Tony Kushner's Postmodern Theatre : A Study of Political Discourse [1 ed.] 9781443870337, 9781443864008

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Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre

Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse

By

Hussein Al-Badri

Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse, by Hussein Al-Badri This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Hussein Al-Badri All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6400-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6400-8

To Omar and Khaled Al-Badri

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Theorizing the Postmodern Theatre Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 A Bright Room Called Day Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59 Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 103 Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 119 Homebody/Kabul Conclusion ............................................................................................... 135 Paradoxes and Perspectives Bibliography ............................................................................................ 143

INTRODUCTION

This book is primarily concerned with exploring/analyzing the political discourse as dramatized/concretized in the dramas of Tony Kushner who is considered one of the most politically-engaged playwrights in America today. For this reason, my point of departure is the concept of political theatre as developed by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. This theoretical explanation/exploration serves a double purpose; first, it is meant to provide a statement of the definitions and concepts central to this study such as political discourse, political theatre, and postmodern theatre; second, it gives the author the tools of analysis by which to read/analyze Tony Kushner’s postmodern, politically-oriented texts. The aim in view is to try to define the major features of Tony Kushner’s postmodern theatre and to find out how he theatricalizes/incorporates politics. American drama in the 1980s and the 1990s has witnessed a noticeable thematic shift from exclusively personal plays and musicals that once dominated the American theatre for a long period of time to an increasing number of plays which put greater emphasis on exploring issues and questions of socio-political interest. As a result of this thematic shift, the predominantly private settings and familial character relationships of the traditional family play have been replaced by a great variety of public settings and non-familial characters. Tony Kushner’s theatre is a pioneering attempt in this respect. In Kushner’s theatre, there is no room for the traditional family plays which have dominated the American stage in the 1960s and 1970s. Kushner has found that there is not enough political discourse in contemporary American Theatre. For this reason, he writes his plays to shed special light on the politics of the American society in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in the beginnings of the 21st century. In order to explore such thorny issues of socio-political concerns, Kushner has to depart both thematically as well as structurally from the traditional patterns of the family play, which have dominated the American Theatre landscape through most of the twentieth century. His first major play, A Bright Room Called Day (1985) draws parallels between Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the 1980s. It is actually a political critique of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s America which was mainly characterized by Reagan’s huge record of

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Introduction

political failings, his unprecedented buildup of the U.S. military, and his administration’s blatant disregard of the growing AIDS plague. Tony Kushner's major breakthrough Angels in America (1994) is a tremendous hit which many theatre critics view as one of the most important plays of the twentieth century. In two full-length plays Millennium Approaches and Perestroika - Kushner condemns the political corruption which prevails the political system of the United States in this period. Kushner’s third play "Slavs!” (1994) is about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under former president Mikhail Gorbachev. In this play, Kushner explores the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ruin left in its wake. Tony Kushner's latest play Homebody/Kabul (2002), written before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, is an ambitious and powerful drama set principally in Kabul under the Taliban regime.

CHAPTER ONE THEORIZING THE POSTMODERN THEATRE

In 1960, Henri Stendhal argued that "Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention" (Stendhal, 349). Stendhal's image has become one of the most-cited statements on art and politics, because it suggests an intrinsic opposition of two distinct realms: the realm of pleasure on one hand, and the realm of the everyday and social, on the other. Stendhal is hence often quoted in support of the argument that any intermingling of the two realms would mean some sort of intrusion and violation. Art and politics are two totally different worlds that can not be presented side by side to an audience. Such a dichotomous reading has frequently been maintained in an endeavor to theorize the relationship between art and politics in a way which presents the very idea of political art as a contradiction in terms. However, I want to read Stendhal in a different way, proposing to examine the relationship of concert and pistol shot under the contention that all art is political. In this respect, political art is no longer a question of reconciling opposite spheres, but a question of degree. What Stendhal finds shocking is not the intrusion of the political in the aesthetic, but the explicitness and frankness of the intrusion. As Stendhal also points out, the pistol shot might be vulgar but it undeniably attracts our attention. Therefore, it is precisely such blunt manifestations of the political in the aesthetic which I seek to examine in this study of Tony Kushner's postmodern political theatre. With political theatre, I mean a theatre praxis that explicitly defines itself as a public forum for the discussion of current political events and issues. Moreover, it considers itself not merely as an aesthetic reflection of life but an active social force which tries not only to depict the political reality and the pressing social issues of the time but also to change that reality. In this theatre praxis, concert and pistol shot are not mutually exclusive. Each artistic production is rather designed to function as a pistol shot, startling and alerting its audience by its explicitness and bluntness. In

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short, in political theatre, the aesthetic is a function of the political while the political manifests itself aesthetically. Owing much to the Greeks and the origins of theatre itself, political theatre has a vivid tradition reaching back to the 1920s and the 1930s. During that period, the belief that theatre could be a means of political intervention was particularly strong. It was at this point that the term 'political theatre' was born. In the wake of World War I and under the influence of the revolutionary upheavals in Germany and Russia, a great number of theatre people began to conceive of theatre as a concrete political tool, a means for transforming reality according to a leftist worldview. 'Political' was no longer a mere descriptive attribute employed by theatre critics in reference to socially committed art but became a declaration, a manifesto proclaimed by theatre makers themselves. Political theatre was to be a way of thinking and living. It was to have a radical impact on the audience and on political reality itself through that audience. In other words, the political no longer constituted merely in the interpretive process, but as an intrinsic part of the production. All the elements of the production process including the author, director, designer, technicians, and actors began rigorously to subordinate subject matter and form to the single ultimate objective of affecting the audience politically so as to bring about social change on behalf of the subjugated and marginalized. Emerging in Germany and Russia in the early 1920s, the concept of political theatre has commonly been associated with European modernism and with avant-garde concepts of art and society. It stands for provocative anti-bourgeois declarations and bold experimentation. In this respect, I refer to this as modernist political theatre. Due to its innovative and revolutionary nature, this theatre has been mostly prominent in the twentieth century theatre histories. However, the preoccupation of theatre scholars and critics with such a kind of political theatre has effaced another form of political theatre, which not only coexisted along with the modernist one but also had a rich tradition of playing an active role in society. That form of theatre could be called vernacular political theatre. The latter was particularly influential on the American stage in the 1930s. Due to the fact that it was less radical and innovative than its modernist counterpart, it had often been considered of lesser political and aesthetic value. Rather than engaging in modernist experimentation, that form of political theatre generally chose to convey its political message via conventional modes of representation such as realism and naturalism. With modernist and vernacular forms of political theatre, we encounter two different cultural objectives and concurrently, two different ways of

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realizing them. A preference of one or the other actually was dependent on various historical, cultural, and social conditions. During the 1920s and 1930s, vibrant leftist theatre cultures emerged in Germany and the United States. Yet despite comparable social and economic conditions, the two theatre cultures processed these conditions in radically different ways. This became particularly apparent when the two leading German theatre artists, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, attempted to transfer their concepts of political theatre onto the American stage. During the Weimar Republic, they had developed a highly modernist approach to political theatre, which they called epic. Epic theatre was very successful in Germany and influenced political theatre aesthetics on a global level for decades. However, when Brecht and Piscator continued their theatre practice during their exile years on the American stage both of them failed miserably. Epic theatre did not succeed with the American public. One of the main reasons for this failure was that it was competing with a strong and popular vernacular tradition; a tradition that could not be embraced by the modernist concept of political theatre. By the early 1930s, leftist theatres in the US had developed their own forms of representation which proved more adequate and efficient in addressing the political concerns and aesthetic sensibilities of the American public of the time. For the different purposes of this study, my point of focus is on the first model of political theatre, i.e. modernist political theatre. The rationale behind this is that this form of political theatre is particularly influential on postmodern theatre, in general, and Tony Kushner's political theatre in specific. Investigating the origins of the modernist political theatre as represented by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator constitutes the point of departure from which to explore/analyze the political discourse as dramatized/concretized in the dramas of Tony Kushner who is considered as one of the most politically-engaged playwrights in America today. The fundamental questions that motivate and guide this study are numerous. Some of these questions – which I have attempted to address and answer – are: how does Piscator's political/ modernist theatre influence postmodern theatre in general and Tony Kushner's postmodern political theatre in particular? Are there any themes in Brecht's theatre – referred to in this project as modernist political theatre – that initiate the birth of postmodern theatre? In other words, does Brecht's modernist political theatre as a modern avant-garde influence postmodern theatre? If yes, in what way/to what extent does this impact extend to influence the politically–oriented plays of Tony Kushner both thematically and technically? Which is more effective for the dramatic text: to overtly raise political issues and questions or to covertly express such political views in a wider socio-

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political and cultural perspective? The aim in view is to try to define the major features of Tony Kushner's postmodern theatre and to discover how he theatricalizes politics. In the following, I attempt to theorize and analyze the model of modernist political theatre in more detail. It is quite acknowledged that modernist political theatre had been originated by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in Germany, Meyerhold and Eisenstien in the former Soviet Union. In fact, the theories and practice of such leading political directors/authors of the first half of the twentieth century are usually situated within the context of European modernism. They are represented as part of a general avant-garde movement. However, such conflation of modernism, avant-garde and political theatre is highly problematic. It cannot go beyond conceptualizing political theatre as part of an overall departure in the modern theatre. Thus it can only account for such basic characteristics as experimentation, provocative anti-bourgeois declarations, and the overarching goal of inciting the audience to action. However, these characteristics are also typical for other modernist movements such as Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism all of which have been considered avant-gardist in one way or another. In point of fact, it is very difficult to account for the fundamental differences between these distinct movements. Similarly, it is not easy to precisely locate the position of political theatre within modernism and how it relates to the various other modernist strands. If we are to understand the genealogy of political theatre, we need to distinguish carefully between the various moments of modernism, and particularly between the terms 'modernism' and 'avantgarde'. Only then, political theatre could be related to other modernist practices in an attempt to get clear on what ultimately distinguishes a modernist political theatre practice. One way of drawing this distinction can best be illustrated by going back to Peter Bürger's seminal book Theory of the Avant-garde (1984) which is actually considered the most comprehensive and convincing attempt at theorizing and conceptualizing the avant-garde movement. Bürger carefully historicizes the avant-garde as a specific moment and function within European modernism. It is the moment when bourgeois art is first able to recognize and criticize its own status and function in bourgeois society without, however, being able to transcend it. The historical avant-garde is thus not simply synonymous with European modernism but represents a crucial moment within it – the moment of crisis. The question now is: what are the stages leading to this crisis of bourgeois art?

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According to Bürger, the evolution of bourgeois art has been characterized by a persistent drive towards autonomy. With the increasing accumulation of specialized knowledge and the concurrent differentiation of the various social spheres in early bourgeois society, art gradually achieved an ever-greater degree of autonomy in relation to society. By the end of the 18th century, art had formed a sphere distinct and apart from the social, but yet relating to it in a reflective and corrective way. Such a status of semi-autonomy enabled art to reflect the relationship of the individual to society. This notion of art as a separate, yet moral and pedagogical force was fundamental in the formation of an emerging bourgeois subjectivity. Over the course of the following century, the process of autonomization continued and was intensified up to a point where the ties of art to the social were completely severed. In the aestheticism of the turn of the 19th century, art expressed its most extreme declaration of autonomy. The dialectic balance between form and content, which had so far characterized the evolution of art, completely tipped towards the former, turning form into its own content. Yet, as Bürger emphasizes, it is precisely at this moment of aesthetic perfect development that the flip side of the persistent drive towards autonomy became fully visible. In this respect Bürger writes: Only after art, in nineteenth-century Aestheticism, has altogether detached itself from the praxis of life can the aesthetic develop "purely." But the other side of autonomy, art's lack of social impact, also becomes recognizable. (Bürger, 22)

Art wanted to be nothing but art. Bourgeois art decided to be fully autonomous from the praxis of life. In the 1910s and 1920s, the historical avant-garde appeared and specifically at this time bourgeois art became critical of itself. As Bürger puts it, "with the historical avant-garde movements, the social subsystem that is art enters the stage of selfcriticism" (ibid 22). The Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists recognized the chasm that had opened up between art and the social. Launching a severe attack against the very institution of art in bourgeois society, they attempted to bridge the chasm and to reintegrate the two spheres. Notably they did so not by calling for socially significant art but by boldly proclaiming the aestheticization of life. However, these avant-garde movements failed in retranslating art back into life praxis. Its historical achievement was contained, as Bürger underlines, in the act of voicing a radical critique of the institution of bourgeois art. "It is to the credit of the historical avant-garde movements that they supplied this self-criticism" (ibid 27). Bürger's own argument stops at this point. He cannot

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conceptualize a post- avant-garde movement. Hence, Bürger's argument cannot account for the phenomenon of political art, an art praxis that never conceived of itself as autonomous but always as an integrated function of social totality. Two major criteria in Bürger's Theory of the Avant-garde are particularly useful for conceptualizing modernist political theatre. First, the avant-garde is not simply synonymous with modernism, but represents a specific historical moment in the evolution of bourgeois art and modernism: the moment of crisis. It is precisely at this moment of crisis that political theatre appeared on stage and pointed to a way of overcoming it. Whereas the avant-garde attempted to bridge the gap between art and social reality in aestheticizing life praxis, political theatre proclaimed the need for politicizing art. Art was to be refunctioned by putting it in the service of the subaltern and the working class rather than the dominant class. This insight, however, could only be gained from the failure of the avant-garde. Not surprisingly, a number of the most influential political theatre directors came out of the avant-garde. Piscator was briefly affiliated with the Berlin Dadaists, while Meyerhold and Eisenstein were influenced by Russian Futurism. As Piscator explains in his masterpiece The Political Theatre (1978) regarding the pioneering role of Dada: "These iconoclasts cleared the decks, abandoned the bourgeois position they had grown up in, and returned to the point of departure from which the proletariat must approach art" (Piscator, 23). Second, Bürger explains the emergence of the avant-garde as both a negation and continuation of its predecessor. Phrased differently, to conceive of the genealogy of political theatre in terms of a series of sublations of previous modes of cultural production enables us to understand a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernist political theatre. For while Brecht and Piscator defined their work in vehement opposition to bourgeois art praxis, they nevertheless inherited a significant amount of its aesthetics. Thus, political theatre sublated not only its immediate predecessor, the historical avant-garde, but also its respective predecessors; the art theatre movement and naturalism. We can thus devise the following genealogy of modernist political theatre covering a period from about 1890 to 1925. Modernist political theatre is heir to all previous modernist traditions in a dialectic sense, that is, both as negation and continuation. In the following, I attempt to sketch out the details of this genealogy. As a starting point, one can argue that it is 'naturalism' and not realism which actually constitutes the beginning of modern theatre. The distinctions between the two are hard to draw, particularly in the theatre (and this is

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not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of them). Both movements, for instance, claim Ibsen and Strindberg as founding fathers. With the term 'naturalism' I refer to a phase in European theatre ranging from about 1890 to 1910, and encompassing the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Gorky, to name only a few. In effect, it is quite obvious that such periodization represents an oversimplification. The early Ibsen, for instance, was clearly influenced by romanticism, while the late Ibsen and Chekhov already anticipated the symbolist movement. Strindberg again became the precursor of expressionism. Political theatre acknowledges its indebtedness to naturalism because it rigorously pursued George Brandes's famous dictum that "unless art submitted social problems to debate it was meaningless" (Brandes, 383). This is why it is said that naturalism was the first theatre movement to systematically elucidate the social and economic structures of society and to place the working class on stage. At the same time, modernist political theatre strongly opposes the naturalist staging practice. For in its attempt to photographically reproduce the reality of life as accurately as possible on stage, naturalist theatre had ironically moved farther away from its audience. That is in order to create the perfect illusion of actual life, naturalism insisted on a strict separation of stage and audience. As Brecht himself explained, the naturalist stage "create[s] such an impression of naturalness that one can no longer interpose one's judgment, imagination and reactions, and must simply conform by sharing the experience and becoming one of 'nature's' objects (Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 219). In this respect, one can argue that the naturalist staging practice embodies at its best not only the audience's inability to feel that it is part and parcel of what it sees on stage, but also its inability to take action to change that reality. Thus, the naturalist stage, and consequently, theatre itself epitomizes the very condition of the separateness of art from life. In short, the art theatre movement that was most committed to relating art to life by reproducing it as accurately and minutely as possible on stage, paradoxically found itself removed from the reality of the spectator and consequently from the very praxis of life it tried to create. Art theatre movement, on the other hand, had also its enormous influence on modernist political theatre. As a matter of fact, the emergent art theatre movement was much indebted to naturalism with the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg exerting a particularly formative influence because of their provocative anti-bourgeois politics. Around 1900 there was, however, a decisive rupture between the two. Theatre artists and practitioners began to increasingly resist naturalist staging practice since they tended to 'naturalize' the theatre experience and did not challenge the perception of

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the audience. They consequently developed various non-mimetic forms of representation in order to tear down the fourth wall and reach out to the audience. One of the most important and pioneering attempts in this regard was presented by the Russian stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold through his famous concept of 'Stylized Theatre'. Meyerhold overtly opposed the naturalistic theatre. He found that by photographically recreating life on stage down to the minutest details, theatre denied the spectator any imaginative participation in the theatrical event. Providing a high degree of artifice and stylization, Meyerhold's form of 'Stylized Theatre' attempted to ignite and challenge the imagination of the spectator. According to him, the spectator should be encouraged – at least imaginatively – to participate in the dramatic action. Meyrehold sees a theatre production split up into four dimensions: author, director, actor, and spectator. When brought together, actor and spectator can freely develop their creativity. He also proposed that the four theatrical elements should be placed on a straight, horizontal line beginning with the author, who has a clear influence on the director, who stages the author's work. Further, the actor assimilates the creation of the director and reveals his soul freely to the spectator. In so doing, Meyerhold's 'Stylized Theatre' forces the spectator to create, and not to assimilate a theatre production. On the formative role of the spectator in developing a dramatic experience, Edward Braun quotes Meyrehold as saying: "We produce every play on the assumption that it will be still unfinished when it appears on the stage. We do this consciously because we realize that the crucial revision of a production is that which is made by the spectator" (Braun, 256). Around the same time, numerous other theatre artists began to explore the use of space, movement, lighting, music, setting, and design. The most emblematic innovations took place in stage architecture, where theatre artists deliberately began to manipulate the distance between stage and auditorium. The fourth wall of the bourgeois deep stage was torn down, the apron abolished and the orchestra pit bridged. One of the most ambitious projects to integrate the stage with the auditorium was the 'Total Theatre' Baauhaus director Walter Gropius for Piscator's multi-media shows. It is very hard to claim that such experimentations, which have taken various directions and degrees, constitute an actual 'movement' defined and united by a homogenous agenda. However, these radical experimentations, despite their heterogeneity, emphasize a highly significant objective which, in one way or another, linked all these experiments together: art theatre movement attempted to reestablish its contact with the audience by means of having radical innovative forms of representation. Breaking with

