two men for each other and the love of a man for a woman; no essential difference, and that's why I've examined both ...."(11) In his novel, Moise and the World of Reason (1975), Williams is franker in his depiction of homosexuality than in any of his plays. However, more important than issues of homosexuality, the characters in the novel feel the absence of love and a need for connection--constant themes in all of Williams's work. There is no question that, as a rule, Williams was writing about love and not gender. He criticized sexual promiscuity as "a distortion of the love impulse,"(12) and for him, this impulse, in whatever form, was sacred.

In retrospect, Williams's cautious exploration of homosexuality--or at least his unwillingness to be more overt about it in his plays--pales by comparison with the defiant openness of Kushner's work. Williams balked at writing what he called gay plays, but Kushner says, "I feel very proud that Angels is identified as a gay play. I want it to be thought of as being part of gay culture, and I certainly want people to think of me as a gay writer. It does also seem to speak very powerfully to straight people."(13) To understand, in part, why Williams obscured homosexuality in his plays, Gore Vidal explains that Williams "had the most vicious press of almost any American writer I can think of. Fag-baiting was at its peak in the fifties when he was at his peak and it has never given up, actually."(14) Donald Spoto believes that Williams's ambivalence had to do, in part, with the fact that he wanted "to be controversial--the hard-drinking, openly homosexual writer with nothing to hide--and at the same time, a man of his own time, a Southern gentleman from a politer era who would never abandon propriety and privacy."(15) This view might indicate why Williams seemed uncomfortable with public displays of drag or campiness, which, he writes, are

imposed upon homosexuals by our society. The obnoxious forms of it will

rapidly disappear as Gay Lib begins to succeed in its serious crusade to

assert, for its genuinely misunderstood and persecuted minority, a free

position in society which will permit them to respect themselves, at least

to the extent that, individually, they deserve respect--and I think that

degree is likely to be much higher than commonly supposed. (16)

And it was in the arena of the arts, Williams believed, that the gay sensibility was most likely to first engender such respect. In his Memoirs he states, "There is no doubt in my mind that there is more sensibility--which is equivalent to more talent--among the `gays' of both sexes than among the `norms'..." (p. 63). At the same time, Williams wished to attract a broader audience than gays for his work and seems to have believed that a so-called gay play would limit his access to universal acceptance.

Williams's concern about acceptance was not without some justice. He did not have to look too far back into the preceding decades of American drama to see that the audience was, at best, uncertain about its willingness to accept homosexual characters and issues. The first American play to deal openly with homosexuality is believed to be Mae West's The Drag, which generated so much controversy that it closed before completing a tumultuous pre-Broadway tour in 1927. A few other curiosities appeared in the subsequent decades, most notably Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), in which the question of a lesbian relationship is at the center. Of course, secondary homosexual characters appear in a few plays of the 1930s and 1940s, but they are rarely identified as such. Simon Stimson, the alcoholic choir master of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), is a vivid example of such types, typical in that he is comparatively unimportant to the plot and that he is seen mostly as a tragi-comic victim. With the appearance of Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953), in which a sensitive young man is viewed by his peers as a homosexual (even though it later becomes clear that he is not), gay issues and characters slowly come out of the shadows.

During the 1950s, other playwrights introduced gay characters and issues, but often not in their most visible work. William Inge, inspired to become a playwright by Williams's example, did not feature openly homosexual characters in any of his major plays, but in a few lesser-known one-acts he does so vividly. Inge's The Tiny Closet (1959), for example, features a man boarding in a rooming house where the nosy landlady has been attempting to break into a padlocked closet in his room. As soon as the man goes out, the landlady and her friend manage to break in and discover an array of elegant women's hats. The landlady's violation--and the presumption that she will cause him public disgrace--leaves the man's ultimate fate in question. Inge's blunt attack on intolerance(17) was written in the aftermath of the McCarthy era and was a forerunner of later gay plays, particularly those written after the late 1960s, which argue for greater acceptance for homosexuals.

Mid-twentieth century dramatists employed various techniques to present gay characters and situations. One device often used is "transference," the act of hiding gay viewpoints and situations behind a mask of heterosexuality. Edward Albee, often accused of using transference in the writing of such plays as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), is a gay dramatist who also emerged in the 1950s. With the homosexual triumvirate of Williams, Inge, and Albee dominating the non-musical Broadway stage--and despite the fact that none of them had publicly acknowledged their own sexuality--New York Times drama critic Stanley Kauffmann "outed" them in 1966. Although he does not give their names, it is clear to whom he is referring in his article "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises." Kauffmann implies that homosexual writers have no right to write about anything but gay characters--an attitude which would logically imply that men are unable to write about women and vice versa. Kauffmann's notion, undoubtedly all too prevalent in the mid 1960s, becomes clearer when he writes:

