The World Only Spins Forward

I'm having a hard time sleeping. My brain is sort of spinning off its axis right now (read: melting out my ears), and I thought I'd try to blog my way out of it. After all, what use is a blog if I can't take my vacuous thoughts and foist them on you, my unsuspecting readers. I guess that presupposes anyone is reading this. They might not be.

I've been rereading Angels in America the past few nights. Cynic that I am, I understand that you might be tempted to roll your eyes. After all, every teenage gay boy with an HBO subscription and a chip on his shoulder likes to go on and on about how wonderful it is. And admittedly, in my most cynical moments, I find myself on the verge of dismissing the kind of identity politics which the play enacts. Maybe I'm just haunted by the ghost of 17 year old Will, who read Angels in America as the GREAT GAY MASTERPIECE. Gag me with a spoon.

And yet.

I really do think Angels in America (particularly the second part, Perestroika) contains some of the best (and most significant) writing by an American playwright. I've blogged about one of my favorite scenes before, but tonight, I'm tangled up in Harper's final monologue. Maybe it'll ease my racing brain to reread it in public:

"I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare like old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the sounds of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind and dreaming ahead. 
At least I think that's so" (275).

(Forgive me, techno-nub that I am, I cannot format for shit. Anyone have any advice?)

Honestly, I don't have an argument for the play. I don't totally know what Kushner means when he claims a painful progress, or later, when Prior resolutely tells us that the world only spins forward. I'm a little worried about what overthinking the play might do to my overall appreciation of the piece. Plus, honestly, the writing does enough intellectual and emotional heavy lifting for all of us. What I admire most about the Angels in America is its willingness to struggle with religion. Kushner really gets America's terrifying religious history stuck in his teeth and manages to locate hope in pre-millennial  New York City. His results are fascinating and alternately refreshing/terrifying. (Am I allowed to use "refreshing" to describe something that premiered 20 years ago?)

I'll conclude this late-night public reading first by demanding that you put the computer down and go read (or reread) the play. Second, I'll leave you with Perestroika's final monologue. In the epilogue, Prior and company are sitting on the rim of Bethesda Fountain in Central park. Prior closes:

"The fountain's not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes. But in the summer, it's a sight to see. I want to be around to see it. I plan to be. I hope to be.

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 will be citizens. The time has come.
Bye now.
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you: More life.
The Great Work Begins" (280).


Incidentally, I saw a amazing performance of Perestroika in Silver Spring two years ago. Ah, that more theaters would stage this (admittedly really, really difficult) play.