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such conventional modes of representation and developing new ones, art theatre movement encouraged the spectator to actively participate – at least throughout his imagination – in the theatrical event. This is why one can argue that the most accomplished achievement of the art theatre movement consists in the rediscovery of the spectator and the concurrent shift from the internal communication on stage to the external communication with the audience offstage. In sum, the art theatre movement of the 1900s and 1910s was fuelled by the rejection of a theatre praxis which is characterized by a complete isolation and passivity of the spectator. Instead of the total separateness of art and life, art theatre movement tried to reunite them anew. That was actually achieved by the art theatre movement critique of bourgeois art and society that had encouraged the growing discrepancy between art and life. Regardless of the serious differences between the various tendencies of the art theatre movement, the aim in view was to conceptualize and define theatre as the place where the gap between art and life – a major characteristic of bourgeois society – might be bridged and art might be transferred back into life. In this respect, one can also argue that these art theatres represented an important step towards a fundamental reconceptualization of the role of art in relation to society. However, those art theatres fell short of having fully concentrated on resisting and negating the praxis of bourgeois art and life only via radical formal experimentation. This is actually a solution that is diametrically opposed to the agenda of political theatre. Phrased differently, all various attempts of the art theatre movement to challenge the bourgeois staging practice focused completely on trying to find out new forms of representation at the expense of the themes to be presented throughout such innovative forms. In the theatre practice of the theatre art movement, form is far more important than content. Form is an end in itself; it is not a means to an end. Despite a lack of political direction, the avant-garde enthusiastically continued the art theatre project of emancipating and activating the spectator. However, it was not enough for the avant-garde theatre to merely incite the spectator to imaginatively participate in the theatrical experience. Rather it went farther than this to the extent that it attempted to shock and provoke the spectator, and to elicit verbal protest and physical action. A spectator's provocation in this stage formed an important step in the direction of political theatre. Sergey Eisenstein, one of the most famous Russian film directors in the early twentieth century, for instance, in his 'Theatre of Attractions' suggested releasing firecrackers from under the seats of the spectators to keep them alert. The Russian Futurists provocatively entitled their manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste

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(1912) in which they quite seriously provided a whole list of suggestions on how to cause laughter, commotion, quarrelling and fighting in the audience, for example by smearing the seats of the audience with glue, selling the same seats of several people, or sprinkling the auditorium with sneezing powder. Such provocative techniques actually constituted another important step towards realizing the political theatre. Such a provocation of the audience, mentally and viscerally, helped the avant-gardists to shake the audience from the passivity conferred upon them in the bourgeois theatre. It incited creative as well as physical participation. The overall goal was to turn the recipient into an actor in the arena of theatre and consequently in the world in which he lives. In short, the avant-garde marked the moment of crisis of bourgeois art, and it is exactly at this moment that the political theatre could emerge and enter the stage. As seen earlier, modernist political theatre selectively inherits all previous traditions. From the naturalist stage, it takes over the social agenda. From the art theatre movement, it learns the necessity of emancipating the spectator from the static passive reception. From the avant-garde, it acquires a complete rejection of the bourgeois art and life. It also continues the avant-garde project of transforming bourgeois life by means of politicization of art. At the same time, political theatre also defines itself in strict opposition to its predecessors. For none of the preceding modes of theatrical production conceptualized art as an integral function of the social. Political theatre, by contrast, considers art a means of transforming social reality according to its needs. Piscator succinctly summed up this new understanding of art in his masterpiece The Political Theatre: I too had a clear opinion on how far art was only a means to an end. A political means. A propagandistic means. A pedagogical means. Not only in the sense of Dadaists, but in any event: a way with art, make an end of it!. (Piscator, 23)

It is quite obvious that Piscator's new understanding of art can only be brought about if art exchanges its purely reflective role for a more transformative function and if it is able to incite the audience to political action. The goal is to motivate the spectator to not only contemplate reality but to actually transform it. To conclude this part, one can argue that the modernist political theatre which emerged out of this genealogy of modernist theatre is marked by the following characteristics:

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x Emphasis on formal innovation as a way of subverting conventional forms of representation. x Tendency towards abstraction (over verisimilitude) as a way of breaking through illusionism of bourgeois stage and engaging the audience. x Emphasis on inciting audience to political action. x Abolition of autonomy of art by refunctioning it in the interest of the proletariat. Although modernist political theatre rejects bourgeois conceptions of art and culture, it nevertheless continues to consider the theatre as a public site where the masses can be educated, where class-consciousness can be formed, and where aesthetic and political sensibilities can be cultivated. In this part, the writer attempts an analysis of the modernist approach to political theatre by mapping out its most canonical examples: Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. As a matter of fact, the theatre of Brecht and Piscator is generally considered the founding model of modernist political theatre. During the 1920s and the 1930s, the two artists developed, in close collaboration but yet independent of each other, a modernist and a political model of theatre which they called 'epic'. The epic theatre was deeply influenced by avant-garde aesthetics on the one hand and the desire to arouse the proletarian masses to political thought and action on the other. In this respect, epic theatre actually formed a unique synthesis of formal experimentation and social agenda. It also represented an entirely different new approach to the role of theatre in society. Theatre was to function as an interventional social force. Both Brecht and Piscator developed this new concept of theatre in response to a prevalent need for the presentation and dramatization of the pressing social and political issues of their time. Such thorny socio-political issues were not presented on the professional bourgeois stage in mainstream theatres. Rather than reflecting the intense class conflict and economic recession of the 1920s, leading theatres resorted to presenting a type of theatre which brought about light entertainment to its spectators. The objective was to distract and divert the working masses from the socio-political issues and conditions that determined their everyday reality. Brecht and Piscator's preoccupation was precisely to offer the opposite: to offer workers an alternative to the prevailing theatre practice of the bourgeois stage. This alternative consists in presenting relevant topical issues in an innovative form in order to provide the working masses with conceptual tools that would enable them to understand and consequently transform reality according to their needs. However, epic theatre is not a homogenous concept. A closer analysis

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reveals that it comes in two different versions. Despite a common understanding of its formal methods and political functions, Brecht and Piscator were different regarding the question of what role the audience was to play in this theatre. Later on in this chapter, both Brech's and Piscator's individual models of political theatre will be investigated. For now, I want to begin by sketching out the key concept of Brecht's theory of epic theatre/political theatre, namely Verfremdungseffekt, or, the Alienation Effect. When Brecht was looking for a term that would encompass the type of theatre he was looking to create, he was influenced by the work of Erwin Piscator, who during the 1920s and 1930s was involved in the creation of new theatre forms. Piscator was the first person to coin the phrase 'Epic Theatre', a term that Brecht is often associated with. In his famous extensive analysis of Brecht's theories of epic theatre, particularly his best known technique Verfremdungseffekt or, the Alienation Effect, Fredric Jameson in his book Brecht and Method (1998) delineates four main components. First, it is a way of representing the ordinary and familiar in a way that amazes the audience. Second, it describes a set of staging and acting techniques (V-effekt) used to create a distance between stage and audience, performance and content. Third, it is a method for shutting down empathy with the characters' dilemmas. Fourth, it is a way of depicting characters, processes, and situations in their historical context and consequently as subject to change. To put it differently, Verfremdung is a method of defamilairizing and historicizing the subject by interrupting the flow of dramatic action and thereby distancing it from both the spectator and the actor. Similarly, Peter Brook maintains that 'Verfremdung' demonstrates Brecht's respect for his audience. He argues that "Alienation is above all an appeal to the spectator to work for himself, so to become more and more responsible for accepting what he sees only if it is convincing in an adult way" (Brook, 72). With V-effekt, Brecht "sought to replace classical Aristotelian empathy leading to catharsis with an empathy based on critical observation" (Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 93). By being subject to an epic performance, Brecht wanted his audience members to leave the theatre energized for social and political action, not pacified through their empathy with the characters' dilemmas. Central to Brecht's technique of V-effekt is his unique concept of spectatorship. Through the cultivation of relaxed but intelligent spectators, Brecht strove to counteract the bourgeois entertainment industry and activate the political will of the audience. He explains the fundamental differences between the spectator of dramatic/bourgeois and epic/political theatre as follows:

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The dramatic theatre's spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It's only natural – It 'll never change –The sufferings of this man appal me – Because they are inescapable – That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre's spectator says: I'd never have thought it – That's not the way – That's extraordinary, hardly believable – It's got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary – That's great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (Brecht, ibid 71)

As previously noted, Brecht systematically subordinates dramaturgy, acting, and staging to the primary goal of cultivating a totally unemotional, detached and critical spectator without which he can not imagine political change. Erwin Piscator, by contrast, insists that political activism needs both a rational and an emotional basis. In Piscator's theatre, reason and emotions play an equal role in developing the audience's consciousness and bringing about social change. His dramaturgy is therefore strongly invested in challenging the audience both intellectually and viscerally. In this respect, Piscator provides a rather different version of modernist political theatre. In his staging practice, the desire for emotional stimulation, however, often, contradicts the wish for rational instruction, canceling out the latter and severely undermining their overall political effectiveness. Piscator attempted throughout his career to strike an effective balance or a compromise between aesthetic representation and political agenda which lies at the core of the very concept of political theatre. In the following portion of this study, I will attempt to provide the reader with an overview of Piscator's political dramaturgy with a focus on his constant ambivalence between rational argumentation and visceral absorption. Trying to work out the most effective audience approach, Piscator moved through various stages which actually constitute the various phases of his evolution as a man of the theatre. His early political revues (1924/1925) were strongly influenced by Russian aesthetics, particularly by Eisenstein's theories of montage and attraction. With the founding of his own theatre, the Piscatorbühne in 1927, Piscator began to synthesize various theatre arts into multi-media spectacles, merging the audience in a festive community. After the failure of the Piscatorbühne in 1929, Piscator resorted to more minimalist staging practices. From the very beginning of his theatre career, Piscator insisted that the bourgeois stage had to be refunctioned towards political ends. Like other modernists, he believed that this could only be achieved if theatre

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overcame the passive indulgence commonly attributed to bourgeois art and instead, defined itself as a site of political education and agitation. He therefore fervently declared: The theatre was no longer trying to appeal to the audience's emotions alone, was no longer speculating on their emotional responsiveness it consciously appealed to their intellect. No longer mere élan, enthusiasm, rupture, but enlightenment, knowledge and clarity were to be put across. (Piscator, 49)

It is quite obvious that Piscator's dramaturgical objective was remarkably similar to Brecht's. Both artists stressed that epic theatre should represent collective rather than individual experience. It should elucidate the causality between socio-economic factors and personal circumstances and, more importantly, situate these factors within a general historical context. Above all, it should portray the world as subject to change and consequently as changeable. Piscator, however, differed fundamentally from Brecht in retaining the need for emotional involvement of the audience. Brecht, on one hand, considered the emotional identification and absorption of the audience harmful to the cultivation of critical spectatorship and thus, employed a variety of V-effects to pre-empt them. Piscator, by contrast, firmly claimed that the emotional and the rational should be evenly matched, that the visceral and cerebral incitement should be hand in hand. Towards this end, Piscator used, just like Brecht, various epic elements such as projections, film, narrator, chorus, and music. Piscator's brilliantly used such devices not as a means of defamiliarization and distantiation, but of confrontation and absorption. Needless to say, Piscator's explicit emphasis on visceral appeal and emotional absorption formed a sharp contrast to Brecht's conception of the role of emotionality in political theatre. In short, Piscator approached the goal of refunctioning the stage for revolutionary purposes from opposite ends. Piscator combined political propaganda with emotional agitation by way of using both the innovative forms and media of modernist political theatre as well as the emotional structures of the classic bourgeois stage, i.e. dramatic suspense, empathy and catharsis. To achieve this purpose, he integrated film clips on World War I and the November Revolution in one of his most famous documentary revues entitled In Spite of Everything (1925). Piscator's use of film in this play is part and parcel of the staging practice. It actually contributes to the overall understanding of the whole drama. Using film clips here serves a double purpose; first, it was meant to instruct the audience about the historical context of the German revolutionary movement; second, it helps to elicit an intense emotional

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involvement in it. On his genuine use of film clips in his early political development Piscator writes: The momentary surprise when we changed from live scenes to film was very effective. But the dramatic tension that live scene and film clip derived from one another was even stronger. They interacted and built up each other's power, and at intervals the action attained a furioso that I have seldom experienced in theatre. (ibid 97)

The epic element of film proved effective in providing both intellectual and visceral stimuli. It informed and captured the audience and, above all, built up dramatic suspense and revolutionary sentiment towards a final cathartic climax. Ideally the climactic moment – the moment of complete identification with the dramatic action – would also be the moment in which political cognition would lead directly to spontaneous political action. To put it differently, with the help of various epic elements, Piscator moved the action towards Aristotelian catharsis, through which he in turn hoped to effect Marxist revolution. Piscator commented on the effect of the In Spite of Everything documentary by saying that "For the first time we were confronted with the absolute reality we knew from experience. And it had exactly the same moments of tension and dramatic climaxes as literary drama, and the same strong emotional impact" (ibid 96). In the following years, Piscator changed his strategy. Founding his own theatre, he aimed at a broader and more heterogeneous audience apart from the proletariat. He did so above all on the aesthetic and not on the political level. He intended to create a stage, on which he could implement his epic dramaturgy with the help of the latest stage technology. This was actually Piscator's great dream which he never achieved; he wanted to direct in what he called a 'total theatre', a theatre building equipped with all the mechanical equipment necessary to realize the full potentialities of modern stage technology. On his unique concept of 'total theatre', Piscator himself writes: What I had in mind was a theatre machine . . . technically as perfectly functional as a typewriter, an apparatus that would incorporate the latest lighting, the latest sliding and revolving scenery, both vertically and horizontally, numerous projection boxes, loudspeakers everywhere, etc. (Piscator, 179)

Piscator commissioned Bauhaus director Walter Gropius with the design of a new theatre building which could approximate his vision. Gropius

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came up with a highly versatile theatre design capable of converting the stage at any time – even in the course of a performance – into any of the three classical theatre models (Greek arena stage, semicircular proscenium stage, bourgeois fourth-wall stage). As a matter of fact, the 'total theatre' represented a radical departure from the static bourgeois theatre because it provided a maximum contact with the spectator. The aim in view was to catapult the spectator in the midst of the dramatic action and to integrate him spatially into the spectacle rather than allowing him to escape behind the curtain. To enhance the impression of complete absorption, a system of spotlights, loudspeakers, film projectors and projection screens was to be installed along the walls and ceilings of the auditorium. Moreover, stage and auditorium would merge into one single site for the unfolding of a multimedia spectacle, and the spectator would be completely immersed in it. In this manner, the entire theatre would be transformed into the site of scenic events. To conclude this part, it is highly significant to summarize Brecht and Piscator's shared vision of the theatre. The aforementioned discussion of Brecht’s and Piscator’s models of modernist political theatre delineates the following seven characteristics. First, Brecht and Piscator insisted that modern theatre needed to assert itself as a political force, if it was to play an active social role. Second, both Brecht and Piscator stressed that their notion of political theatre was informed by a Marxist worldview. Brecht explained that he inadvertently ended up writing from a Marxist perspective since it best enabled his audience to grasp and actively change the world around them. Piscator similarly announced his Marxist background. Third, the theatre of Brecht and Piscator was a theatre for and about the working class, more specifically for the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat. Fourth, because of its political aspirations, epic theatre considered the education of the audience its main task. One way of doing that was to elucidate the interrelation of the economic, political and social forces of the time. Piscator believed that the continuous education of current events would have a positive effect on all parts of the audience. Similarly, Brecht declared pedagogy to be the new purpose of art. Fifth, in order to be pedagogically effective, epic theatre sought immediate contact with the audience. Like other modernist artists, Brecht and Piscator considered the tearing down of the fourth wall of bourgeois theatre a necessity to the development of an effective didactic practice. However, they developed different methods of approaching their audiences. While Brecht insisted on establishing immediate contact via distantiation, Piscator immersed his spectators in a highly technologized audio-visual

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spectacle. Sixth, both artists considered the epic form most suitable for discussing political issues. Brecht insisted that classical drama had to break down because it could no longer accommodate the themes relevant for the working class. Similarly, Piscator maintained that the closed form of classical drama was typical of bourgeois society and thus this form must be changed as well. Both directors considered the open narrative of epic drama capable of presenting contemporary reality with all its complexity since it allowed the authors to shift the dramatic focus from individual suffering to collective processes and from the personal to the general. As Brecht and Piscator asserted, once the working class audience recognized its position within the general economic and social structure of capitalism, it would also know how to go about changing it. In short, form and content are inseparable in epic drama. Finally, Brecht and Piscator agreed on what this epic form looked like. They defined it as an extremely open dramatic form that incorporated various narrative and technical devices as running commentaries into the dramatic actions such as narration, film, slide projections, choreographic movements and songs. A discussion about the political possibilities of art in our present-day theatre landscape would necessarily have to engage the ongoing debate over the meaning of modernism and modernity as well as postmodernism and postmodernity. That debate became particularly vivid in the early 1980s. In fact, one of the problems in dealing with postmodernism is in distinguishing it from modernism. In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film, and the computer. Many date postmodernity from the sixties when the world witnessed the rise of postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see World War II as the radical break from modernity, since the horrors of Nazism were made evident at this time. Linda Hutcheon, for instance, in her seminal book A Poetics of Postmodernism attempts to sketch “a flexible conceptual structure which could at once constitute and contain postmodern culture and our discourses both about and adjacent to it” (Hutcheon, Poetics ix). She argues that postmodernism cannot be regarded as a new paradigm precisely because it “works within systems it attempts to subvert,” (Hutcheon, Poetics 2)

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neither can it be separated from the problematics of modernism, upon which it comments. In addition, she asserts that many of the most wellknown commentators on the postmodern, including Fredric Jameson, fail to define it against existing cultural practices, relying instead on generalizations and simplifications. In her own critique of postmodernism, Hutcheon highlights postmodernism as a contradictory practice that does not pretend to exist outside the system it comments upon and contests, but “overtly acknowledges its complicity, only to work covertly to subvert the system’s values from within.” (Hutcheon, Poetics 4). Moreover, in The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon distinguishes between postmodernity and postmodernism. The former she understands to mean "the designation of a social and philosophical period or 'condition'" (Hutcheon, Politics 23), specifically the period or 'condition' in which we now live. The latter she associates with cultural expressions of various sorts, including "architecture, literature, photography, film, painting, video, dance, music" (Hutcheon, Politics 1) and so on. Indeed, Hutcheon diagnoses as one reason why critics have been led to such disparate opinions about the "postmodern" is because of the conflation of these two disparate if associated domains: socio-historical on the one hand, aesthetic on the other hand. By distinguishing between the two domains, Hutcheon offers a critique of Fredric Jameson's influential attack against the postmodern: "The slippage from postmodernity to postmodernism is constant and deliberate in Jameson's work: for him postmodernism is the 'cultural logic of late capitalism'" (Hutcheon, Politics 25). Jameson thus sees postmodern art and theory as merely reinforcing the many things he finds distressing in postmodern culture, particularly the conditions of multinational late-capitalism. Hutcheon does not deny that postmodernity and postmodernism are "inextricably related" (Hutcheon, Politics 26); however, she wants to maintain the possibility that postmodernism's cultural works could be successful in achieving a critical distance from the problems of our contemporary age. On the whole, she agrees with other critics regarding the elements that make up the postmodern condition: a world dominated by the logic of capitalism, which has no regard for the rights of oppressed laborers or the ravagement of the natural world; a society increasingly under the scrutiny of government agencies that insist on casting their disciplining gaze ever deeper into our private lives; an increasing reliance on technologies that separate people from each other and the natural world. A close analysis of Hutcheon's critique of postmodernism clearly highlights the fact that she departs from other critics of postmodernism in

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that she underscores the ways that postmodern cultural works engage in effective political critiques of the postmodern world in which we live. In this respect, Hutcheon writes: critique is as important as complicity in the response of cultural postmodernism to the philosophical and socio-economic realities of postmodernity: postmodernism here is not so much what Jameson sees as a systemic form of capitalism as the name given to cultural practices which acknowledge their inevitable implication in capitalism, without relinquishing the power or will to intervene critically in it" (Hutcheon, Politics 27).