Conventions and puritanisms in the Western world have forced [homosexuals]

to wear masks for generations, to hate themselves, and thus to hate those

who make them hate themselves. Now that they have a certain relative freedom,

they vent their feelings in camouflaged form .... They emphasize manner and

style because these elements of art, at which they are often adept, are

legal tender in their transactions with the world. These elements are, or

can be, esthetically divorced from such other considerations as character

and idea.(18)

Albee firmly refutes the idea that he, or Williams, employs transference in his plays: "Tennessee never did that, and I can't think of any self-respecting worthwhile writer who would do that sort of thing. It's beneath contempt to suggest it, and it's beneath contempt to do it.(19) Gore Vidal's explanation of the centrality of women characters in Williams's plays seems a valid alternative to understanding his work and the reasons critics see transference in his plays. Vidal believes that for Williams, a woman was "always more interesting as she was apt to be the victim of a society."(20) Williams understood, as Strindberg did, that there are many aspects of the female in the male and vice-versa. And, also like Strindberg, Williams's pained, driven, poetic, and passionate characters are unquestionably extensions of his own persona regardless of their gender.

For surviving life's vicissitudes, Williams believed that "romanticism is absolutely essential" (Frost, p. 35) and felt that the "ability to feel tenderness toward another human being, "the ability to love" (Frost, p. 35) was paramount and that people must not let themselves "become brutalized by the brutalizing experiences that we do encounter on the Camino Real" (Frost, p. 35). Romanticism, however, must co-exist with self-awareness and a clear sense of the difference between illusion and reality. The characters who suffer most in Williams's plays do so less because of any deviance from accepted norms than because they are, somehow, self-deluded. There is no doubt that constraints on sexuality in the American society of his time meant that Williams's sexually driven characters were often outlaws who could only be fulfilled through some kind of transgression. His characters were often shocking to audiences and even more so in the world they inhabited. Aggressive in their pursuit of fulfillment, they can destroy and be destroyed as Williams undoubtedly hoped to destroy constraints and mores that prevented the survival of a romantic view and the ability to love. Reflecting on Williams's plays, Edward Albee suggests that the drama itself is "an act of aggression. It's an act of aggression against the status quo, against people's smugness. At his best, Tennessee was not content with leaving people when they left a play of his the way they were when they came in to see a play of his."(21)

Williams's first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie (1944), is rare among his works in that the sexuality of his characters is not a significant factor. However, beginning with his next produced play, Summer and Smoke (1947), the sexual personas of his characters become central and visible--and would remain so for the rest of his career. In Summer and Smoke, Alma Winemiller fears and rejects sexuality, which she equates with bestiality, and she places a high value on spiritual love. However, she is physically drawn to young Dr. John Buchanan, her neighbor, whose view of sexuality is purely biological. "I reject your opinion of where love is," she tells John, "and the kind of truth you believe the brain to be seeking!--There is something not shown on the chart."(22) However, what is missing from John's biological chart frustrates Alma--a creature of desire. John is similarly trapped behind his awe of Alma's purity. He admits to her that "The night at the casino--I wouldn't have made love to you.... I'm more afraid of your soul than you're afraid of my body. You'd have been as safe as the angel of the fountain--because I wouldn't feel decent enough to touch you ..." (p, 222). For much of the play Alma hides behind her propriety and the safety of her weak suitor, Roger Doremus, an unacknowledged gay may who, she instinctively understands, poses no sexual threat to her. Ultimately, Alma's despair leads her to abandon her resistance to sexuality. In the final scene of the play she is discovered near the same angel of the fountain John mentioned, picking up a traveling salesman who refers to her as "angel." Williams acknowledged that Alma's startling liberation mirrored his own move "from puritanical shackles to, well, complete profligacy."(23) Profligacy, as he describes it, represents "`Liberation from taboos", (Gaines, p. 27). To Williams, sex is ultimately a welcome and potentially joyful release, and as a playwright he endeavored not to "make any kind of sex dirty except sadism" (Gaines, p. 27).

Roger Doremus is one of several shadowy gay characters Williams includes in his early plays; in fact, in the next play the gay character would not even appear on the stage. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) was a seismic event in contemporary theatrical sexuality. Blanche DuBois, raised in a genteel family of the Old South, faces so many burdens of physical and emotional death that she begins to believe that the opposite of death is sexual desire, which she seeks promiscuously. The most harrowing death in Blanche's past is the suicide many years before of her young husband, Allan Grey. Allan's repressed homosexuality can only be read as weakness by the immature and frustrated Blanche. As she recounts it to Mitch,

There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and

tenderness which wasn't like a man's, although he wasn't the least bit

effeminate looking--still--that thing was there .... He came to me for help.