Hutcheon, therefore, explores a wide variety of works from various genres and media to illustrate how the cultural works of postmodernism effect their critique of the present. Some of those strategies postmodernism borrows from modernism, in particular its self-consciousness and selfreflexivity, as well as its questioning of such Enlightenment values as progress, science, and empire or such nineteenth-century values as bourgeois domesticity, capitalism, utilitarianism, and industry. However, Hutcheon argues that postmodernism does differ from modernism in important ways and that it is this difference from the modernist project that exemplifies the critical potential of postmodern cultural work. For one, Hutcheon points out that postmodern works tend to be critical of modernism's elitist and sometimes almost totalitarian modes of effecting 'radical change'. She points out how modernists pursued radical change without acknowledging the price that must be paid by the more extremist positions assumed by modernist authors, some of which are, for instance, fascism, futurism, anarchism. She also questions how effective elitist modernist projects could ever be as political critique. In point of fact, if there is one thing that especially distinguishes postmodernism from modernism, according to Hutcheon, it is postmodernism's relation to mass culture. Whereas modernism "defined itself through the exclusion of mass culture and was driven, by its fear of contamination by the consumer culture burgeoning around it, into an elitist and exclusive view of aesthetic formalism and the autonomy of art" (Hutcheon, Politics 28), postmodern works are not afraid to renegotiate "the different possible relations between high and popular forms of culture" (Hutcheon, Politics 28). Apart from Hutcheon's attempts to identify the perimeters and characteristics of postmodernism in relation to cultural practice, I intend to focus on Fredric Jameson's concept of postmodernism because it poses the question of political agency most clearly and urgently.

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Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism signifies not only a generational reaction to modernism, but also a new conception of culture that blurs the boundaries between high and low, elite and popular. Moreover, it functions as a periodizing concept, which allows one to correlate new formal features to the emergence of a new type of social and economic order; specifically the postindustrial or consumer culture of the Western world. Thus, while the concept of postmodernism acknowledges its links to modernism, it also signifies an important radical departure from it. Jameson's concept is extremely useful in historicizing new formal features in relation to the social and economic development of Western culture. Jameson strongly believes that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. At the same time, it projects a rather bleak vision of the possibility of representation. In light of an utter dispersion of language as well as the perpetual différance of meaning, the question of authoritative and objective representation becomes redundant. The classical idea of mimesis is null and void when the connection between the signifier and the signified is no longer secured. Rather than pointing to an actual meaning, the signifier now at best points to the stereotypes, clichés and images it accrued in a mediatized culture. In this sense, Jameson writes: If there is any realism left here, it is a 'realism' which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reason, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach. (Jameson, 198)

Jameson's pronouncement clearly highlights the fact that the 'realism' of postmodernism is a false realism, a mere mimicry in dead languages and hollow images, a realism of a perpetual present, forfeiting the very possibility of authentic, objective imitation. Jameson concludes his argument by saying that art can ultimately only be representational art about art itself. Postmodernism, in this respect, replicates and reinforces the logic of late capitalism. Thus, one can simply say that according to Jameson, postmodern art inevitably is not capable of contesting or even resisting capitalism. If, as Fredric Jameson postulates, the bind to the real has been severed in postmodernism, how then is it possible for postmodernist art to move beyond mere representation towards a politics of resistance? Moreover, is there something as postmodernist political art or is that a very contradiction in terms? If we take up the modernist definition of modernist political art as a means of social and cultural intervention in society, as developed by,

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for example, Brecht, Piscator, Meyerhold and Eisenstein, such intervention would only be possible if art is capable of an adequate depiction of reality, of an authoritative pointing out of alternatives and utopian visions, and of asserting a complete political subjectivity for a majority of people. These are actually the very modernist essentials that Jameson's definition of postmodernism negates. As a result, one can safely argue that in Jameson's model of postmodernism, the postmodern is necessarily apolitical. Postmodernism, he argues, indicates apolitical art because the cultural realm of which theatre is a part is inextricable from the economic and political realms. This is why he sees nearly all art today as powerless to instigate political change because of an advanced mode of capitalism that he variously calls late capitalism, multinational capitalism or consumer society. Philip Auslander points towards a possible alternative. In effect, Auslander is perhaps the most influential 'postmodern' performance theorist. He seeks to redefine the concept of the 'political' in postmodernist theatre. In his seminal book Presence and Resistance (1992), which focuses on postmodern performance in the 1980s, he claims that the solo performance of Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray, the stand-up comedy of Andy Kaufman, and the postmodern theatre of the Wooster Group, were political. As evidenced by his title, Auslander does not seek the clear political ideals of either Piscator or Brecht, or the advancement of a particular alternative political structure but rather strategies of resistance. Theatre cannot any more, as it has done in the 1960s and 1970s, claim a place outside of society in order to criticize it and to create a distinct alternative vision. In the postmodern view of the world, there is no such place outside the social, cultural, symbolic order. Philip Auslander stresses that postmodernist political art cannot place itself outside the object of its own critique, but “postmodernist political art must position itself within postmodern culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them” (Auslander, Presence 23). What is most important is that postmodernist political art must articulate this suspicion. Unlike modernist art, postmodernist art has no choice but to operate from within the culture whose representation it simultaneously recycles and critiques. While modernism still asserts a fundamental belief in the possibility and viability of exterior critique and transgression of hegemonic cultural practices, postmodernism finds this position untenable and delusional in a culture that is saturated with its own images. Thus, whereas the former was still capable of postulating an aesthetics/politics of intervention or transgression, the latter can at best resort to an aesthetics/politics of resistance. This,

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however, does not make postmodernist art less political than its modernist predecessor. It simply acknowledges that the terrain of contention has significantly changed in a late capitalist media society. Auslander seeks ways in which contemporary theatre or performance might not wholly uphold dominant values. He consistently lauds his examples of postmodern performance for not claiming to stand outside of postmodernism, or presenting an alternative to it, but rather fighting it "deconstructively, resistantly, from within" (Auslander, ibid 51). His main thesis in Presence and Resistance is that these performers all in some sense reveal their own constructedness, or acknowledge their lack of reality, by using a 'refusal of presence' – and in so doing launch critiques of mediatised culture (Auslander, ibid 54-55). In this sense, Philip Auslander follows Hal Foster in calling the performance art that operates from within the representational system 'resistant performance' in opposition to 'transgressive performance'. Thus, he endorses a distinction between 'transgressive' and 'resistant' politics in theatre work. He links transgressive politics with the modernist avantgarde and the figures of Brecht and Piscator, while resistant politics are associated with postmodern theatre practice. Auslander labels the transgressive politics of the avant-garde 'utopian' in that they constructed a position outside representation from which it was possible to comment on existing social relations and to posit alternatives to them. Postmodernist theatre, however, recognizes the impossibility of standing outside representation and advocates resistance from within the system of representation itself. The notion of resistance is particularly useful, as the highly political dramas of Tony Kushner often achieve a similar effect: destabilizing capitalist inevitability, striving for autonomy and so on. Assuming that theatre, namely realistic theatre, which works with the same representational means basic for political and social representation, hierarchies, power structures and so forth, it should always deconstruct its own representational means, if not, criticizing or subverting them. The postmodern theatre of the 1980s and 1990s is characterized by deconstructing traditional representational categories such as presence, illusion, and identity. And most of it actually does contest hierarchical structures, objectivities, and perceiving conventions. However, apart from feminist and queer performance, one of its famous models is Tony Kushner's theatre, the outstanding representatives of postmodern theatre do not intervene in politics or in social questions in a more concrete manner. However, one can also argue that Auslander's resistant politics could be considered equally utopian in the sense that such resistance, coming as it does from within the dominant culture, cannot easily avoid

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replicating its values. The importance of Auslander's work resides in his effective illustration that postmodern theatre is not, as some have argued, apolitical theatre, but a theatre with important political strategies of its own. Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It is hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it is not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism. The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled 'modernism'. This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art. Modernism is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of high modernism, from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism. The second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes more from history and sociology than from literature or art history. This approach defines postmodernism as the name of an entire social formation, or set of social/historical attitudes; more precisely, this approach contrasts 'postmodernity' with 'modernity,' rather than 'postmodernism' with 'modernism.' The question, again, is: what is the difference? 'Modernism' generally refers to the broad aesthetic movements of the twentieth century; 'modernity' refers to a set of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas which provide the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. In the literary field, postmodernism means different things to different postmodernists. In fact, what postmodernism can/does/ should/might mean is what makes the debate over postmodernism so lively. For while postmodernism has been by turns celebrated and deplored by writers in painting, architecture, film, and music, the field of theatre and performance studies has lagged behind a bit. That is why theatre theorists have often resorted to plundering and questioning other disciplines, and as

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a result, full-length scholarly studies on postmodern theatre/performance were scarce in the 1980s. But things have changed in the 1990s with the release of a number of scholarly theoretical writings discussing postmodern cultural production, namely those of Johannes Birringer's Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1991), Vanden Heuvel's Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance (1991), and Philip Auslander's Presence and Resistance (1992). However, such a heated debate on what is performative about postmodernism and/or what is postmodern about performance does not accord the domain of theatre the same attention that prose and poetry have abundantly enjoyed. Moreover, when theatre finds its place in the core of this debate, performance, rather than the literary text, becomes the sole focus of the debate. This is why I find it incumbent to initiate my study of Tony Kushner's political theatre with an attempt to define what is postmodernism and what is postmodern about literary texts. Given that there is little agreement over what constitutes postmodernism in general, it becomes even more difficult to claim stable criteria for postmodern theatre or to distinguish it from its antecedents particularly the avant-garde. Nevertheless, it is primarily important to begin the close analysis and interpretation of Tony Kushner's postmodern political theatre with differentiating postmodern theatre from its preceding periodizing categorizations, namely the 'classical' and the 'modern' drama. Generally speaking, classical drama is characterized by the value placed in the plot and its adherence to Aristotle's laws of dramatic unities. In the nineteenth century we also observed how Hegelian philosophy filtered into modern drama with the movement of 'man'/character at the forefront of dramaturgy in the character dramas of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Anton Chekov. We also see how Aristotle's mimesis is taken to the heights in the period of naturalism which is illustrated in the staging practice of modern theatre. As a matter of fact, modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism, have come to be slippery in the literary criticism of the last decades. Thomas Travisano in his Midcentury Quartet (1999) and Umberto Eco's postscript to his novel The Name of the Rose (1984), offer ahistorical definitions to these major literary movements. Travisano states that placing the avantgarde artists seriously into the 'modernist' period would radically change our view of the period and challenge our earlier critical notions that modernists were characterized by a nostalgia for traditional order in a fallen world or that modernism was committed to what Travisano calls an "impersonal poetics" (Travisano, 164). In other words, the artist in the modernist literature moves inwards creating a conventionalized reality based upon an understanding of an inner world of emotions and

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subconscious workings of the mind. Therefore, Samuel Beckett is to be considered as the epitome of modernism with his 'impersonal poetics' to create a world even though it may be initially less recognizable to the average reader/spectator than that of Ibsen or Even Strindberg. It is such an 'impersonal poetics' which leads artists to create either an abstraction or distillation of the concrete world. In the same sense, Umberto Eco's discussion of these terms offers an extremely useful perspective. According to Eco, "postmodernism" is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category . . . a way of operating" (Eco, 66). Furthermore, according to Eco, what we call "modernism" can appear at any historical moment; at any time the "past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us" (ibid 66), leading to the desire to negate, destroy, or deface the past. Beyond the modernist urge, postmodernism is a reaction to the modernist aesthetic strategy. It, Eco argues, "demands in order to be understood not the negation of the already said [but] the ironic rethinking" (ibid 68), of the past or of the "the already said" (ibid 68). In fact, this perspective allows one to see the intersection of the 'postmodern' with the 'avant-garde': the avant-garde can appear at the very same time as postmodern and such impulses can even appear in the same writer. In this respect, Matei Calinescu argues that the avantgarde is a variant of postmodernism and that these two terms can be defined and understood as similar in many of their facets (Calinescu, 143). Much of postmodernism is intimately relevant to themes that the avantgarde writers endorsed: radical experimentation in form; violation of and a rebellion against the accepted rules of mainstream culture and literary discourse; challenging subjectivity; violation of both gender and genre boundaries – where "traditional barriers between theatre, dance, music, and art began to crumble" (Aronson, 3). Postmodernism, then, is closely interrelated with avant-gardism. The former is actually a logical extension and elaboration of the latter. The postmodern cultural spirit, to adopt Edmund Smyth's words, is characterized by "fragmentation, discontinuity, indeterminacy, plurality, [metadrama], heterogeneity, intertextuality, decentring, dislocation, ludism" (Smyth, 9), as well as a very strong "element of self-consciousness and reflexivity" (ibid 9). This cultural spirit of postmodernism manifests itself in Tony Kushner's works and in his earnest effort to counter or negate conventional unity, centricity, stability, and like values that have strongly dominated the canonical standards of modernism. The traditional concept of literature involves the contention that drama is a representational experience of reality and life for the study of man. The standards of realism are yardsticks to measure the quality of a piece of

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literature, in so far as this literary work represents and reflects the truth of life. Subjected to this yardstick, realist writers make full efforts to create an objective and accurate imitation as possible, faithfully chronicling their personal feelings and impressions in their texts. Martin Wallace, in his Recent Theories of Narrative, notes that realism is a term not only "designating a true reflection of the world" (Wallace, 57) but also "referring to a certain kind of reading experience" (Wallace, ibid 57). In this experience, the reader/audience is absorbed in the story in a certain way that he or she believes that things really could have taken place in exactly this way. He states that the most significant tenet of realism is the choice of ordinary or typical subjects. Wallace has described realism as embracing 'objectivity' – which means "the author should not let personal attitudes intervene in the representation of a narrative" (Wallace, ibid 175). The author, Wallace goes on to say, should "suppress his/her personality and the [authorial] voice" (Wallace, ibid 176). This involves a doctrine of natural causality that contains a presentation full of all factors that influence life. In radical opposition to the realist stance is the avant-garde breakaway from pursuit of truth to pursuit of fiction. Avant-gardists seek new artistic forms and experience and vehemently oppose realist typicality. In this respect, Arnold Aronson notices that the avant-garde drama […] created neither an abstraction nor a distillation of the concrete world; in a sense it did not create a world at all, at least in any common understanding of the term. It created an art in which the reference points were other forms of art, the creative process of the artist, and the theatrical experience itself – not the external or so-called "real" world. (Aronson, 5)

Avant-gardists, thus, are committed not only to a complete dissolution of the causality that links characters and incidents, but also to an utter disruption of the logical relationships among characters. Characters in their texts are liberated from the complex relationships among characters that characterize the American realistic works. In such works, textual form is characterized by the intrinsic logicality and continuity demanded by the realistic paradigms. Moreover, language in these realistic works is nothing but a system of symbols signifying what is real, and anything in language must be realistic. Identifying the realistic paradigms, Arnold Aronson believes that most of the American dramatists exploited "themes that would have been easily recognizable to Ibsen" (Aronson, 2). He proceeds to mention such dominant realistic themes as "questions of morality, social responsibility, the individual versus society at large, and familial relationships . . . and the exploration and pursuit of the elusive American

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dream" (Aronson, ibid 2). Therefore, Aronson comes to the conclusion that these American writers "continued to work within a basically realistic framework and psychologically character structure" (Aronson, ibid 2). Contrary to the aforementioned, the avant-garde drama is anti-realistic. It calls into question meaning, value, and continuity. It interweaves fact and fiction or life and art in such a way as to shatter the audience's confidence in their credibility. Avant-gardists consistently display the qualities of irony, paradox, and indeterminacy in a dramatic construction and a dramatic discourse that reveals itself as nothing but designed and fabricated. Closely related to the avant-garde drama is its logical offspring, namely the postmodern drama. In fact, postmodern drama springs directly from the anti-realistic theatre. To put it simply, a major feature of postmodern drama is its discontent with classical modes of representation, which often go by the name of literary realism. This is understandable due to the sharp discrepancy between the postmodern experience and the worldview represented by the discourse of realism in literature. Realistic representation no longer holds in a world where the sense of a single, knowable reality is replaced by the conviction that everything is a construct shaped by language and discourse. In this respect Patricia Waugh writes: Contemporary . . . writing is both a response and a contribution to . . . [a] thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are [sic.] provisional: no longer a world of eternal variety but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist, and empiricist worldview on which realistic [drama] is premised no longer exists. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that more and more [dramatists] have come to question and reject the forms that correspond to this ordered reality (the well-made plot, chronological sequence, the authoritative omniscient author, the rational connection between what characters 'do' and what they 'are', the causal connection between 'surface' details and the 'deep', 'scientific laws' of existence. (Waugh, 7)

The postmodern drama, then, is significantly characterized by the need to challenge and subvert this idea of an "ordered reality" and of a one-to-one correspondence between art and life. The first important postmodern theatre was the short-lived arts phenomenon called 'Dada' which came into light at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916. A group of rebellious artists including Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp began the disintegration of form entirely. Songs were written with only sounds for lyrics. Ball wrote verses without words. Tzara shredded manuscripts and recited from pieces reassembled randomly. Nonsensical sketches were performed in

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outlandish cardboard costumes. As critic Mel Gordon described it, Dada was a "chaotic mix of balalaika music, [Karl] Wedekind poems, dance numbers, cabaret singing, recitations from Voltaire, and shouting in a kaleidoscopic environment of paintings" (Gordon, 313). The Dadaists – as they came to be called – found themselves the artistic favorites of Berlin and Paris in the early 1920s. That is why they left Zürich and spread through Germany in the postwar period of the 1920s. Though short-lived, Dada clearly stimulated the experimentalism of the theatre of the Absurd. Its major contribution to staging lies in destroying all accepted notions of what the stage should be and should express and in attacking the cultural values of the audience in particular and society in general. Contemporary postmodernism also owes a debt to the other current of anti-realistic theatre, the theatre of alienation as created and promoted by Bertolt Brecht. In fact, Brecht's epic/political theatre clearly influences the postmodern theatre in many ways. It stimulates the postmodern delight in stepping out of the dramatic situation, deconstructing drama into storytelling and disconnecting actors from characters in order to toss the play's issues directly to the audience. Postmodern dramatists and directors influenced by Brecht, one of whom is Tony Kushner, therefore openly employ the theatre as an ironic metaphor, jumping back and forth between simulations of reality and comments on that very simulation. Upon analyzing Tony Kushner's plays, one can find out many post-Brechtian and postmodern theatrical techniques which stem from this discontinuity. Deliberate cross-gender casting – as, for example, actors switching roles as well as genders where a young actress with an obvious fake beard playing the old Jewish rabbi at the opening of Tony Kushner's Angels in America – forces the reader/audience to confront a profound separation between the actor and his or her role. Due to Brecht's major influence, contemporary postmodern theatre is also characterized by nonlinearity. Aristotle said that plays should have a beginning, middle, and end, and they generally still do – but no longer always in that order. The conventional development of plot – from an inciting incident through intensifying action, climax, and denouement – is no longer uniformly presented in linear fashion. Temporary flashbacks, of course, have been used in drama, as well as in film, for several decades. They appear prominently in different postmodern plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and the action of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is, in effect, almost entirely a flashback. But in such linear works, flashbacks are generally framed as such, as by a narrative or musical transition which makes clear that the story is shifting to an earlier time period. In postmodern nonlinear drama, however, movement from

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one time zone to another is usually instantaneous and rarely narrated: the audience is simply expected to figure it out. Moreover, the audience is not necessarily 'returned' to the present when a postmodern flashback concludes. A postmodern play proceeds in almost any order the playwright wishes to construct, and such time warping no longer seems surprising. Postmodern plays are freed from the necessity to align themselves with a forward-moving arrow of time, and even from the need to explain when the arrow reverses direction. In Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, the action makes quantum moves in time – between previous centuries, the present, and the afterlife – with never so much as a program note, while actors jump back and forth between different roles and occasionally between different genders as well. Previously employed by quite a number of theatre directors and playwrights, one can argue that such nonlinear – or gender or language or character – shifts do not represent dramaturgical novelty. Rather, each indicates a theatre – and an audience – prepared for instant cross-association and able to keep several ideas and chronologies in mind at the same time, melding them into a satisfying dramatic experience. Tony Kushner's plays actually represent different moments in such dramatic experiences. In the following, I will examine these moments/plays by close analysis and interpretation both thematically and structurally in an attempt to delineate their political as well as aesthetic objectives. The aim in view is to try to define the major features of Tony Kushner's postmodern theatre and to discover how he incorporates politics in his dramas. Kushner's plays show that a reading of political theatre needs to be situated in its specific historic and cultural context. When referring to a theatre practice as political, there might be a need to map out exactly how this theatre positions itself in relation to its society and cultural tradition. It is in this regard that this study aims to contribute to a more open and a more dynamic understanding of the term 'political'. An understanding of Kushner's politics is essential to delve deep into his political theatre. In his manifesto-like essay "Notes About Political Theater", Tony Kushner seeks a working definition of what it means to be a political playwright and to understand the duties of one who so chooses. He points out that American drama concerns itself largely with the 'individual': "the principle antagonists and agents of our drama are individuals, usually white men, or families, usually white families. The individual is important to us, he gives us something to 'care' about. We are apparently incapable of caring about issues, or ideas, or communities..." (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theater" 24). The political playwright, Kushner insists, must move beyond this narrow focus on the individual,

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opening up the theatre to complex explorations of the large-scale effects of historical circumstances. Kushner writes, "Theater has always had a vital relationship to history, the examination and, yes, the teaching of history has got to be accounted a function of any political theater" (Kushner, ibid 28). Kushner's own work, indeed, is rooted in very specific historical moments. Rejecting the individual focus of contemporary American drama, Kushner writes primarily ensemble pieces that strive to illuminate interconnections between seemingly disparate characters and time periods. He strongly believes that "The political is a realm of conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth" (Kushner, ibid 26). Such a world must be entered with a clear purpose: "In times of struggle and oppression the names with which we choose to identify ourselves become very important. If we are in opposition to the established order, it's strategically necessary and personally fortifying to call oneself an oppositionist" (Kushner, ibid 26). Turning his attention outward near the end of the essay, Kushner writes, "We have entered into an age of politics of which I like to call neo-barbaric, in that the previously unassailable fundamentals of civilization, of community, are under attack" (Kushner, ibid 33). By allying himself with various communities, including homosexuality; Jewish tradition; the movement of the Left, Kushner's work combats the barbarism of the conservative, Right-leaning present era and seeks to restore a larger sense of a community of humanity that he feels is slowly fading away. Although homosexuality is not at the forefront of all Kushner's projects, he sees his homosexuality as a defining characteristic of his political sensibility. A work like Angels, Kushner tells David Savran, seeks to overturn "the fiction of the white, normal, straight male center . . . which has been the defining project of American history" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 302). Kushner is recovering a history that has been overshadowed by the dominant society. He writes: "The recovery of antecedents is extremely important work. Historians are reconstructing the lost history of homosexual America, along with all the other lost histories" (Kushner, "American Things" 9). Kushner sees his own goals as an artist as being rooted in "the mythology of radical politics" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 295), and he criticizes the lack of a sense of political mission he witnessed in such groups as the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in the early 1980's: "It was so bourgeois and completely devoid of any kind of left political critique. There was no sense of community with any other oppressed groups (Savran, ibid 301). Kushner's public statements certainly reveal an anti-assimilationist stance. However, he acknowledges an 'assimilationist penchant' inherent

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within his own work: "For all that I have publicly decried the dangers of assimilationism, for all that the assimilationism of the lesbian and gay Right infuriates me, I have long been guiltily aware of the extent to which my work and even my politics betray an assimilationist penchant for 'the accumulated wisdom of culture' " (Kushner, "On Pretentiousness" 70). Despite the obstacles, however, Kushner believes that within American culture there is a "history tending, though not deterministically, not without struggle, towards some plausible, workable, realizable version of radical, pluralist democracy" (Kushner, ibid 70). Pluralist democracy is, in fact, the kind of society Kushner seems to call for, one centered around a "non-violent, pragmatic revolutionary politics predicated on a collectivity of individuals reinventing themselves into something new" (Kushner, ibid 70). Kushner believes this difficult proposition to be a true possibility: There are in this country political traditions congenial to the idea that democracy is multicolor and multicultural and also multigendered, that democracy is about returning to individuals the fullest range of their freedoms, but also about the sharing of power, about the rediscovery of collective responsibility. There are in this country political traditions— from organized labor, from the civil rights and black power movements, from feminist and homosexual liberation movements for economic reform—which postulate democracy as an ongoing project, as a dynamic process. (Kushner, "American Things" 9)

For Kushner, communities seem less determined by any particular characteristic such as race or sexual orientation than by the political mindset that governs a group of people. He is drawn to ideas of socialism which he sees as a misunderstood system whose underlying assumptions are solid. Kushner tells David Savran that "the socialist tradition in this country is so despised and has been blamed so much on immigrants. It's been constructed as a Jewish, alien thing which is not the way socialism is perceived anywhere else in the world, where there is a native sense of communitas that we don't share" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 305). Kushner offers a personal definition of socialism in an interview with Craig Lucas: Socialism is simply the idea that people are better off if we work collectively and that the economic system we live in is made by people and therefore can be controlled intelligently rather than let loose. There's no way that can't be true. As long as there are decent people in the world, there's going to be a demand for socialism. The demand for health care right now, which is a demand that 80 percent of the people in this country share, is a demand for a certain kind of socialism. (Lucas, 37)

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As I have explained earlier in this chapter, Tony Kushner's apparently sudden prominence was not so sudden. He was established in regional theatres as a director, adaptor, and dramatist throughout the United States and England since the mid 1980s. His groundbreaking epic play Angels in America represents a remarkable culmination for a playwright working restlessly to develop a way of presenting political drama on the American stage in the late twentieth century. Kushner believes that imagining a political theatre is difficult because the theatre is "a world that's many things but has always been tainted, tawdry, and superfluous, it's very important not to devalue the tainted, the tawdry, and the superfluous and indeed, the essential tackiness and falseness of the theatre is its greatest aesthetic asset and political strength" (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theatre" 25). Theatre, Kushner believes, presents the sole realm in contemporary life where it is possible to explore the fact that: things are not always what they seem to be; that the unpredictability and vibrancy of actual human presence contains an inimitable power and a subversive potential; that there is an impurity, a fluidity at the core of existence – these secrets speak to the liberationist, revolutionary agenda of our day. I continue to believe in this usefulness, and the effectiveness of this increasingly marginalized profession and art. But I believe that for theatre, as for anything in life, its hope for survival rests in its ability to take a reading of the times, and change. (Kushner, ibid 34)

Like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, Kushner uses the stage as a platform for social, political, and religious argument, but in ways that neither Piscator nor Brecht, nor any other American dramatist has. In Kushner's plays, ideological debate emerges from a composite of rhetorical rationality, literary and cultural imagery drawn from the dogmas of the past, and wildly imaginative fantasy to unfold the complex crosscurrents of history. Kushner acknowledges having: a kind of dangerously romantic reading of American history. I do think there is an advantage to not being burdened by history the way Europe is. This country has been, in a way, an improvisation of hastily assembled groups that certainly have never been together before and certainly have a lot of trouble being together. (Szentgyorgyi, 16)

For Kushner, America is a 'mongrel' nation made up of "the garbage, the human garbage that capitalism created: the prisoners and criminals and: religiously persecuted and the oppressed and the slaves that were generated by the ravages of early capital" (Szentgyorgyi, ibid 17). Within

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the tensions inherent in these highly complex relationships, Kushner finds the pressure points of his drama: There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they're living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or for the bad, or some mixture of the two. I think that Russia in 1917 was one of the times, Chile under Allende was one of those times. It's a moment when the ground and the sky sort of split apart, and there's a space, a revolutionary space. During these sorts of periods all sorts of people – even people who are passive under the pressure of everyday life in capitalist society – are touched by the spirit of revolution and behave in extraordinary ways. (Szentgyorgyi, ibid 14)

Kushner has actually found such a moment for Angels in America in the rise of the 'new conservatism' of the late twentieth century. He also seeks out similar historical moments in most of his plays. He found them in the Nazi Party's seizure of power in Germany during the 1930s in A Bright Room Called Day, and in the collapse of the Soviet Union in Slavs. As a matter of fact, an understanding of Kushner's political beliefs is extremely essential to fully comprehend his drama, as his socialist politics is never far from the surface. It is quite known that most critics and audiences think of Tony Kushner as almost solely as a gay dramatist. However, one can safely argue that Kushner is truly a political dramatist who happens to be gay. He actually calls for a new brand of socialism that he calls a 'socialism of the skin'. This type of socialism honors the values and traditions of the past without a slavish adherence to belief systems whose traditions have excluded or oppressed diversity in culture, sexual orientation, and politics. In his interview with the novelist Michael Cunningham, Kushner provides us with a detailed definition of his concept of socialism. His definition is worth quoting in full: It's about beginning to struggle in a really, really powerful way with why economic justice and equality are so incredibly uncomfortable for us, and why we still define our worth by how much money we individually can make at the expense of other people, and why we find sharing and collective enterprise and motivations that are not competitive so phenomenally difficult. It's a tremendously difficult struggle that one has to undertake. It has to do with unlearning privilege; it has to do with examining what sort of events and activities make you feel worthwhile as a human being. But I really believe that the world is doomed unless we can re-create ourselves as social beings as opposed to little ego-anarchists. (Cunningham, 70)

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Tony Kushner insists that unshakable dogmas of any variety are dangerous and that viewing the world solely in rational ways is potentially catastrophic. Rather, he believes it is through the unspoken, the unseen, and a faith in the hard progress built of compassion and humanism that society can proceed most effectively into the future. Imagination is the true source of revelation for Kushner, particularly an imagination informed by an exposure to the workings of history and the ways in which history has been understood, distorted, and manipulated over the centuries. Kushner's seemingly inexhaustible imagination is actually fueled by a breathtakingly wide range of literary, cultural, historical, and religious sources. He is perhaps more successful than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in melding together an aesthetic drawn from aspects of post-naturalistic European theatre with elements of the traditions of America's lyrical dramatic realism. Influences from literature, art, and thought of the ancient world on through to the Renaissance blend together in Kushner's work, along with socialist politics inspired by Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. In literary and dramatic terms, these political influences derive from Kushner's reading of Walter Benjamin and Brecht, his most important dramatic inspiration. As a matter of fact, much has been written about the importance of Brecht to Kushner's work. Kushner himself has frequently acknowledged the significance of Brecht to his evolution as a writer and theatre artist. Reading Brecht's theories and plays "was a kind of revelation to me" (Weber, 106). Brecht offered the first evidence that led Kushner to believe: that people who are seriously committed political intellectuals could have a home in the theatre, the first time I believed that theatre, really good theatre, had the potential for radical intervention, for effectual analysis. The things that were exciting me about Marx, specifically dialectics, I discovered in Brecht, in a wonderful witty and provocative form. I became very, very excited about doing theatre as a result of reading Brecht. (Weber, ibid 106)

Tony Kushner offers Weber a list of the kinds of questions that Brecht wrestled with, questions he also sees as essential to his own work: the question of the individual ego and the question of how one marries a historical, social construct like the individual ego to a theory, and what is the practice of that. What is the way in which the individual, which is a sort of glorious and immensely destructive creation of hundreds and hundreds of years of Western civilization, how does the individual become a socialist subject? How are we to remake ourselves into people who are fit

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to remake the world? And what becomes of the individual when the individual encounters the need to collectivize. (Weber, ibid 118)

Because Kushner's vision of an ideal America is of an inclusive community that still allows for cultural difference, Brecht's questions are ideal for Kushner's exploration of what happens to identity--be it sexual, religious, or political--in such a collective society. Kushner also explains to Weber his attraction to the epic structure of some of Brecht's work: "I loved the multifocal, the multiple perspective of it" (Weber, 107). Employing such a structure in Angels in America allows Kushner to give voice to the various communities of his work which will eventually merge into the kind of 'pluralist democracy' Kushner envisions. When he began to write plays himself in the early 1980s, Kushner was profoundly influenced by Brecht's techniques as well as the content of his plays. As an American dramatist, it might reasonably be expected for Kushner to be a logical heir to those American dramatists with a political identity like Arthur Miller, but, Kushner seems instead to descend directly from the European traditions of political theatre, from what I call 'modernist political theatre', and especially Brecht, believing deeply that "all theatre is political" (Blanchard, 42). Kushner's political awakening had begun during his college days after reading Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art. A Marxist Approach, as well as the writings of Walter Benjamin, especially Understanding Brecht. From these writings, and from Brecht's plays themselves, Kushner gained a true sense of the social responsibility of the artist. For Kushner, as for Fischer, the artist is socially committed to the society in which he lives. Surprisingly enough, Kushner's initial response to Fischer was "incredibly angry, because I thought it was Stalinist and dangerous" (Smith, 247). In The Necessity of Art, Fischer explores not only the nature of art, but also the reasons behind a society's needs of it. In this respect, Fischer writes: In the alienated world in which we live, social reality must be presented in an arresting way, in a new light, through the "alienation" of the subject and the characters. The work of art must grip the audience not through passive identification but through an appeal to reason which demands action and decision. (Fischer, 10)

Fischer points out that even "a great didactic artist like Brecht does not act purely through reason and argument, but also through feeling and suggestion," (Fischer, ibid 14) with the goal of "enlightening and stimulating action" (Fischer, ibid 14). Kushner has obviously drawn on Fischer's concept of art and its purposes, and on Benjamin's conception of

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history. He explains that his initial anger in response to Fischer's ideas led him to look at other works about art and Marxism, a choice that represents a turning point in his life, which, therefore, led him directly to his master: Bertolt Brecht. Kushner reflects upon Brecht's tremendous influence on him to Anna Deavere Smith saying: I think I was looking for a model of a political artist who was engaged and committed politically, and who had generated, who had found some way of fusing integrally both politics and aesthetics, and Brecht really did. (Smith, 248)

Kushner has also spoken of feeling intimidated by Brecht's dramatic achievement, that if he could not write a play equal to Mother Courage and Her Children, he did not want to write at all. However, while reading Shakespeare and Brecht at the same time, he found a dialectical method in the structure of the historical plays of these two different dramatists and strove, at the beginning of his playwriting career, to emulate the lyricism of Shakespeare while, at the same time, drawing on the epic qualities of Brecht. Even as a graduate student, Kushner wrote a couple of things that were heavily influenced by Brecht. Seeking an image of a politicized artist who successfully merged art and politics, Kushner found that Brecht offered "a really brilliant marriage of Marxist theory as theatre practice" (Smith, 248). That is why Brecht's theories and techniques constitute the chief source of inspiration for Kushner. As I have previously explained, Kushner has found in Brecht the model to be followed and the fountain from which he absorbs diverse dramatic tools and techniques. His Brechtian style took shape in his first important play A Bright Room Called Day and flowered fully in Angels in America. Kushner, however, has adapted Brecht's methods and techniques to suit his own particular voice, embellishing the method with his own devices. A close analysis of Kushner's major plays clearly demonstrates that he has adopted a structure that is both cinematic and Brechtian. At the same time, he has coupled the alienation techniques of Brecht with a fully realized emotional and personal strain drawn more from American lyrical realism than from Brecht whose characters' emotional struggles are often neutralized in his effort to keep the audience focused on the issues. These techniques combine with an outrageous sense of humor as well as a wide-scale theatricality to offer a completely original form of American political theatre. This originality comes to full fruition between the writing of his first major play, the overtly Brechtian A Bright Room Called Day, and his masterpiece Angels in America.