I didn't know that. I didn't find out anything until after our marriage when

we'd run away and come back and all I knew was I'd failed him in some

mysterious way and wasn't able to give the help he needed but couldn't

speak of. He was in the quicksands and clutching at me--but I wasn't

holding him out, I was slipping in with him! I didn't know that. I didn't

know anything except I loved him unendurably but without being able to help

him or myself. Then 1 found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By

coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty--which wasn't empty,

but had two people in it ... the boy I had married and an older man who had

been his friend for years ...(24)

Later in her story, Blanche recounts the events of the same evening at the Moon Lake Casino, after Allan has killed himself: "It was because--on the dance-floor--unable to stop myself--I'd suddenly said--`I saw! I know! You disgust me ...' And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this--kitchen--candle ..." (p. 115). The deep root of Blanche's sexual dysfunction can be found in Allan's homosexuality and her inability to understand or accept it. Despite her desperate dalliances with countless other men, she is tragically unable to reignite the light of love snuffed out by her treatment of Allan.

The issue of transference consistently emerges in critical discussions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Blanche's character. Among others, Robert Emmet Jones describes the play, remaking Blanche as a homosexual male; he finally concludes, however, that it is not the femininity of Blanche hut the masculinity of Stanley Kowalski that ultimately provides Streetcar with a "very homoerotic element ... in a convincing heterosexual situation."(25) Before Williams, the male body was not depicted in American drama as erotically appealing, but Stanley, particularly as embodied by the young Marlon Brando, is a sexual catalyst for both sexes. Stanley, a character defined by his appetites, ultimately uses his sexual power as a weapon against Blanche, but learns, as Blanche has, that sex for its own sake is inevitably destructive--only when it is mixed with love and compassion can it redeem.

In terms of Williams's homosexual characters, his next important play was Camino Real (1953), a drama that failed to attract an audience in its original production, more because of its startling theatrical innovations than because of its subject matter. Camino Real, a play of fanciful metaphysics pleading for a romantic attitude about life, depicts the crosscurrents of history as described by a particularly literary sensibility. Williams intermingles such characters as Don Quixote, Kilroy, Camille, Casanova, and Lord Byron in a fantastic world drawn from elements of Spanish folklore and traditional Christianity. Although it is relatively unimportant in the action of the play, the character of Baron de Charlus, borrowed from Proust, is an avowed homosexual and pointedly effeminate--a trait Williams himself disliked. When these types appear in his plays they are often objects of ridicule, Williams showing strangely less compassion for effeminate men than for the more masculine homosexuals he often depicted. Such masculine characters of ambiguous sexuality appear more frequently in Williams's plays of the mid-to-late 1950s. In Orpheus Descending (1957) Williams makes use of the myth of Orpheus, who descends into the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from the King of the Dead. Williams introduces Val Xavier as his Orpheus, a sensual and poetic hero inarticulately yearning for some vaguely understood form of transcendence, either through art or sex. A rather less poetic version of this type can be found in Chance Wayne, the young male hustler of Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), but it is with Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic ax-athlete of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), that Williams takes another important step in his depiction of homosexuality.

Brick shares Williams's repugnance at what he calls "fairies," mocking the deceased former owners of the family estate, who were two gay men. Brick's past triumphs in sports are taken by all as a sign of masculinity, but his family, particularly his sexually frustrated wife, Maggie, are distressed by his reckless and relentless drinking. He does not drink, however, because his athletic career is over, as all but Maggie think, but because he fears that his confused feelings for his deceased best friend, Skipper, who he now knows was a homosexual, haunt him. In response to the question, Williams explained that Brick "went no further in physical expression-than clasping Skipper's hand across the space between their twin beds in hotel rooms--and yet his sexual nature was not innately `normal'."(26) Brick is also disgusted by the "mendacity" he sees around him and finally recognizes in himself. Here character and author meet, for certainly Williams understood as a gay man in 1950s America that mendacity, as Brick explains, is "a system that we live in."(27) Hellbent on destroying himself, Brick drinks to oblivion but learns in the final scenes that the act of love is more important than anything--including the gender of those involved. Maggie becomes an angel of salvation for Brick and, as the play concludes, she succeeds in drawing him back to her bed through her compassionate wish to create an heir--a son of Brick's--to whom a dying Big Daddy can leave his vast fortune and estate.

There are no such saving angels to be found in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), in which Williams sketches a vision of a predatory universe. Following the violent and mysterious death of her son, Sebastian, the imperious Violet Venable tries to convince young Dr. Cukrowicz to perform a lobotomy on her disturbed niece, Catherine, who has witnessed Sebastian's death. Mrs. Venable does not want Catherine's version of Sebastian's death to prevail. However, Cukrowicz encourages Catherine, who painfully recounts the final hours of the voraciously homosexual Sebastian, who died at the hands of a mob of predatory youths he had used sexually. In a sense, Sebastian, who is apparently incapable of real love, is devoured by his own promiscuous appetites in a frightening cosmos where only the most efficient predators survive.