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Similarly, it is highly significant to highlight Tony Kushner's view of history. Kushner believes that history teaches profound lessons and he understands that the concepts of apocalypse and the afterlife are fraught with the same struggles, confusions, and pain encountered in real life. His unique view of history is mainly drawn from reading Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1968). As a matter of fact, Kushner is inspired by Benjamin's assertion that, as he describes it, one is "constantly looking back at the rubble of history. The most dangerous thing is to become set upon some notion of the future that isn't rooted in the bleakest, most terrifying idea of what's piled up behind you" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 300). Tony Kushner engages with history, reevaluates its evidence and its ruins, its theories and its dictums, and its human toll, with the aim of illuminating those overlooked and misunderstood elements which might offer a valuable lesson for moving forward. Kushner is convinced that: The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: These are American things. This jangle is our movement forward, if we are to move forward; it is our survival, if we are to survive. (Kushner, Thinking 10-11)

Seen from this perspective, one can argue that Kushner looks back at history and the past not only to help frame eternal questions about existence, but also shape a better future for humanity at large. At the same time, Kushner does not propose to simply recommit to old values. For him, the American society is in an age of intellectual stagnation and profound political and social crisis, but he views the greatest threats as internal; a moral emptiness stemming from what he views as a fundamental abandonment of commitment to justice, compassion, love, and mercy that is a requirement for moral survival in his universe. There is little doubt that ideas from Benjamin's Understanding Brecht and other essays on art, theatre, and literature permeate Kushner's work as a political dramatist. As I have found out upon analyzing Kushner's plays, Benjamin's essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History" not only provides the central imagery for Angels in America, but it, along with Brecht's theoretical writings, illuminates nearly all of Kushner's plays thus far. As an American playwright, Kushner's overt political voice makes him a nearly unique figure, for the political dramatist is a rarity in American theatre. Few contemporary American dramatists, whatever their personal

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politics, examine political issues, theories, and historical figures as Kushner does, although there are a few American groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Bread and Puppet Theatre offering interesting parallels to Kushner's politically-oriented plays. Tony Kushner's predecessors with political aims, including Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller, seem to have had little direct influence on Kushner compared with that of Brecht or Williams for example. The profound influence of European politics, literature, and theatre on Kushner is more significant than that of his American predecessors, but he is, despite this, an American figure who is greatly burdened by the problems, issues, and conflicts of the American society. Regarding the American dramatic traditions, Kushner tells Kim Myers that he is closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams, "all-in-all my favorite playwright and probably all-in-all our greatest playwright" (Myers, 235). Kushner also acknowledges some debt to contemporary gay dramatists like Larry Kramer and Harvey Fierstein, but they are less significant to Kushner's development as a dramatist than Williams. There are obvious similarities between Williams and Kushner in the lyricism of both writers and in the sexual identities that inform their work. Perhaps more significantly, Kushner and Williams present views of a changing sociopolitical environment in which their characters are generally caught between two worlds: one that is dying and one that is being born. Of his predecessor, Kushner has said, "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" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 297). Kushner is also drawn to the seriocomic 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. There are astonishingly beautiful things scattered throughout his work" (Savran, ibid 300). In fact, the influence of Williams on Kushner could hardly be overlooked in the illusory and lyrical aspects of Kushner's work, as critic John Lahr writes: 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. (Lahr, "Earth Angels" 133)

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An important connection between Kushner and Williams lies in their homosexuality. Williams, who was guardedly open about his sexuality from the 1960s until his death, and who featured gay characters in his drama from nearly the beginning of his playwriting career, could not be as outspoken as Kushner can be. But still a gay sensibility fuels the work of both writers. It is actually a great irony that Kushner's Angels has had unprecedented success due to the enormous mainstream audience that the play has embraced despite the fact that its politics, moral universe, and sexuality are incompatible with the beliefs of the American society. It is perhaps in this irony that some of the questions that both Williams and Kushner explore meet:"What is the relationship between sexuality and power? Is sexuality merely an expression of power? Is there even such a thing as 'sexuality'?" (Savran, Speaking on Stage 308). It is true that not all – or even most – of Kushner's plays, are about homosexuality, and this also applies to Williams'. Even Kushner's Angels that is widely regarded as a milestone in gay drama and in the movement for gay rights and the war against AIDS, is not simply a gay play. It is actually about many diverse facets of American life, of which sexuality is, either traditionally or currently, a divisive issue. Gay characters are usually present in Kushner's other plays, but often in secondary roles. However, one can argue that regardless of the significance of a given character, sexuality informs Kushner's work as much as it does in Williams's drama. It is particularly significant to know that Kushner has initiated his playwriting career in an era of dizzying changes in the American cultural landscape. Following some abortive efforts to find a cure for his sexual orientation, Kushner has come to terms with his homosexuality and has been even inspired by gay dramatists like Williams. His identity as a gay man not only led to the dramatic works he masterfully creates, but has permeated all of his dramatic work and an increasing commitment to social activism, ranging from a variety of leftist political issues to gay rights and AIDS. He began his dramatic career as the terrifying devastation of AIDS became all too clear, and it is against this background that Kushner emerged as a playwright and director. However, to see Kushner solely as a gay dramatist, either in Angels or in his lesser known but equally challenging dramas, is not to do justice to a writer whose work is as diverse as the American society itself. In short, the social and political battles of the last four decades of the twentieth century are as important to understanding Kushner as are his literary and theatrical influences. Kushner's political activism is also of central importance to an understanding of his work. As a Jew, Kushner is part of an ethnic heritage

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that has experienced horrible losses. He identifies parallels between the Jewish experience and what gays have contended with in the American society. For him, the connections between Jews and homosexuals are highly important in that he believes both groups shared "a history of oppression and persecution that offers a sort of false possibility of a kind of an assimilation that demanded as one of its prerequisites that you abandon your identity as a Jew" (Cohen, 217-218). Kushner insists that: as Hannah Arendt says, it's better to be a pariah than a parvenu. If you're hated by a social order, don't try and make friends with it. Identify yourself as other, and identify your determining characteristics as those characteristics which make you other and unliked and despised. (Cohen, ibid 218)

To conclude this chapter, Tony Kushner's politically-oriented plays present a characteristic move in the history of American political theatre at the dawn of the twenty first century. Regarding politics, and, more than any other playwright of his contemporaries, it is ironic that Kushner is perhaps the best-known dramatist of his generation in the United States as a result of representing views seemingly incompatible with a post-Reagan age. His plays have elicited both enthusiasm and controversy worldwide. In the next four chapters, I will attempt, by means of close analysis and interpretation, to find out how Tony Kushner incorporates such progressive/leftist politics in his theatre. The crucial question which needs an answer is: does Kushner succeed to promote his socialist politics through such incorporation? This study, for this purpose, examines Kushner's major dramatic works thus far in an attempt to shed light on the techniques and themes of his work. In a unique form of postmodernist political theatre, Tony Kushner explores quite a number of profound political, social, moral, and religious questions. It is true that the phenomenal success of Angels catapults Kushner to a prominence usually unavailable to any other American dramatist during the second half of the twentieth century. It has also made him a leading spokesperson for gay rights and leftist politics in a contentious era for both. However, that tremendous success of Angels has, to some extent, obscured the rest of his work. Kushner's other plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness and Homebody/Kabul, are as challenging and provocative as Angels. In effect, they offer a more staggering range of themes and characters than even Angels in America can encompass.

CHAPTER TWO A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

In the mid-1980s to early 1990s, Tony Kushner angrily perceived the moral abandonment and surrender by the American leftist intelligentsia to the rightward lurch of American politics in the Ronald Reagan/George Bush years. Writing the play, Kushner noticed that the American Left and the media withdrew from protesting as the Reagan/Bush administrations oversaw an illegal war against a popularly elected government in Nicaragua. In addition, these two administrations attempted to dismantle many governmental social services that assist the poor and the disenfranchised, traded arms for hostages with America's enemies, ignored the growing epidemic of AIDS, and fractured the country's economy with irresponsible tax cuts and overspending on the military. This moral abandonment Kushner has likened to the failure of the German Left to rise up against the Nazis. Kushner wrote his first play A Bright Room Called Day during 1984 and 1985 within a framework of the political currents of the mid-1980s. He presented that period of time as an unstoppable wave of political upheaval and set the political upheavals against the life of a lone woman incapable of coping with a social reality she can barely comprehend. The play, first produced in 1985, grimly envisions the harrowing perils of the Nazi rise in Germany, and uniquely combines an intimate and realistic portrait of the lives of some German filmmakers in the early 1930s with contemporary highly debatable issues in the mid-1980s America. Such controversial issues are introduced and contextualized by Zillah Katz, a present-day political activist and feminist who points out parallels between the Nazi era and her own time. Thus, A Bright Room Called Day highlights Germany in 1933 and America in 1985 in ways that generated a great deal of controversy when the play was performed. In his published afterword to the play, Kushner agrees with some critics of the play that it is 'immature', particularly in its invitation for an audience "to consider comparisons between Ronald Reagan and Adolf Hitler" (Kushner, A Bright Room 172). The play, as Kushner himself describes it, "is supposed to be about morbidity and mysticism in the face

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of political evil, [but] is actually to an extent a manifestation of the kind of reaction it seeks to describe" (Kushner, ibid 180). Kushner stresses that the play's bold collision of past and present, a feature most frequently criticized by critics, is intended as: a warning signal, not a prediction, but I often ask myself: Is it politically effective? Will it galvanize an audience to act or, less ambitiously, will it make an audience think, argue, examine the present through the example of the past? Or will it merely confirm and voice for them what they may already suspect: that something unstoppable and horrendous is right around the corner. (Kushner, ibid 180)

As a matter of fact, Kushner's previously-mentioned questions are at the core of the original concept of political theatre. Such questions inevitably arise from any dramatic work which aims to address various political issues, especially for the American audience. As explained earlier in the first chapter of this book, the American political dramatist is a rarity in the American theatre landscape, and this is why the American audience in the late twentieth century is less accustomed to political debate in the realm of theatre. And here also lies the difficulty of writing/presenting politically oriented plays to that audience who, for a long time, has been attracted to/immersed in familial plays and psychological dramas. Kushner's major character Zillah Katz, that is actually the spokesperson of the mid-1980s' America, mirrors his own fear in what he calls 'a season of calamity', adding that "the desolate political sphere mirrored in an exact and ugly way an equally desolate personal sphere" (Kushner, ibid 173) that he himself was experiencing at that time. While writing A Bright Room, Kushner suffered from several difficult personal crises including deaths of friends and family members and the despair he felt over domestic politics as well as the deepening tragedy of AIDS in Ronald Reagan's era. That actually led to what Kushner himself called the "outrageous comparison" (Kushner, ibid 176) between Reagan (and in subsequent updates of the play George Bush) and Hitler. Similarly, the comparison led to much more outrage from critics when the play was produced in America and London, where Zillah's furious rants were rewritten as attacks on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Actually, this is one of the key features of the play. Kushner strongly believes that his play should be regarded as unfinished due to the fact that the play's text is available for updating since "it is designed as a debate between the past and a shifting present" (Bigsby, Modern American Drama: 1945–2000, 419).

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That Reagan/Hitler comparison has actually generated universal disapproval worldwide. Critics either have bitterly condemned the play or scoffingly dismissed it, labeling such offending comparison as childish. Kushner insists that his hyperbole is "a response to the Right's cynical understanding of every genuine social evil" (Kushner, A Bright Room 177). For him, the rise of Reagan stemmed from various problems inherent in both the Left and the Right. The former, Kushner argues, "characterizes the Right's nostalgia as senescent" (Kushner, ibid 171) whereas the latter "characterizes the left's demands for change as adolescent" (Kushner, ibid 171). As Kushner explains it, "The Left – the true, progressive Leftist – has taken increasingly to looking back longingly towards times of lessunjust injustices, less-toxic toxicity, as the Right continues to careen human society forward into a future nobody wants" (Kushner, ibid 171172). Kushner continues his severe attack on Ronald Reagan and his administration due to Reagan's "unimaginable" (Kushner, ibid 175) visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, and his refusal to acknowledge or respond seriously to the growing death toll from AIDS in the mid-1980s. Despite a great deal of disapproval and controversy, Kushner still believes that: the play’s experiment remains useful and entertaining. And while I am wary of a tendency, given the absence of God, to substitute the judgment of History for the judgment of Heaven, I believe that History will judge Reagan and Bush harshly; not occupying the same circle of Hell as Hitler, but numbered among the damned". (Kushner, ibid 178)

Similarly, in response to the criticisms of the analogies between the Nazis and the political right in the 1980s and the 1990s in America and England spoken by Zillah, Kushner explains that "we're so allergic to politics in the theatre and I wanted to treat that. I wondered, while I was writing it, what if, in the middle of this well-made, little four-wall drama someone stood up and said well, what's the most obnoxious thing anyone could say in 1985? 'You've just reelected Adolf Hitler'" (Szentgyorgyi, 15). It is crucial in this regard to highlight the fact that the structure of A Bright Room obviously reflects Brecht's influence on Tony Kushner. Being the most Brechtian of Kushner's plays, the published version of the play divides the drama into two parts, each consisting of several scenes as well as a prologue and an epilogue; a structure which immediately calls into mind Brecht's seminal essay "A Short Organum for the Theatre." The play includes "Brecht-like titles and projected pictures"(Bigsby, Modern American Drama: 1945–2000, 419). Such a point, again, reminds the audience/readers of Erwin Piscator's very powerful technique of film

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projections during the performance. Thematically, the play reflects on the need for average people to recognize evil and unite to battle it, even when the obstacles and hardships seem enormously strong. In facing that difficult subject matter, Kushner also faces Brecht's theories and his example as a dramatist, attempting to maintain those aspects of Brecht's style that might help him while struggling to move far beyond Brecht in establishing his own individual dramatic voice. The eminent critic Christopher Bigsby writes that A Bright Room is "a startlingly original work, it is allusive and lyrical, displaying that mixture of sensual delight and the unpleasant that he had seen in The Threepenny Opera" (Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 92). However, it is important to note that it is also a nightmare borne out of catastrophic social and political upheaval. To create such a nightmare, Kushner resorts to portraying his central character suffering so completely from paralyzing fear that she cannot respond to the evils around her. In fact, if Brecht provides Kushner with a very powerful model for addressing political ideas in a fluid structural technique, it is the latter who dramatizes its events by creating an immense historical panorama with his own unique dramatic voice. Kushner's early play, A Bright Room Called Day is, according to its author, a play about "exile" (Weber, 112). It has two settings, one fixed in the past, 1932 Berlin, the other in a present that changes with each production of the play; a fascinating idea that says much about Kushner's views of history and contemporary society. The play begins as the political and social conditions paving the way for Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s. As the New Year begins, the Weimar Republic, holding an extremely shaky power over the country, is meeting strong opposition from Hitler and his fascist Nazis, as well as opposition from the KPD, Germany's Communist Party. All three parties are rallying the masses and vying for power. Within six months, the Weimar Coalition is defeated. Within another month, the Nazi party takes the majority of seats in the German Parliament. Weimar Coalition and KPD members attempt to unify against the Nazis, but the plot ultimately fails, and Hitler is elected Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Kushner also argues that the major powers of the German Left "were entirely unable to form a United Front to stop the rise of fascism. (Kushner, A Bright Room xii-xiii). Kushner sees in this a parallel with contemporary America, where the concerns of the Left are continually undermined by the conservative Right. Each production of the play, Kushner writes in the production notes, requires a continual updating to reflect, "whatever evildoing is prevalent at the time of the production" (Kushner, ibid x).

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The play opens with its characters gathered around a table, drinking to celebrate the New Year. The setting is Berlin. It is New Year's Eve 1932, and the lives of a group of friends are about to undergo massive change. The group includes Agnes Eggling, a moderately successful bit player in German films, Baz, a gay man who works for the Berlin Institute for Human Sexuality; Paulinka, a featured player and budding star in commercial films; Annabella Gotchling, a Communist who works as a graphic designer; and Husz, a one-eyed cinematographer from Hungary. United in their dread and distaste for the Nazi party, all the characters fearfully resort to some kind of escape into their own individual form of exile. Each one of them differed regarding the ways to respond to the approaching evil of the Nazi. Agnes Eggling, the major character of the play, struggles for survival with a group of close friends who worry about what is happening so suddenly in their country. She is unable to respond in the face of the rising evil. With the rise of fascism in Germany, Agnes helplessly expresses the powerlessness of individuals as fascism descends upon them. Her inaction is mirrored by the more engaged Zillah Katz who interrupts the action set in the 1930s Nazi Germany and shares in the 1980s a feeling of hopelessness about the political situation in which she is trapped. As a powerless member of her society, Zillah's reactions to her dilemma cannot go beyond writing a hate mail to Ronald Reagan. However futile, it is the only way she can find to respond. The prologue, named "Evening Meal in a Windstorm", is set on January 1, 1932, as Agnes and her friends usher in the New Year. From the corner of the stage, behind a stack of books and a wooden desk, Zillah Katz, separate from the main action of the play, is seen reading what appears to be the story we are watching. The friends are debating politics with Gotchling noting that "Capitalism is a system of . . . of . . .", with Paulinka sarcastically completing her statement: "Digestion! A digestive system!" (Kushner, A Bright Room 3-4). The debate has a good sense of humor as the characters do not yet seem to grasp the catastrophe which is going to take place. Agnes reflects her own feeling of safety as she exults: "We live in Berlin. It's 1932. I feel relatively safe" (Kushner, ibid 5). The tightly knit group drinks the whole night and they together compose a story about a night watchman who has spent his last few coins on a woolen coat to protect him against the harsh night wind. Ultimately, the watchman realizes the coat is not enough protection against the wild cold until he helplessly dies. In the next scene, Agnes and her lover, Husz, are seen in typical domestic situation. Husz returns home with a lemon as a gift for Agnes,

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but he feels anxious to make love and both complain about the lack of interesting film projects. Agnes is doing extra work on a film whose director is only interested in her "jolly twinkle" (Kushner, ibid 10), which she must deliver in crowd scenes. Simultaneously, Husz laments having ever left his native country Hungary. In "All Day in the Rain", the next scene, Agnes is discussing psychotherapy with Paulinka feeling that "psychoanalysis makes more sense than Communism" (Kushner, ibid 14), which Agnes has begun to flirt with. Paulinka is not impressed with Agnes's new-found passion for Communism: "You don't have a political bone in your body" "(Kushner, ibid 14). She is not a Communist and that is why she does not "have to call sweaty people I don't like 'comrade'" (Kushner, ibid 14). Paulinka strongly believes that Communism is a dangerous ailment from which Agnes "will recover" (Kushner, ibid 15). This scene is significant as it is set in counterpoint with Zillah's first interruption. At this moment, the audience/reader realizes that this is not simply a tale of Germany and Hitler in the 1930s. It is, by contrast, the story of Ronald Reagan's America in the mid-1980s. Zillah's first interruption, entitled "The Small Voice: Letter to the President" in which she is writing a furious letter to the president is very expressive. She argues that she is going to purchase a computer only to keep up the flow of mail protesting the corruption of Reagan's administration. She is quite sure that her letters are futile as "these get sent to the FBI, analyzed, Xeroxed and burned" (Kushner, ibid 17), claiming that "For me and my cause, money is no object" (Kushner, ibid 17-18). With the main characters and their circumstances established, the formation of that past setting needs a contemporary counterpart. This is why it is time for Kushner to add a contemporary perspective which can best be depicted through the inclusion of Zillah's character. Kushner argues that such a contemporary figure is intended to "polarize an audience, separating those who saw the value in holding a miscreant like Reagan up to an agreed-upon standard of evil from those who felt such an exercise to be preposterous and jejune" (Kushner, ibid 178). Zillah, like Kushner, strongly believes that Hitler set an unprecedented standard of evil so great that subsequent villains have paled by comparison, but still do much evil. For her, Ronald Reagan is her Hitler. Linda Winer points out that Zillah: dismisses the notion that Hitler's evil was different – in more than degree – from evil today. She wants to be somewhere where she can see the danger. "If there's any safety anywhere, it is there." Kushner believes the devil is most dangerous when he becomes invisible. Whether one agrees with

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Kushner's politics or even his dramaturgy, it's a hell of a good point. (Winer, 69)

In the next scene, Kushner introduces another major character; Die Alte who is "a very old but hard to tell how old – somewhere between 70 and dead-for-20-years" (Kushner, A Bright Room viii). The ironic juxtaposition of the two worlds of Agnes and Zillah is now given a third dimension. It is quite obvious that the appearance of Die Alte represents those people who have suffered before Agnes's. It is also an incarnation, not only of the past, but also of the grimly isolated present and future of both Agnes and Zillah. Die Alte reflects on the coming of an earlier, unnamed war: War was declared. Which war, I don't remember. We wore corsets then; ... I heard the snap of the flags crack in the wind, and the men marched past. ... A wonderful time / not now. . . (Kushner, ibid 21-22)

Die Alte's previous "celebration of militarism" (Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 99) should be read as a call for collectivity, not necessarily a pro-war sentiment. Gradually, Kushner attempts to prepare the audience/reader to assimilate the play's major theme which focuses primarily on the characters' helplessness, raising questions about what an individual can do against the surging tide of unwanted political change. The action jumps from one scene into another in a purely Brechtian technique. It is now June 2, 1932 when Agnes is struggling to read Marx's Das Kapital. She is interrupted by Baz and Gotchling who, to her horror, have just returned from a Nazi rally. Baz explains that "You must have an intimate knowledge of the enemy" (Kushner, ibid 24). It is now November 6, 1932, where Agnes and Gotchling are happily discussing the Nazi defeat in the Second Reichstag Elections in which the Communists have gained twelve seats while the Nazis have lost thirty-four. Husz rejoices that "the masses are on the move" (Kushner, ibid 47). In a highly impressive interlude, Husz imagines making a film that will "make Trotsky weep" (Kushner, ibid 47), for the eye he lost in the 1919 Hungarian revolution in Budapest. Commenting on Husz's optical defect Christopher Bigsby writes, "Having had one eye put out by progressives, he sees an altogether different world. It is as though

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Beckett were debating with Brecht" (Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 102). The story is actually more significantly about the cost of political engagement and of the changes resulting from shifting political fortunes. Zillah's second interruption is entitled "The Politics of Paranoia" where she recalls the happiest time of her life; it is Watergate, a general term for a series of political scandals during the presidency of Richard Nixon that resulted in the indictment of several of Nixon's closest advisors and the ultimate resignation of President Nixon himself in 1974. For Zillah, and consequently for Kushner as well, it was an era that was "dramatic and garish and incredibly funny. Not at all like the bone-naked terror" (Kushner, A Bright Room 54) of the present in which "I sense parallels" (Kushner, ibid 55) between the present and the rise of Hitler. The characters now begin to realize that Hitler will become Germany's chancellor. Agnes's fears are beginning to paralyze her, as when she explains that she feels: like I'm in a film, all the time. A newsreel. I see all these events already on film, not just Hitler, but us: no sex, eating and crying. All public events. There is a title: 'PERCHED ON THE BRINK OF A GREAT HISTORIC CRIME'. (Kushner, ibid 57)

Kushner's persistent idea of the necessity of interconnection is clearly revealed. The play's central figure, Agnes, is certainly cut off from a sense of connection, a feeling articulated by Agnes when she says to Baz: "I feel no connection, no kinship with most of the people I see. I watch them in the underground come and go and I think, "Are you a murderer? Are you? And there are so many people" (Kushner, A Bright Room 61-2). Agnes is overwhelmed by a sense of loss and isolation. However, despite the fact that the play paints a mostly bleak picture of the failure of collective action in the Weimar Republic, this failure only highlights the necessity of collectivity and connection. Once again, the primary focus of interest is the contemporary American 1980s figure Zillah Katz. Kushner provides the audience/reader with another stormy interruption made by Zillah. In "German Lessons", Zillah is haunted by both the past, as represented by Agnes's frightening world, and her own present. She warns that understanding the late twentieth century requires "not caution or circumspection but moral exuberance. Overstatement is your friend: use it" (Kushner, ibid 70). Her comparisons of Ronald Reagan to Hitler are part of this overstatement. Zillah launches a severe attack on Reagan due to his indifference to the rising number of victims dying of AIDS, the unprecedented buildup of the

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military force, and a number of domestic socio-political issues, drawing parallels between Reagan and the Nazi. In effect, Zillah's/Kushner's direct blunt attack of presidency has garnered universal disapproval in daring to compare Reagan to Hitler. New York Times reviewer Frank Rich describes the play as "the most infuriating play of 1991" (Rich, 11). Zillah deliberately and insistently offends the contemporary audience with such a horrifying parallel between the Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the present-day America of the mid-1980s. Zillah's pivotal interruption deserves quoting in full: just because a certain ex-actor-turned-President who shall go nameless sat idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn't even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help, does this mean he merits comparison to a certain fascist-dictator anti-Semitic mass-murdering psychopath who shall also remain nameless? OF COURSE NOT! I mean I ask you – how come the only people who ever say "Evil" anymore are southern cracker televangelists with radioactive blue eyeshadow? . . . REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST DON'T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO! (Kushner, A Bright Room 71)

Despite the huge anger and disapproval this Reagan/Hitler comparison has generated, Kushner's comparison, however, may be read/interpreted in a different way. One can safely argue that by drawing this comparison, Tony Kushner unintentionally affirms American values through their very critique. In fact, what many critics have overlooked is that in the context of Nazism, Zillah's outburst demonstrates an assertion of her ability, and consequently, Kushner's, to criticize the national government without reprisal. As much as Kushner attempts to draw a comparison between Nazi Germany and the 1980s' America, the contrast between the two becomes unavoidable in the course of the play: while Agnes and her companions risk death for simply belonging to the Communist Party, Zillah expresses her vitriol going about streets with her "can of spray paint" (Kushner, ibid 71) and even direct letters to Ronald Reagan with impunity. Although Zillah is likely correct that "crazy, hostile letters" (Kushner, ibid 17) like hers "get sent to the FBI, analyzed, Xeroxed and burned" (Kushner, ibid 17), she also firmly believes in the undermining power of her "poisoned post" (Kushner, ibid 18), and "In this way, through osmosis, little droplets of contagion are being rubbed into your leathery flesh every day" (Kushner, ibid 17-18). Underneath Zillah's hostility lies the belief that every American voice has the potential to be heard in one way or another. The U.S. administration permits Zillah to feel empowered while simultaneously committing her seditious mail to flames before it ever

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reaches the President. Nevertheless, Zillah continues to exercise her own right of protest; a right her Germanic counterparts in the past may never experience. Thus, Tony Kushner's critique of the American society actually replicates and reinforces its values. This is actually what Philip Auslander has meant by the fact that postmodernist political theatre aims particularly at 'resisting' the status quo, although it works from within the same culture it resists. In this respect, one can safely argue that postmodernist theatre, represented in this study by Tony Kushner's political dramas, recognizes the impossibility of standing outside representation and advocates resistance from within the system of representation itself. However, one can also argue that Auslander's resistant politics could be considered equally utopian in the sense that such resistance, coming as it does from within the dominant culture, cannot easily avoid replicating its values. This is what exactly happens in Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day. However hostile Zillah's insurgence may be, it is contextualized and diminished by the surrounding narrative of the Nazi era, a time when freedom of speech was a mirage and any opposition to Hitler's authority was completely squashed. In the beginning of the play, Agnes's house acts as a nexus for a tightly knit group of German intellectuals – artists, actresses, and philosophers – who together create a homogenous community of anti-fascists. Despite Agnes's best efforts, nothing can prevent the unstoppable progression of events leading to her group's fragmentation, as Kushner demonstrates through a series of slides ominously announcing the Nazi takeover. The slides, containing facts and photographs from the Third Reich and detailing the history of the period during scene transitions, keeping the audience occupied and informed, provide a brutal sense of dramatic irony by bringing the real world of history into the fictional world of Agnes's narrative. In this respect, one can, again, recognize the influence of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was an antifascist pro-Communist playwright. In Brecht’s early work, when he was still writing in Weimar Germany, he wrote several agitprop or 'agitation propaganda' plays. These plays expressed strong communist themes and were intended to agitate an audience to action. In such plays, Brecht employed various dramatic tools, such as slides, to heighten the presentation. Likewise, Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day calls for the use of slides, which not only indicate the passage of time but also help to create an effect Brecht called 'Verfremdungseffekt' also known as the alienation or estrangement effect. As the first act of the play ends, Kushner's postmodern dramaturgy is heightened with the introduction of the Devil in a scene entitled

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"Welcome". Kushner raises the play's nightmarish gloomy atmosphere by introducing the Devil himself as a character whose name is Herr Gottfried Swetts, an exporter from Hamburg. There is also a quite impressive show of theatrical spectacle when Husz literally calls up the Devil from beneath the ground. If the foreboding descent of Germany into evil has not been sufficiently foreshadowed by this point, the Devil makes it clear when he informs his stunned onlookers, "I have taken up temporary residence in this country." (Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day 75). Herr Swetts appears sickly, almost asthmatic, until he delivers an extraordinarily powerful monologue cataloging his years in the European wilderness, culminating in a resurgence of strength and confidence as his position is restored in the world. Swett, the Devil, lyrically relates the darkest and bloodiest eras of the past, ominously adding that the evils of more recent centuries have made him "Very strong! Very hungry!" (Kushner, ibid 79). His lyrical recounting of his autobiography reveals that: It's not the danger that you see that's the danger. I become increasingly diffuse like powdered gas taking to air, not less potent, but more, spreading myself around. (Kushner, ibid 80)

Before vanishing, the Devil warns Paulinka that she cannot imagine "the scope of what's ahead" (Kushner, ibid 80) and "the great possibilities in the Modern World. The depths . . . have not been plumbed. Yet." (Kushner, ibid 80). As the Devil exits, the terrified Agnes, who has been unable to utter a word during this display, finally finds her voice, but all she can utter is a polite and friendly welcome to Germany. In the second part of the play, Kushner continues to build up the terrifying atmosphere of the Nazi Germany. It is February 27, 1933 when there is another encounter between Agnes and Die Alte, who coaxes Agnes to join her in another nightmarish verse in which the parallels with Hitler become obvious: When the little penny man Bangs the pots and pans about, No one dares to go downstairs, No one dares to throw him out. (Kushner, ibid 88)

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Agnes remembers this little song from her childhood, but Die Alte warns that “memory is like the wind. Tricky. Horrible things forgotten overnight. Pleasant nothings remembered for years" (Kushner, ibid 88). Their singing is interrupted when Agnes notices a great fire in the distance, which caught the Reichstag building. Zillah interrupts again, recalling an old photograph she has seen of a woman among a huge crowd of enthusiastic Nazis. The woman is the only one not offering the Nazi salute and is seen standing with both hands holding her purse. This actually moves Zillah to acknowledge her allegiance to and sympathy with this anonymous woman who defies, in her own simple way, a great political force she alone can never stop. A few weeks roll by to March 12, 1933, Agnes and Gotchling are making anti-Nazi posters, which worry Agnes who feels great distress with the present situation. At the same time, she cannot make a decision in any particular direction. She is very frightened due to her political involvements. Gotchling angrily responds to her fears rebuking her for thinking too much without being able to make a decision, "Feel feel feel feel feel. So much feeling. Hold still. Don't feel. Think for a change" (Kushner, ibid 102). Gotchling tries to persuade Agnes to allow her apartment to serve as a safe house for escaping Jews and dissidents, but Agnes resists as she is very much concerned about her safety. Responding angrily to Gotchling's persuasion, Agnes furiously asks Gotchling a very embarrassing question: "What are people like me supposed to do if people like you just leave?" (Kushner, ibid 103). Gotchling, however, insists that Agnes's apartment is bitterly needed to aid the cause, while she laments that "Art . . . is never enough, it never does enough" (Kushner, ibid 105). At this point, Tony Kushner poses a highly significant question about the power of art in society. This question actually worries all artists and theoreticians who are interested in the marriage of art and politics in what is called 'political art'. It is a question of efficacy or whether the work of art is efficient in achieving the desired effect or not? In fact, the term 'efficacy' is often used with respect to political theatre in order to define the actual impact of a performance. Baz Kershaw has adapted the term, which he phrases 'performance efficacy' to suit the assessment of political theatre. He defines performance efficacy as "the potential that theatre may have to make the immediate effects of performance influence, however minutely, the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities" (Kershaw, 1). If a given performance played a small role in changing few people's opinions of the Iraq War, for instance, then it could be said, in Kershaw's concept, to have been somewhat efficacious. It is actually such kind of efficacy which Kushner's political theatre seeks to

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achieve. Kushner's concern about the power of art to cause action or change is an understandable worry. However, one can safely argue that theatre, in general, and Kushner's theatre, in particular, does possess the power to pose questions, change attitudes, and inspire action. The debate between Agnes and her friend Gotchling is heightened and the frightening atmosphere of the play accelerates. As a result, the audience is painfully aware of the pending disaster that the comrades sense only vaguely and generally without comprehension of its horrific magnitude. Gotchling summarizes what they comprehend when she says: we live in a country where theory falls silent in the face of fact, where progress can be reversed overnight, where the enemy has stolen everything, our own words from us. (Kushner, A Bright Room 105)

Gotchling believes that under the Nazi's regime, she has no right to speak because the Nazi system has deprived her from her own right to express her views and opinions. For her, Hitler's sovereignty to dominate all aspects of German life was unquestionable, even the right to talk. In effect, these lines are highly significant in their sharp contrast to all that Zillah possesses and promotes. As I have previously explained, Zillah, despite her furious rants and assaults on Reagan, is a living testament to the potential for progress and the right to free speech. Agnes and her friends, who are far less fortunate, are deprived of one of the basic human rights: the right to speak. Such exaltation of America as the antithesis of German repression undermines Zillah's rage against Reagan's dictatorship, demonstrating instead the radical divergence of the two political systems. In the next scene, Zillah, in another interruption, continues her severe assault on Ronald Reagan, calling him "the Beast"' (Kushner, ibid 107). Noting that the number of 'the Beast' is 666, Zillah holds up a sign revealing that the three sixes of Reagan's name: R-O-N-A-L-D-W-I-L-SO-N-R-E-A-G-A-N, adding that upon Reagan's retirement from the presidency he moved to 666 Mayfair Road, but "he had them change the address because, well, he reads the Book" (Kushner, ibid 108). It is very clear that Kushner uses Zillah in obvious ways to connect the evils of the past to those he perceives in the present, but her presence also raises more complex questions about the meaning of the dark disasters of history – in this case it is the Nazi's takeover – on those who live in the present. Back again to the major setting of the play where most of the action takes place; it is Agnes's apartment where Baz, Agnes, and Husz are debating the feverish arrests and the ruthless police interrogations by the

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Nazis. Baz recounts the arrest of his colleagues and his own interrogation during which he was severely slapped. He also explained that he has planned to escape to Munich. Baz's strong sense of despair is highly intensified when he reveals that realizing the escape plan is difficult, he has decided to commit suicide instead. However, he has not been able to carry out such a decision. Baz's self-determination is not in his hands. His paralyzing fear prevents him from taking any action against the overwhelming danger around him. The only way out of this dilemma is to flee, as he finally has arranged for a fake passport to leave Germany as soon as possible. Zillah's next interruption is highly significant to the overall understanding of the play. She imagines that the unsmiling woman in the photograph of the Nazi rally may be Agnes, whom she believes "hears me. No answer. I ask her how she died" (Kushner, ibid 117). Zillah considers the various possible deaths Agnes may have suffered – in a concentration camp, in an air raid – but finally believes she hears the woman tell her that she died, "not in the camps, and not in the war, but at home, in front of a cozy fire, I died of a broken heart" (Kushner, ibid 118). Kushner has made it clear in this scene that although the horrors of the past are so terrible, the present horrors are far more unbearable. Throughout a simple contrast between how a person dies in the past and how he/she dies in the present, Kushner allows Zillah to recognize that unlike the terrors of past history, the most dangerous place to be is at home where, as Christopher Bigsby writes, "naïve commitments and studious evasions, of indifference deepening to hostility and then to evil" (Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 103), reach a high level of absurd horror. In another encounter between Agnes and Die Alte, the latter urges Agnes away from exile, toward the connection that Agnes has strenuously resisted. "Time is all that separates you from me" (Kushner, A Bright Room 122), Die Alte tells Agnes, adding "It's bad to be too much alone" (Kushner, ibid 122). Though the play largely bemoans the failure of various factions of the Weimar Republic to unite and stop the advance of Nazism, there is some hope to be found in the connections that emerge between the past and the present, which can point Zillah toward a better future. Few days later, Husz and Paulinka turn up at Agnes's flat following a riot in which Husz has been injured. He only survives because Paulinka uses her screen fame to secure his safety. Obviously intending to resist the Nazis, Husz shows Agnes a large kitchen knife he carries with him for that purpose. Fearing for her safety, Agnes asks Husz to leave her apartment, as Agnes later explains to her that "Justice . . . is vanishing. Like all the air in the earth's atmosphere getting used up, like life's blood running freely