The last stage of Williams's depiction of homosexuality is the most significant in his dramatic canon. At the time of the play's initial New York run, Walter Kerr described Small Craft Warnings (1972), which is set in a down-and-out bar, as a play of "Talkers, drinkers, losers getting ready for one or another kind of death."(28) Frequently considered by critics to be a lesser play in the Williams canon, it is, in fact, the most important work in understanding Williams's dramatic depiction of homosexuality. Critics have generally claimed that Williams offers a dark and embittered view of homosexuality through the character of Quentin, a middle-aged gay screenwriter. The play, which is written in a series of connected confessional arias for the major characters, permits Quentin, in a speech Williams himself considered the best in the play, to reflect on his way of life:

There's a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most

homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the

pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the

jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they're addicted but which is more

and more empty of real interest and surprise.(29)

Quentin also expresses his amazement at Bobby, the young hustler from Iowa he has recently picked up. Williams describes Bobby as having "a quality of sexlessness, not effeminacy" (p. 240), and Quentin is moved by his discovery that Bobby has "the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth" (p. 261), and painfully notes that he himself has "lost the ability to say: `My God!' instead of just: `Oh, well"' (p. 261). Bobby presents an image of youthful wonder and a joy in his sexuality that balances Williams's portrayal of Quentin's dulled sensibilities. Another angle is supplied by Leona, the self-described "faggot's moll," a drunk and habitue of the bar, who recalls the experiences of her deceased brother to Quentin:

I know the gay scene and I know the language of it and I know. how full it

is of sickness and sadness; it's so full of sadness and sickness, I could

almost be glad that my little brother died before he had time to be infected

with all that sadness and sickness in the heart of a gay boy. This kid from

Iowa, here, reminds me a little of how my brother was, and you, you remind

me of how he might have become if he'd lived. (p. 254)

At the time Small Craft Warnings was first produced, critics were eager to believe that Williams was condemning homosexuality--or regretting his own--in this play, and that Quentin's bitterness and disillusionment were some sort of final statement on the subject by Williams. In fact, Williams shows several faces of homosexuality in the play and Quentin's and Leona's views, if indeed they are speaking for Williams, may well have more to do with the author's personal unhappinesses and addictions than with a desire to make a universal statement on homosexuality. Williams, who played the role of Doc in the off-Broadway production of Small Craft Warnings for part of its run, believed that Quentin was close to his own persona because he, too, had

quite lost the capacity for astonishment .... I'm not a typical homosexual.

I can identify completely with Blanche--we are both hysterics--with Alma and

even with Stanley .... If you understand schizophrenia, I am not really a

dual creature; but I can understand the tenderness of women and the lust and

libido of the male, which are, unfortunately, too seldom combined in

women.(30)

Williams's interest in androgyny and bisexuality also becomes clear in his depiction of Bobby's exuberant love life in Small Craft Warnings. Bobby has lost none of the aforementioned capacity for astonishment, and at one point in the play he describes an experience that literally caught him between the sexes:

On the plains of Nebraska I passed a night with a group of runaway kids my

age and it got cold after sunset. A lovely wild young girl invited me under

a blanket with just a smile, and then a boy, me between, and both of them

kept saying "love," one of 'em in one ear and one in the other, till I

didn't know which was which "love. in which ear or which ... touch ....

The plain was high and the night air ... exhilarating and the touches not

heavy. (p. 264) In his letters and his Memoirs, which were written at about the same time he was working on Small Craft Warnings, Williams writes with similar eroticism about his own sexual history. Perhaps his ultimate public stance is best expressed by Monk, the owner of the bar in Small Craft Warnings, who opines of gays, "I've got no moral objections to them as a part of humanity, but I don't encourage them in here" (p. 264).

The theatre in general was catching up with Williams's depictions of homosexuality in this same era. With the appearance of Matt Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1968), gay theatre, and the inclusion of homosexual characters and issues in mainstream American drama, increased significantly. Between 1960 and the 1980s, however, gay characters were often reduced to peripheral status in the plays--or were seen most vividly in musicals like La Cage aux Folles (1983), boulevard comedies like Torch Song Trilogy (1981), or in broad stereotypes in straight plays. There were exceptions, including Albee's Everything in the Garden (1967), LeRoi Jones's The Toilet (1964), and the inspired grotesquerie of Charles Ludlam's Theatre of the Ridiculous, but at the outset of the AIDS epidemic an important change occurred in the depiction of gays. Homosexual plays became either scathing indictments of American society's failure to respond adequately to the AIDS crisis, as in the plays of Larry Kramer, or dark depictions of the oppression of gays, as in Martin Sherman's Bent (1978), which dramatizes the brutal oppression of homosexuals during the Holocaust. However, no gay dramatist seems logically to follow Williams, who, as Delma Eugene Presley writes, "made serious efforts to explore the subjects of reconciliation and redemption"(31) in their work. Before Williams, only Eugene O'Neill faced such questions; after Williams, only Tony Kushner.

Despite many similarities between Williams and Kushner, there is at least one obvious difference: Kushner is a dramatist with a strongly political perspective. Williams is rarely thought of as political and believed that it was "only in the case of Brecht that a man's politics, if the man is an artist, are of particular importance in his work" (Memoirs, p. 178). In recalling his political awakening, Williams wrote in his Memoirs that he came of voting age while working at Continental Shoemakers and "cast my first and last political vote. It was for Norman Thomas: I had already turned Socialist" (p. 46). Late in life, his political interests became inflamed by "the atrocity of the American involvement in Vietnam, about Nixon's total lack of honesty and of a moral sense, and of the devotion I had to the cause of Senator McGovern" (Memoirs, p. 120), and he continued to long for the emergence of "an enlightened form of socialism" (Memoirs, p. 118). Otherwise, Williams's drama is certainly not overtly political, but Kushner, who also calls for reconsideration of socialism in light of the collapse of the Soviet model, argues that "All theater is political. If you don't declare your politics, your politics are probably right-wing" (Blanchard, p. 42). The AIDS epidemic had, in essence, pushed gay dramatists toward a more politicized view--even more than had been inspired by the Stonewall era. A politicized gay theatre, for Kushner, is a positive direction, and he believes that "America watching the spectacle of itself being able to accept homosexuality is good for America" (Blanchard, p. 42).

Kushner's political awakening began when he was in college. He was inspired, in part, by the writers and artists emerging from the Stonewall generation, by ACT UP and Queer Nation, whose chant, "We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous," pervades Kushner's plays. He acknowledges some debt to dramatists like Larry Kramer and Harvey Fierstein, but more directly significant to his development as a dramatist is his deep admiration for Williams: "I've always loved Williams. The first time I read Streetcar, I was annihilated. I read as much Williams as I could get my hands on until the late plays started getting embarrassingly bad.... I'm really influenced by Williams."(32) Kushner also admires the plays of John Guare, who "Like Williams, has figured out a way for Americans to do a kind of stage poetry. He's discovered a lyrical voice that doesn't sound horrendously twee and forced and phony" (Savran interview, p. 24). Kushner aims for a similar sort of lyricism in Angels in America, weaving a tapestry of the crushing human and spiritual issues of the Reagan era--and beyond--with poignance (in the Williams sense) and epic stature (in both the O'Neillian and Brechtian senses).John Lahr writes of Kushner, "Not since Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage. Kushner is the heir apparent to Williams's romantic theatrical heritage: he, too, has tricks in his pocket and things up his sleeve, and he gives the audience `truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.' And, also like Williams, Kushner has forged an original, impressionistic theatrical vocabulary to show us the heart of a new age."(33)

At the very least, if Williams's plays dramatized homosexuality from the 1940s through the early 1970s, Kushner's plays clearly provide the next chapter. In technique, particularly in his lyricism, scope, humor, and compassion for his characters, Kushner is clearly in Williams's debt. There are also distinct differences. For example, all of the major male characters in Angels are gay--some are "out" and others are "closeted"-- but all must deal with their sexuality centrally in the action Kushner provides. Whereas Williams's gay characters are forced by their times to the periphery of mainstream society, Kushner's characters have broken through to the center--but not without great cost. In Small Craft Warnings, Williams provides Quentin and Bobby equal time to reveal their differing perspectives, and Kushner similarly allows each of his characters ample opportunity to share their private journeys of self-discovery within the complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies he sees in modern American life.

Drama critics like John Simon, often accused of homophobia, disliked the plays, particularly finding them to plead "not just for homosexuality but also and especially for transgression, a life-style of flouted complaisance and flaunted socially unacceptable excess,"(34) but the plays have been highly acclaimed by any standards. One of the great ironies of the success of Angels in America is the enormous mainstream audience that has embraced the play, despite the fact that its politics, moral universe, and sexuality are, at least as measured by whom we elect to public office, the opposite of what American society claims to believe in. It is perhaps in this irony that some of the questions that both Williams and Kushner explore meet. As Kushner wonders, "What is the relationship between sexuality and power? Is sexuality merely an expression of power? Is there even such a thing as `sexuality'?" (Savran interview, p. 100).