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on the ground, pouring from a wound too big to stop up; you watch it spill, watching yourself die" (Kushner, A Bright Room 128). Changing his mind about resisting the Nazis, Husz produces two visas intended for their escape, ironically to Chicago. Agnes, alone among her friends, refuses to flee the country. Husz sadly goes without her, explaining "It will not be hard to leave Berlin. But it will be very hard to leave you" (Kushner, ibid 130). Paulinks and Baz say goodbye to Agnes as they leave Berlin. Paulinka ironically notes that the Communist Husz has fled to America while she is heading for Russia. On the other hand, Baz lyrically laments the failure of the Communist movement as he departs to Paris. Later, Gotchling, the only friend remaining in Berlin resisting the Nazis, attempts to persuade Agnes to let him use her apartment for the secret underground resistance. Agnes again refuses causing him to attack her saying: If you say no to this, Agnes, you're dead to me. And we both need desperately to keep at least some part of you alive. Say yes, and I promise to carry you with me, the part of you that's dying now. I can do that, I'm stronger than you. Say yes, and I will take your heart and fold it up in mine, and protect it with my life. And some day I may be able to bring it back to you. You're very fond of regrets, Agnes, but the time for regretting is gone. (Kushner, ibid 141)

Agnes reluctantly surrenders to Gotchling's pressures, and she is, finally, providing one of the Communist comrades – Rosa Malek – with a shelter before her clandestine escape. In her conversation with Rosa Malek, Agnes expresses her distress because she is unable to help in the secret resistance due to an overwhelming sense of fear which prevents her from doing "something to help but I'm simply not able. The arrests. Every day they execute . . ." (Kushner, ibid 145). Towards the end of the play, Agnes's moral lassitude ultimately succumbs to passivity as she grows emotionally paralyzed, a response symbolized by the diminishment of the physical environment around her. Her life and circle of friends continue to diminish as she attempts to survive, watching others flee, die, or like her, become immobilized by fear. She prefers to remain ensconced in her room, afraid of what is taking place in the outside world. All alone in a dark corner of her apartment, Agnes is little more than a trapped animal. In the play's epilogue, she lyrically explains her dilemma: I live in a modern flat On one side lives nightmare, on the other despair. Above me, exhaustion,

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As the play concludes, Die Alte joins Agnes to offer another nightmarish view of the world, trying to predict the postwar horrors and "ruins of home," (Kushner, ibid 149) where "everyone was patchy, delirious, diseased, and waiting for the end . . ." (Kushner, ibid 149). Zillah comes to see herself as somehow connected to Agnes, whose lonely resistance could potentially inspire greater efforts in Zillah. The final words in the play are telling, suggesting the often-unconscious effects of one era on another. Zillah says: "The borders are full of holes" (Kushner, ibid 151). The phrase is a repetition of one used in a conversation between Agnes and Rosa Malek, a young Communist woman who is the first to stay with Agnes after she has reluctantly agreed to use her apartment as a safe house. In Rosa's usage, the term 'borders' is quite literal, referring to a passage between Germany and Czechoslovakia. As the word mysteriously bleeds over into Zillah's present, however, it takes on a more abstract but still seemingly optimistic meaning. The circumstances of Agnes's time may spark in Zillah a resistance that could allow for a brighter future for America. The suggestion seems more clear that Zillah's bridging of this 'border' between past and present through her strange interconnection with Agnes has taught her something that will allow her to return and function in the right-wing America she detests. To return to Kushner's interpretation of the play, she has discovered the 'space,' what Kushner terms the 'bright room called day' in which the seeds for a "successful Left revolution" (Szentgyorgyi, 14), might grow. Whereas her exile in Berlin can be read as a form of cowardice, her return to America suggests a willingness to do battle. Bigsby's assessment of the play's resolution provides a clear view of Kushner's approach to history in the play: Agnes alone stays, [in Germany] offering her home as a safe house for escaping Party members, and accepting the fate to which that may condemn her. And as the membrane that they believed separated them from the realities of the street begins to become permeable so, too, does that between past and present as Zillah feels the presence of Agnes and Agnes converses with Die Alte, time collapsing, bringing separate experiences together into the metaphor that constitutes the play. (Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 103)

Bigsby identifies not only the aforementioned 'border' between past and present, but also a border between 'the personal and the political'; another

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conflict that Kushner's work continually seeks to negotiate. In fact, Bigsby's description echoes almost exactly Kushner's comments on these matters from "Notes About Political Theater": "there is a membrane, however permeable it may be, that divides inside from outside. The private is a preserve, a place of resistance . . . The political, in one sense, is a realm of conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth, even in the face of the fearfulness, the caution and conservatism of the past haunted interior" (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theater" 26). In the modern world and on the modern stage, the personal has become the political. However reluctantly, Kushner exiles Zillah and Agnes, ending the play by acknowledging they can play a role in the struggle against the horrible conditions in which they have found themselves. Yet these roles cannot be played alone, and Zillah's declaration of "an end to the exile"(Kushner, A Bright Room 170) perhaps suggests a sense of her need to join forces with like-minded individuals. Meanwhile, Agnes fearfully is waiting for the catastrophic disasters to come: Clubfoot Smell of sulphur Yellow dog No shadow. —Welcome to Germany. (Kushner, ibid 151)

It is quite obvious that the characters in Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day are portrayed as theatrical manifestations of the victims of fascism and Nazism. They see their hopes for a socialist Germany collapsing and their friendships scattered by their fears and denials over what is happening in their country. At the same time, they barely glimpse the depths of evil that victimizes them as they flee, either from the real world of the danger; that is the geographic center of their own victimization, or, like Agnes, who resorts to her own isolated self. For Agnes, the isolation is both physical as she hides in a corner of her small apartment, and psychological as she tragically retreats from the outer world, finding a solace in her loneliness. In point of fact, Agnes's character evokes a great amount of sympathy as she tries so desperately to hold onto a Germany she once knew and believes will soon return. Her only glimpse of hope consists in merely surviving until the evil moves away. In his published afterword to the play, Kushner invites those producing it to delete the controversial Zillah interruptions since the years pass and the socio-political realities of the Reagan/Bush eras elapse. It is clear that the play can function without Zillah, but in many respects her elimination

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would be unfortunate. Her interruptions, as explained in this study, attempt to draw the focus on a group of powerless individuals in 1930s' Germany into a parallel with the play's current audience/reader. The play's political power is, to some extent, in the anger she expresses and that streams from the convergence of past and present evils which is so pivotal in the play. As Kushner himself suggests, the play functions in the risk run in: reawakening old nightmares, of being overwhelmed with horror. Conjuring up the future is even more treacherous, because to attempt to envision the future we must resort to what is known, to the past, and if the past as past is nearly unbearable, how much more unbearable to look ahead and see old nightmares staring back at us. (Kushner, ibid 183)

To conclude this chapter, A Bright Room is inspired by Brecht, but is purely Kushnerian in its theatrics: in the juxtaposition of different times and places which is actually a major feature of postmodern dramaturgy; in the lyrical realism of the dialogue exchanges among the characters; and in a sense of inevitability regarding change, loss, and the survival of hope. For although the play seeks to push a heavy political message, it is touching in its portrayal of hope. Kushner, by presenting hope, gives an answer to what a play and drama in general could do as a political commitment to give hope to the audience: You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. I don't believe you would bother to write a play if you really had no hope. . . . What I found in the audience response is a huge hunger for political issues and political discussion. So I always wonder: Is it that Americans don't like politics, or is it that so much theater that is political isn't well-done? (Bernstein, 59)

CHAPTER THREE ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES

Tony Kushner's sweeping epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is steeped in politics, particularly influenced by the platforms of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan, Republican President of the United States from 1980-1988, is mentioned often in Kushner’s play. He is the era’s most recognizable political icon, and the success or failure of economic and political policies from the 1980s is usually attributed to his administration. Reagan’s far-reaching economic policies, termed 'Reaganomics', were an attempt to correct many of the economic and social problems Americans had been experiencing since the 1970s. During the 1970s and early-1980s, Americans found renewed interest in ecological awareness and demanded that industry should take steps to save the endangered environment. This led the House of Representatives – The Congress – to pass strict measures that forced American companies to divert profits to environmental controls and cleanup, reducing their ability to modernize and compete with less regulated foreign companies. At the same time, the cost of gas and oil rose quickly to a very high level. Moreover, the American society suffered greatly from unemployment and inflation. In its foreign policy, America was not doing any better abroad, where the Cold War seemed to be favoring the communists. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and the communist power was also gaining leverage in different parts of the world. Americans were the target of many terrorist attacks, one of which was startling where fifty-three Marines and civilian personnel in the American embassy in Iran were held hostage for more than a year, from November 1979 to January 1981. Amidst all this chaos, Reagan was elected the new president of the United States on a platform promising a strong national defense and a tough stance against the communist Soviet Union. He also vowed to reduce the size and cost of government, lower taxes by 30 percent, reduce spending, and control inflation. With the help of a largely Republican

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Senate, Reagan’s foreign policy and 'supply-side economics' met with a mixture of success and failure. On the positive side, inflation and interest rates fell. Between 1983 and 1989, 18 million new jobs were created, and the average price of stocks nearly tripled in value. Many Americans grew very rich, and the country experienced what has been called the longest period of peacetime economic growth in the nation’s history. In his first year in office, Reagan convinced the Congress to budget nearly $200 billion in defense spending, creating an economic windfall through the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history. Tony Kushner took the title for the second part of his epic, Perestroika, from the policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who, faced with America’s tremendous military build-up and economic boom under Reagan, chose to radically change the direction of Russian society. Gorbachev sought to reform the Soviet economy through 'perestroika' a Russian word for 'restructuring', and he introduced glasnost, or 'openness', into political and cultural affairs. Within a few short years, the spread of communism around the world, a major threat that usually worried the Americans, had reversed itself. The Berlin Wall, a longtime symbol of the division between the communist East and the capitalist West, was dramatically dismantled in 1989. Two years later, in December 1991, the Soviet Union’s communist system collapsed; the Cold War was over. The other war that really matters to Angels in America was a domestic one fought between an outnumbered, marginalized, terrified homosexual community and the rest of America, which was largely heterosexual. The discovery of AIDS in 1981 threw both sides into a feverish struggle over rights, recognition, and morality in America. Americans have always been ambivalent about homosexuals. In fact, it is impossible to appreciate the play without understanding something about the history of the AIDS crisis as well as the broader story of gays and lesbians in America. Although men and women have engaged in homosexual behavior in all times and cultures, it was only in the twentieth century that homosexuality came to be seen as a fundamental orientation rather than a specific act. In the United States, the modern gay rights movement began after World War Two, which brought millions of unmarried adults into close contact in large cities far from their families. Gay bars and political organizations existed mostly in secret in the 1950s and 1960s, but New York City's Stonewall riot in 1969 helped usher in a period of growing openness among gays and greater public acceptance. Although gay life flourished in the 1970s, many gays saw the 1980s as a period of retrenchment and tragedy. The first cases of AIDS were diagnosed among gay men in 1981. Within ten years, more than 100,000 people died of the disease in the U.S.

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alone. In the early years of the epidemic, ignorance and fear resulted in widespread discrimination against AIDS patients, and the national media reported the story in a sensationalistic manner, if at all. Gays' anger about the mainstream reaction to AIDS became interlinked with political frustration, as a conservative backlash that began in the late 1970s hindered the cause of gay rights. For many gay activists, Presidents Reagan and Bush symbolized the opposition: both men's administrations were at best uneasy with and often hostile to the gay cause, and Reagan remained silent on the subject of AIDS until 1987. According to Atsushi Fujita, President Reagan “referred to AIDS for the first time in public in 1987 after 25,000 people had already succumbed and scores of others were infected with HIV” (Fujita, 114). Some gay rights activists believe that the American government was deliberately slow in funding the medical research for AIDS and helping AIDS patients. Not only the government but also the mass media at that time was suspected of deliberate passivity and reluctance in reporting the AIDS crisis to the public, and consequently in boosting positive public opinion to solve the crisis. It is actually against this turbulent multidimensional backdrop that Kushner's Angels in America has been written.

Angels in America According to Savran, “not within memory has a new American play been canonized by the press as rapidly as Angels in America,” (Savran, "Ambivalence" 13), since this play “has almost single-handedly resuscitated a category of play that has become almost extinct: the serious Broadway drama that is neither a British import nor a revival” (Savran, ibid 13). John Lahr also declares that “not since Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage” (Lahr, "Earth Angels" 133). In addition to those critics’ encomia, John Clum’s comment that the play is “a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American drama, and of American literary culture” (Clum, Acting Gay, 313), seems appropriate and plausible. While most prominent former gay playwrights – William Hoffman and Larry Kramer come to mind – mainly introduce the issues of the AIDS pandemic and homosexuality in American theater and educate the audience on the theme * Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches, 1993. Angels in America. Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. [All further citations of Angels in America refer to the first combined paperback edition, September 2003, and appear parenthetically in the text].

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of gay rights, Kushner’s Angels in America emphasizes the theme of interconnectedness between people, forgiveness, and community as a whole rather than mere anger or protest against social discrimination. Reasons for the extreme popularity of Kushner’s Angels in America include its Brechtian epic dramatic style, the grand scale of the play running more than 7 hours, and a sensational theatrical effect of an angel on the stage. Above all of these, however, in my opinion, the timing of the play – the appearance of the AIDS pandemic and homophobia during the 1980s – is the most persuasive reason for the groundbreaking success of Kushner's Angels in America. In 1993, the play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which coincidentally was the year that Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States. As a Democrat, Clinton was hailed by some people as a new hope and new era for the United States, since he was expected to bring changes from the previous conservative Republican administration. As noted before, the Reagan administration was criticized by gay rights activists for its conservatism and late response to the AIDS pandemic. In this respect, Michael Schaller writes: During his first term, Reagan avoided discussing the AIDS problem, opposed spending much federal money on research, and exercised no leadership. The president’s attitude began to change after October 1985 when actor and matinee idol Rock Hudson died of the disease. He was a friend of the Reagan’s and his death humanized AIDS for the first family and many ordinary Americans (Schaller, 94).

Frustrated gay rights activists suspected that the Reagan administration’s deliberate ignorance about AIDS constituted an intentional “gay genocide” (Troy, 203). Therefore, Bill Clinton’s election as the President of the United States was interpreted as a new hope for the new era: likewise, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was viewed as a message of new hope for the marginalized homosexuals in America. Tony Kushner's groundbreaking masterpiece Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes examines, in great detail and with varying degrees of anger and empathy, America's immediate and contemporary history by portraying a myriad of themes which are held together by Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the ruins of history as the price of progress. In fact, Tony Kushner turned to Benjamin's image of the Angel of History as the guiding metaphor for his play which is made up of two long plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. German critic Walter Benjamin, whose well-known book Understanding Brecht most influenced Kushner's theatre in the same way as his "Thesis on the Philosophy of History" particularly inspired Angels in America. In the core

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of this essay, Benjamin uses a strange visual allegory for the presentation of his theories on history written within the context of the Nazi advance across Europe. By gazing at Paul Klee's painting, "Angelus Novus," the philosopher develops a parable of history in his ninth thesis. Benjamin's eloquent depiction of Klee's painting deserves quoting in full: A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 257-258)

In Benjamin's metaphor, the angel of history stands for both the absence of the idea of a future and the intolerable situation of a present. Trapped between a past and a horrific future, the angel just passively gazes at the catastrophe of the history of human kind. Thus, the paradise becomes a real tempest that gets caught under his wings and pushes him into an unknown future. This way, Benjamin's angel looks like a bird of bad omens rather than a prophetical messenger. The philosopher's upset and pessimistic view on history and progress is at the core of Kushner's plays, in general, and Angels in America in particular. Like his first major play, A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner in Angels in America follows in the tradition of large important political dramas influenced mainly by Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who is credited with the creation of a unique brand of epic theatre. As previously noted in this study, Brecht’s theories of epic theatre not only contain many of the qualities of epic plot structure but also assume a strong political aspect; he was a staunch communist and held virulent antiwar beliefs. His plays were didactic, which means he wanted to teach his audiences something, and his lessons were usually stated strongly and openly. Furthermore, Brecht wanted his spectators to be active participants in the theatre and think critically while watching his plays, rather than become absorbed in emotion as passive witnesses. To manage this, he attempted to alienate his audiences by exposing theatrical devices such as lighting and scene changes. He also broke up the action of his plays – with disruptive elements such as ironic songs and placards that explained

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forthcoming plot points – so spectators were not allowed to become absorbed in the story but were instead constantly forced to reevaluate characters and their actions. Through this process, Brecht felt, audiences would better understand and appreciate a play’s political messages. Tony Kushner shares Brecht's view that the stage can function to encourage a progressive society. In Angels in America, he believes in progress. However, he presents a battle of political ideologies in order to explore the deeper anxieties of its characters through their visions of the ways power affects and controls their lives. As such, characters discover their own strengths and weaknesses while buffeted by social changes that are sometimes more complex than they can imagine. It is often presumed that political drama cannot, by virtue of its temporary topicality, attain universality. Phrased differently, Kushner runs the risk of his plays losing relevancy when he uses fresh political topics in his work. However, Kushner writes: It is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to write a play intended to enter into public discourse that is free of any reference to current events, to news. It's hard to understand why anyone would want to. There's an old fantasy that if one writes a play void of any reference to the world in which we live, void of all reference to political parties, to popular culture, to money and to global conflict, one will be producing something more able of gliding through this present distasteful moment and up into that hyperborean realm toward which, we are told, all artists aspire: eternity, universality, immortality – the canon. Nothing seems plainer to me than that work that has attained such status was not designed to do so, but rather came out of the urgent now; that any such universality as a work may claim must proceed from its particulars to the general, and that art that strives for universality winds up being generic, and dull; and also, finally, that eternity is a very long time, and immortality almost certainly an impossibility. (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theatre" 29)