There is a sense of Greek fatality in Angels in America that can be felt in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Suddenly Last Summer, but also an Ibsenite element--the idea that humanity is on the wrong road and that the souls of the past and future will demand retribution. Like Ibsen--and certainly Williams--Kushner believes that personal tragedy, both real and fictional, teaches and profoundly changes people. The Angels in America plays are feverish historical dramas about our immediate and current history, but it is the questions Kushner asks that are of greatest significance. What claim can we make to humanity in a nation racially, politically, morally, and sexually divided? Has America chosen an uncompassionate path as part of an inevitable movement toward spiritual decline and death or can this course be changed and renewal be achieved? For Williams, tragically inspired plays "offer us a view of certain moral values in violent juxtaposition" (Where I Live, p. 53), and Kushner provides such conflicts in Angels in America. Despite the political predilections of its author, Angels in America attempts to allow both sides to have their say. Its most lovable character is dying of AIDS, but so is its most detestable; both conservative and liberal characters have admirable moments and reprehensible ones; the strong become weak and the weak become strong. Kushner seems to believe what Williams once said of human experience: "I don't believe in villains or heroes--only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents" (Where I Live, pp. 91-92).

It is in this vein that Kushner's "gay fantasia" begins. The first play, Millennium Approaches, opens on a somber scene as an elderly rabbi stands over the coffin of Sarah Ironson, a woman whose difficult life embodies the immigrant experience of her generation. The rabbi ominously warns that "Pretty soon . . . all the old will be dead."(35) And with them will go the values and certitudes that shaped their lives and our times. Kushner then focuses his gaze on a married couple, Joe and Harper Pitt, and a gay Couple, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, the grandson of the deceased woman. These two relationships are both at points of primal crisis when they intersect with the life of a McCarthy-era hatchet man and shark lawyer Roy Cohn. Joe is a Mormon lawyer whose conservative politics lead him to Cohn, who would like to place Joe in the Justice Department as his man in Washington. Joe, however, is caught up in a personal struggle with his long repressed homosexuality. He has lived according to the rules by which he was raised--to be a family man, to be devoutly religious, and to be a conservative Republican. However, he is also miserable. In an agonized plea to Harper, who demands that Joe tell her whether or not he is in fact a homosexual,Joe says what Williams's Brick Pollitt might have said with a greater sense of self-awareness: "Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it" (p. 40). Joe's life-long conflict with himself is most potently illuminated in a later speech to Harper that is reminiscent of Reverend Shannon's struggle with his vision of a predatory god in Night of the Iguana (1959):

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look

at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really

remember the story, or why the wrestling--just the picture. Jacob is young

and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man, with golden hair and

wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm . . . It's me. In

that struggle. Fierce and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing

back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not

just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from

God's. But you can't not lose. (pp. 49-50)

Later, Joe encounters Louis, who is in a desperate flight of fear from his long-time lover, Prior, who is suffering from the initial stages of AIDS. Racked with guilt at his faithlessness, the liberal Louis reflects on the era, which he sees as a metaphor for his own behavior. He describes himself, and Joe, as "Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan's children" (p. 74). Louis has a brutal, punishing sexual encounter with a stranger in Central Park in a situation that mirrors Quentin's description of the "coarse" experience of homosexuals in Small Craft Warnings. The stranger asks, "You been a bad boy?" Louis can only sardonically reply, "Very bad. Very bad" (p. 55).

Meanwhile, Joe's wife, Harper, seriously addicted to Valium, and Prior, often delirious as he becomes sicker with AIDS, meet in each other's hallucinations. These scenes have a mystical quality but are also filled with the sort of campiness Williams preferred to avoid. Some critics of Angels similarly found the campiness unfortunately stereotypical, but Kushner believes that there is something empowering for gays in drag and a camp sensibility. Kushner's use of various forms of humor with all of his characters, but most particularly with Prior, is remarkably similar to the ways in which Williams typically broke the unspeakable tension of his most unsettling scenes to expose the absurd and grotesque sides of a character's circumstances. As Williams told Dick Cavett in a television interview: "Much of my pleasure in life comes from the fun, you know, the funny side of people. And if you omit that from them then they don't seem quite real. I don't find people lovable unless they're somewhat funny."(36)

Kushner uses a quite different brand of humor with the character of Roy Cohn. Cohn's gleefully bitter corruption is both comic and frightening. One of the most remarkable aspects of Angels--and something that is typical of Williams as well--is the way in which Kushner achieves sympathetic moments for even his most monstrous and transgressing characters. Roy is a rapacious predator, who is first discovered in his command module juggling phone calls and wishing he had eight arms like an octopus. It is Roy's self-loathing that is most unsettling and is most vividly shown in his scathing denial of his homosexuality: "Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout" (p. 45).

Roy represents a kind of trickle-down morality in Angels--Kushner's notion that if there's corruption, greed, and bad faith at the top, it will ultimately seep down to each individual in the society. As Robert Brustein writes, there are "no angels in America, only angles,"(37) and Angels depicts a moral combat represented at various points by the opposing poles of conservative and liberal, gay and straight, transgressor and victim. Also, as in many of Williams's best plays, Angels deftly captures a convergence of past, present, and future. The past, as previously indicated, is symbolized by the death of an elderly Jewish woman; the present by the greed of the Reagan era, by Cohn, and by a general loss of faith and loyalty, as demonstrated in the behavior of Joe and Louis. The future is represented by a choice between destruction and change best exemplified at the end of Millennium Approaches by the startling appearance of an angel, who may be bringing news of either salvation or apocalypse.

As a dramatist with a decidedly political bent, Kushner is perhaps closer to a George Bernard Shaw or a Bertolt Brecht than to Williams. However, both Kushner and Williams offer a view of a changing socio-political environment, with their characters caught between two worlds: one that is dying and one that is being born. Although Kushner himself is certainly of the left-wing of the political spectrum, it is in Prior's human and personal politics, more than Roy's or Louis's polemics, that Kushner's sympathies lie. Prior grapples with the politics of existence with a profoundly humane and compassionate viewpoint. Fearful of his future, Prior recounts a story of one of his ancestors who was forced to escape in a lifeboat with seventy other passengers when a ship foundered. Whenever the lifeboat sat too low in the water or seemed about to capsize, crew members aboard would hurl the nearest passenger into the sea. Dying of AIDS, Prior says

I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while

implacable, unsmilling.men, irresistably strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to

you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake

of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and

darkness to drown. (pp. 4142)

At the end of Millennium Approaches, an angel appears to a delirious Prior, who is frightened but with moving courage resists his fears: "I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong and . . . " (p. 117). At this point, Prior is overwhelmed by an intense sexual response as the angel crashes through the ceiling of his room. The angel, calling Prior a prophet, announces that "The Great Work begins" (p. 119).

In the second play, Perestroika, the characters continue their individual journeys in a darker and even more intellectually complex drama. Where Millennium Approaches depicts faithlessness and selfishness with compassion while offering a glimpse of the retreating conscience of American society, Perestroika finds Kushner's indomitable characters moving tentatively toward the feared changes. Despite the overall grimness of much of Perestroika, the play finally, and with a moving humanism typical of Kushner's--and Williams's--work, brings several of the characters to some measure of forgiveness and a settling of accounts. Most shattering of all may be the scenes in which Belize reluctantly but compassionately nurses the delirious and dying Cohn, despite hateful taunts and threats. In another moving sequence, Louis, appalled to find himself at the bedside of Cohn, reluctantly gives in to compassion and joins a ghostly Ethel Rosenberg to chant the "Kaddish" over Cohn's corpse. Similarly, Joe's mother, Hannah, cares for the abandoned and increasingly disturbed Harper. While working at her volunteer job at New York's Mormon Welcome Center, Hannah leaves Harper alone with a life-size diorama of a nineteenth-century Mormon pioneer family. Harper thinks she sees her errant spouse in the image of the "Mormon Father," and she pleads for guidance from the "Mormon Mother." When the figure comes miraculously to life and grimly leads Harper toward the next stage of her personal jouney, Kushner achieves a transcendent meeting of past and present not at all unlike that in Williams's Camino Real, a magical road where the fictions of history and literature converge with reality.

Hannah has lost her son Joe as a result of her rigidity, but visiting Prior in the hospital teaches her acceptance for the "otherness" of homosexuality. She asks Prior if she should come see him again, and Prior, borrowing Williams's most famous--and campiest--line, becomes Blanche DuBois for a moment. "Please do," he says, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Hannah, unfamiliar with the reference, can only reply, "Well that's a stupid thing to do."(38) Hannah does return and is no longer a stranger, either to Prior or herself, for she too has been visited by Prior's angel and experienced a similarly orgasmic encounter with the angel that has transformed her.

The final scene of Perestroika is set at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, with a statue of an angel in its center. It is not at all unlike the one where Williams's repressed Alma Winemuller had her sexual awakening. At the fountain a newly created family including Prior, Hannah, Belize, and a repentant Louis meet. A stronger, wiser Hannah asserts Kushner's view of the interconnectedness of all humanity--regardless of race or sexual preference--and the primacy of loyalty and commitment to others. Prior points out the angel of the fountain, Bethesda, a figure commemorating death but suggesting "a world without dying" (p. 147). Prior, the prophet, whose AIDS symptoms have stabilized, notes that the healing waters of Bethesda's fountain are not flowing now, but that he hopes to be around to see the day they flow again. And in a final statement, this indomitable gay character speaks for all those who have come before, from the plays of Williams through Kushner:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be

commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret

deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We hill be citizens. The time

has come. (p. 148) (1) Ranier Maria Rilke, "Duino Elegies. The Ninth Elegy," in Selected Works. Vol. 11 Poetry, trans. J.B. Leishman (Norfolk, Connecticut and New York: A New Directions Book, 1960), pp. 244-245. (2) Tennessee Tennessee "The Angels of Fructification," in In the Winter of Cities. Selected Poems of Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1956, 1964), p. 34. (3) Kushner's theatrical output thus far includes the plays Yes, Yes, No, No (1985; children's play), Stella (1987; adapted from a play by Goethe), A Bright Room Called Day (1987), Hydriotaphia (1987), The Illusion (1988; freely adapted from a play by Pierre Corneille), Angels in America. Part One. Millenium Approaches (1990), Angels in America. Part Two. Perestroika (1991), Widows (1991; written with Ariel Dorfman, adapted from Dorfman's novel), Slavs (1994), and The Dybbuk (1995; adapted from S. Ansky's play). (4) Alfred Kazin, "The Writer as Sexual Show-Off: Making Press Agents Unnecessary," New York Magazine, June 9, 1975, p. 38. (5) Bob Blanchard, "Playwright of Pain and Hope," Progressive Magazine. October 1994, p. 42. (6) Donald Windham interviewed in "Tennessee Williams. Orpheus of the American Stage," a film by Merrill Brockway broadcast on "American Masters" (PBS-TV), 1994. (7) Edward A. Sklepowich, "In Pursuit of the Lyric Quarry: The Image of the Homosexual in Tennessee Williams' Prose Fiction," in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), p. 541. (8) David Frost, The Americans (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), p. 40. (9) Tennessee Williams, "Let Me Hang It All Out." New York Times, March 4, 1975, Section 11, p. 1. (10) Tennessee Williams interviewed by Arthur Bell, Village Voice, February 24, 1972. (11) Tennessee Williams interviewed by Robert Berkvist, New York Times, December 21, 1975. (12) Tennessee Williams interviewed on "The Lively Arts" program (BBC-TV), 1976. (13) Gerard Raymond, "An Interview with Tony Kushner," Theater Week, December 20, 1993, p. 17. (14) Gore Vidal interviewed in "Tennessee Williams. Orpheus of the American Stage," a film by Merrill Brockway for "American Masters" (PBS-TV), 1994. (15) Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers, 7 he Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 292. (16) Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 63. (17) Inge's one-act The Boy in the Basement (1962) makes a similar plea for tolerance. (18) Stanley Kauffmann, "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises," New York Times, January 23, 1966, Section 2, p. 1. (19) Edward Albee, cited in The Playwright's Art. Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 21. (20) Gore Vidal interviewed in "Tennessee Williams. Orpheus of the American Stage," a film by Merrill Brockway for "American Masters" (PBS-TV), 1994. (21) Edward Albee interviewed in "Tennessee Williams. Orpheus of the American Stage," a film by Merrill Brockway for "American Masters" (PBS-TV), 1994. (22) Tennessee Williams, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Volume 2 (New York: New Directions, 19, 1). p. 221. (23) Jim Gaines, "A Talk About Life and Style with Tennessee Williams, Saturday Review, April 29, 1972, p. 27. (24) Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 114. (25) Robert Emmet Jones, "Sexual Roles in the Works of Tennessee Williams," in Tennessee Williams: Tribute, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), p. 554. (26) Tennessee Williams, Where I Live. Selected Essays, ed. Christine R. Day and Bob Woods, with an introduction by Christine R. Day (New York: A New Directions Book, 1978), p. 72. (27) Tennessee Williams, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Volume 3 (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 127. (28) Walter Kerr, "Talkers, Drinkers and Losers," New York Times, April 16, 1972, Section 2, p. 8. (29) Tennessee Williams, `The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Volume 5 (New York: New Directions, 1976), p. 260. (30) Tennessee Williams interviewed by C. Robert Jennings, Playboy (20, April 1973). (31) Delma Eugene Presley, "Little Acts of Grace," Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), p. 579. (32) "Tony Kushner Considers the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. An Interview by David Savran," American Theatre, October 1994, p. 24. (33) John Lahr, "Earth Angels," New Yorker, December 13, 1993, p. 133. (34) "John Simon, "Angelic Geometry," New Yorker, December 6, 1993, pp. 130-131. (35) Tony Kushner, Angels in America. Part I. Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992, 1993), p. 11. (36) Tennessee Williams interviewed on "The Dick Cavett Show," 1974. (37) Robert Brustein, "Robert Brustein on Theater: Angles in America," New Republic, May 24, 1993, p. 30. (38) Tony Kushner, Angels in America. Part II. Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992, 1994), p. 141.