Kushner's politics are based in a socialism inspired, in part, by Brecht's dramatic aesthetic, which created for Kushner a template for political drama. Angels in America is certainly inspired by aspects of Brechtian theatre, but is primarily fueled by the writings of German thinker and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Kushner is extremely political, and he, too, wants his audiences to think and to learn something, though he allows more subtlety of expression than Brecht does. In Kushner’s play, the strong political ideas are woven into the fabric of the plot and sub-plots, and the audience is left with an impression rather than an obvious message. Controversial ideas are usually presented from both sides, leaving the audience free to draw their own conclusions. Like Brecht, he

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strives for a very theatrical presentation that does not attempt complete illusion. He recommends a minimal amount of scenery for Angels in America, with all the rapid changes of location, realistic scenery would be quite cumbersome to a production. Furthermore, Kushner suggests the scene changes be handled quickly, in full view of the audience (without blackouts) using both stagehands and actors, which is, in fact, a very Brechtian technique. However, while Brecht strongly advocated communism and often hit audiences on the head with his overt pacifist rhetoric, Kushner lets his characters and their philosophies speak for themselves. The concept of the American Dream, for example, is viewed from several perspectives, none of which is presented as right or wrong Roy Cohn, for instance, finds the American Dream in the struggle for political power; Joe embraces an idealistic, perhaps naive vision of America as a land of freedom, opportunity, and justice for all; embittered Belize and Louis, scorned by mainstream society for their openly gay lifestyles, find America oppressive and hypocritical, yet they continue their struggles for rights and recognition. By presenting political ideas in this way, Kushner opens a political dialogue/debate with his audiences, rather than simply shouting political messages at them. By so doing, Kushner struggles with a redefinition of the realistic theatre. His imaginative variations extend the borders of his theatre to include surreal projections of both the interior and exterior lives of his characters. In Angels in America, as in A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner pushes the borders of realistic theatre further by combining fundamentally realistic characters and situations with ghosts, historical displacements, and outright fantasy to alter the way audiences experience the characters' ordinary lives. He describes his attraction to Brecht as deriving to some extent from the ways in which Brecht: married the illusion/reality paradigm at the heart of all Western theatre since the Italian Renaissance and Shakespeare to its counterpart in Marx. The distinction that Marx makes between the real and the social, between the world of illusion created by relationships between producers of commodities, and some unknowable real of which the social is an imaginary reflection, between the real labor which creates goods in a commodity-producing system, and the form of the commodity into which the traces of labor, of human relationship has disappeared. Theatre, like dialectical materialist analysis, examines the magic of perception and the political, ideological employment to which the magic is put. (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theatre" 29)

Actually, there are two different styles of dramatic writing and presentation. Although realism has had a prominent position in twentieth century

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theatre, Kushner resorts to a kind of non-realist theatre that has served him to express many of the tensions and uncertainties of modern life. Kushner's non-realist theatre takes a variety of startling forms; audacity and challenge are fundamental to the highly theatrical expression of Kushner's non-realism, which theatre practitioners and audiences alike find energizing and compelling as well as sometimes puzzling and disturbing. This is exactly the case with Angels in America that is a brilliant example of the kind of experimentation with form in which Kushner juxtaposes realistic and nonrealistic elements to create his vision of life, in general, and his political vision in particular. Such a political vision is mainly provided by the play's themes, or ideas, as much as by the plot or characters. Kushner's Angels deals with a number of sensitive issues in current American society, many of which are of primary significance: the struggle between liberal and conservative politics, the polarity of American politics, the conflict over the moral and social dilemmas of homosexuality, which has caused the greatest consternation, the AIDS pandemic and its consequences on the lives of individuals and society at large, and the attempt to find moral footing in a multicultural and diverse democratic society in which values seem to be constantly shifting. This myriad of interesting themes is closely interwoven together by Kushner's original use of the image of the angel. Moreover, Kushner's Angels demonstrates that he has an overwhelming affection for political digression; an unfolding human drama interrupted by bursts of social theorizing and debate. The play also highlights Kushner's particular skill for bringing together wildly disparate plot lines, political theorems, and aesthetic motifs, mixing the political and social with the sexual and the personal. His own sense of the conjunction of politics and art is that: all theatre is political. If you don't declare your politics, your politics are probably right-wing. I cannot be a playwright without having some temptation to let audiences know what I think when I read a newspaper in the morning. What I find is that the things that make you the most uncomfortable are the best things to write plays about. (Blanchard, 42)

As Kushner began to think about Angels in the mid-1980s, there was much making him uncomfortable: the AIDS crisis and its impact on the gay community and the slow response of American society in general to facing its tragic ramifications. For Kushner, the crisis of the AIDS epidemic is not just the problem of suffering individuals; rather, it is “the fate of the country” (Cadden, 84). Moreover, he has to worry about his country's political swing toward conservatism. As such, Angels has been charged

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with a potent mixture of the angers, fears, and absurdities of the time in which it is set. The first part of Kushner's two-part epic drama Angels in America is entitled Millennium Approaches. The play opens with an elderly rabbi named Isador Chemelwitz, standing alone onstage with a small wooden coffin. He is preaching the funeral of Sarah Ironson, an old Jewish woman whose turbulent life embodies the struggles of the immigrant experience, and who, as the rabbi explains, was "not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean" (Kushner, Angels 16) so that their children could grow in America. However, he stresses that "no such place exists" (Kushner, ibid 16). Chemelwitz admits he did not know Sarah, whose later years in the Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews were sad and quiet, but that he knows her type: the strong, uncomplaining peasant women of Eastern Europe who immigrated to America to build authentic homes for their children. He ends his oration with the ominous warning that Sarah's passing means that "pretty soon . . . all the old will be dead" (Kushner, ibid 17), and with them will go the values and certitudes imported to America by their generation. The beginning of the play presages some of the most important recurring themes in Angels in America. In particular, Rabbi Chemelwitz's opening monologue introduces an idea that becomes especially critical after the Angel's appearance in Perestroika: the opposition between continuity and change. Sarah Ironson's journey to the New World is emblematic of the human tendency and the necessity to migrate. Her migration has been literally motivated by survival, an escape from oppression, yet it is symbolic of every person's need to move. Yet even within the context of Sarah's migration, an anti-migratory impulse is also present. The rabbi points out that Sarah Ironson and her kind tried to recreate the Old World in the New, to stave off the disruptive influence of a completely new society and, in particular, that of America, the world's most famously changing and changeable country. But the desire to prevent change moves Sarah and people like her to take on a heavy burden, one which she metaphorically carries "on her back" (Kushner, ibid 16) and which eventually distances her from the fully assimilated grandchildren on whose behalf she sacrifices. In the next several short scenes of this episodic play, Kushner alternately shifts his gaze to two couples: a married pair, Joe and Harper Pitt, and a gay couple, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson. The two relationships are at crisis points. Following Sarah's funeral, Prior reveals to Louis that he is HIV positive. Acknowledging sadly that he is going to die, Prior is forced to try to calm Louis who, he fears, will be unable to cope

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with what is coming and will leave him. Meanwhile, Harper and Joe, both Mormons who have moved to New York a year before so that Joe could take a job as a law clerk for a judge, have grown apart. At this point, their lives intersect with one of the play's historical figures, Roy M. Cohn. Roy Marcus Cohn (1927-86) was born in New York as the son of Judge Albert Cohn of the New York State Supreme Court. He graduated from Columbia University Law School at the age of nineteen. On the day he became a member of the bar, he was sworn in as Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Then, he became a protégé of Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney, prior to the Rosenbergs' case in a trial of eleven U.S. Communist Party leaders whom he helped send to prison. Roy Cohn came to national attention as a 23 years old assistant U.S. attorney, securing the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenberg's execution for treason and espionage came at the height of anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Although anti-Communism had been building ever since the end of World War Two, Sen. Joseph McCarthy touched off the biggest furor in 1950 by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the State Department. The same year, the Rosenbergs, a working-class Jewish couple in New York who had been longtime political radicals, were arrested for allegedly passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. They were convicted, and despite charges that the trial was biased, both Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Roy Cohn's intervention in their case thus positions him at the center of McCarthyism, the most visible assault on civil liberties in America in the twentieth century. During the trial, Cohn was noticed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He later served as an aide to McCarthy. Senator McCarthy, of course, became infamous for his accusations of Communist infiltration of the State Department and other high government posts. Cohn provided legal guidance to the Senator in his Communist 'witch-hunt' which would become known as 'McCarthyism'. Eventually Senator McCarthy's influence declined and he was discredited. Meanwhile, Roy Cohn became a powerful force in the Republican Party and a successful New York lawyer. In the early 1980s, Roy was frequently spotted at different New York bars and nightclubs. Shortly before his death, he was disbarred for unethical practices, and then finally died of AIDS in 1986, although he insisted until the end that he was suffering from liver cancer. Cohn aggressively supported the anti-homosexual agenda of McCarthy and frequently spoke against gay rights. This is why one can say that Roy Cohn's life provides Kushner with a compelling figure through which he explores various issues of the deeply closeted gay male in late-twentieth-

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century America, as well as the hypocrisies Kushner sees in conservative politics. The play proceeds to explore the deep anxieties of its characters through their visions of the forces that effect and control their lives, and as they discover their own strengths and weaknesses. This exploration, as I will explain in the rest of this chapter, reveals that the obviously strong characters such as Roy Cohn weaken, and the seemingly weak ones like Prior Walter gain strength as they face overwhelming perils. By portraying a highly complex network of relationships, Tony Kushner attempts to allow different political sides a room to be seen at their best and worst. The Right is to be presented along with the Left. Roy Cohn who represents the American conservatism is portrayed side by side with other liberal characters. Despite the socialist doctrines of its author, the play grants a voice to nearly all political ideologies in the American political mosaic. In a word, Tony Kushner's political theatre can best be illustrated by a close reading of his major play Angels in America. Such reading renders/highlights the following points. While maintaining the common assessment of Kushner as a political playwright, I wish to consider his concepts of political theater based on a reading of his work as fundamentally laudatory of America's multiplicity. Kushner's rage against the Republican machine indicates less a disgruntled socialist seeking sedation, and more a citizen infuriated by politicians who seek to deprive America of its particular progressive notion of inclusion. In one of his well-known essays entitled "American Things" Kushner writes: I am homosexual, and this ought to make me consider how my experience of the world, as someone who is not always welcome, resembles that of others, however unlike me, who have had similar experiences. I demand to be accorded my rights by others; and so I must be prepared to accord to others their rights. The truest characteristic of freedom is generosity, the basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude. (Kushner, "American Things" 7 )

Tony Kushner takes the subtitle of his play regarding 'National Themes' quite seriously, and sets out with admirable determination to encapsulate a nation of voices within the confines of his drama. My objective here is not to debate whether or not Kushner has fulfilled his liberal goal of granting positive/accurate voice to each of his myriad minority groups, but rather to consider the importance of this representation in light of Kushner's political and artistic ambitions.

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In both his plays and his essays, Kushner conceives of America as founded upon, and defined by, its pluralism. America derives both its strength and struggle from that common origin of diversification, and Kushner himself struggles to integrate this commonality-based-ondifference in his political views: People who don't recognize common cause are going to fail politically in this country. Movements that capture the imagination of people are movements that deny racism and exclusion. The country is too mongrel to do otherwise. This country is made up of the garbage, the human garbage that capitalism created: the prisoners and criminals and religiously persecuted and the oppressed and the slaves that were generated by the ravages of early capital. This creates a radical possibility in this country that's unique. (Szentgyorgyi, 16-17)

The contradictions in this passage, mutually coexisting, indicate Kushner's ever-evolving struggle between group and individual, and between America's potential and its problems. Throughout his work, he asserts the importance of the dialectic, and the dialogic, of constant change and recurrent revision. This, of course, is the core of Perestroika: a defense of the human passion/need for progression as figured in Prior's refusal to heed the Angel's command: "YOU MUST STOP MOVING! [. . .] Neither Mix Nor Intermarry. Let Deep Roots Grow" (Kushner, Angels 178). Although in the play this mandate extends to all humanity, the inevitability of progress has specifically American antecedents: Prior's ancestry traces back to his White Anglo-Saxon origins, his Angel is the Angel of America, and his rejection of it is an American's revolutionary assertion of selfhood in the face of authority. Hannah Pitt's advice to Prior blends theology with American frontier spirit: "An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It's naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new" (Kushner, ibid 237). This dialogue is fundamental to the play's American ideology not only for its promotion of progress, but because the very notion develops from the conjunction of two completely different characters as opposed as Prior and Hannah. Such communication, even of dissenting views, encourages progress and thus opposes totalitarianism. This liberation through confrontation repeatedly catalyzes the play's crucial transformations. In fact, change and transformation are at the center of Angels in America. In one way or another, each strand in the plot is related to change of some kind, and every major character faces some manner of transformation. Some characters are frightened by change and prefer the comfort and familiarity

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of the world they know. Harper, for example, begins the play terrified by the changes she sees, or thinks she sees, around her. She fears she is losing her husband, her home, and her sanity, and it is all overwhelming. She finds a metaphor for her fear in the ozone layer, high above the earth, which she likens to protective, guardian angels surrounding the planet. She terrifyingly says: “But everywhere things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way” (Kushner, ibid 23). Through the course of the play, Harper does indeed lose everything she held dear, and in the process finds a new perspective on change and transformation. Towards the end of the play as she sits in a plane, bound for San Francisco and a new life, she suggests, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead” (Kushner, ibid 275). Other characters are encouraged by change, even thrive in it. Louis, for instance, tells the Rabbi that the world will change for the better with struggle, and that is why he cannot accept Prior’s sickness into his philosophy of life. Instead, Louis runs away, immersing himself in change to avoid deterioration. He finds Joe, who earnestly echoes the sentiments of his newfound right-wing Republican friends, Roy and Martin. Joe tells Harper that things are starting to change for the good in the world. He insists that "America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations" (Kushner, ibid 32). To Joe, the country has been reinvented, for the better, during the Reagan years. Interestingly, though, by the end of the play, both Louis and Joe are longing to return to the way things were, but both are denied this homecoming. Prior and the angels are caught up in the play’s biggest struggle over change. On a personal level, Prior is having change after change thrust upon him. First, his disease attacks, changing his body. Then, Louis abandons him, changing his world. Finally, the Angel calls upon him and asks him to become a Prophet on behalf of the Continental Principalities. Stasis, the opposite of change, is what the angels seek. Prior thwarts their plan, however, and tells them, “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks — progress, migration, motion is . . . modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do” (Kushner, ibid 263-264). For each of these American pioneers, confrontation, which is often of a very painful nature, precedes progress. Progress then emerges in Angels in America as both essential and essentially American, a crucial human process but also associated specifically with the American national history of individualism and exploration. Consequently, the text itself, despite its author's proclaimed socialist beliefs, supports America even while criticizing it. For all his wrath over the 1980s Regime of the Right, Kushner consistently

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champions America for its diversity and acceptance of dissent. In a 1994 article published in the Newsweek, Kushner analyzes American ideology and notions of progress: Over the course of two hundred years, brave, visionary activists and ordinary, moral people had carved out a space, a large sheltering room from which many were now excluded, but which was clearly intended to be capable of multitudes. Within the space of American Freedom there was room for any possibility. American Freedom would become the birthplace of social and economic Justice. (Kushner, "American Things" 5-6)

In fact, Kushner clarifies that there is much space for improvement, noting that homosexuals and women were never necessarily included as constituents within these multitudes. However, his perception of the American Dream is reverent and completely non-ironic, underlined by a conviction that the nation that welcomed his ancestors and other immigrants will prove likewise hospitable to all groups in the indefinite future. He goes on to describe his connection to this sense of patriotism through his Judaic heritage epitomized in this case by one particular Passover experience: "It was impressed upon us, as we sang "America the Beautiful" at the Seder's conclusion, that the dream of millennia was due to find its ultimate realization not in Jerusalem but in this country" (Kushner, ibid 5). In an essay entitled "Notes on Angels in America as American Epic Theatre", Janelle Reinelt regrets that Kushner's Angels in America prioritizes the personal over the political, and consequently fails to advance a sufficiently leftist platform. She criticizes the play for its failure to uphold a standard of socialist realism. She also claims that the scenes depending on personal interactions and loyalties should be rewritten to valorize the potential for community action. However, I strongly believe that Kushner's work consistently uses the personal in the service of the political, and that he finds the two inseparable. Kushner writes: since it's true that everything is political (though not exclusively so) it becomes meaningless to talk about political and nonpolitical theatre, and more useful to speak of a theatre that presents the world as it is, an interwoven web of the public and the private" (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theatre" 22).

It is quite obvious that Kushner strongly believes that the two realms of the personal and the political are inextricably linked. However, his work's failure to adhere to socialism is not a problem of his preference for 'identity politics', but rather a result of the fact that he is promoting a

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politics of liberal pluralism that is in fact private as well as public. Reinelt highlights certain scenes in Angels that she claims suffer from an excess of the personal, citing specifically the one in which Belize appropriates Roy's AZT, experimental treatment for AIDS patients, and bestows it all on his friend Prior. Reinelt writes: It is precisely the evocation of personal friends who need the medicine that undercuts a social critique by keeping the discourse personal. Nowhere in the play is there any indication of the community organizing, political agitation, liberal church and other networks involved in fighting AIDS. Prior and Louis and Joe are all left with their private consciousnesses to sort their doubts and fears out on their own. The play needs some gesture to the power of social and political organizing; that is, we need to see the social environment, ranges, background, mode of production. In this scene all the ingredients are there– Belize evokes his union to counter Roy's threat to his job. Why couldn't he also mention a network or organization in connection with the friends needing AZT? (Reinelt, 243)

In Reinelt's critique of Angels, one can safely argue that the play in question is not apolitical, but simply a different political than its detractors would like it to be. It actually portrays America which constructively encompasses its good socialists and bad conservatives under one umbrella of liberal pluralism. Reinelt's assertion that the play is apolitical only holds true if one is searching for socialism, a pursuit that is destined for disappointment. Indeed, there are political statements, regardless of their discordance with the socialist party line. As Kushner has often asserted, all his characters' private choices are in some sense a reflection of his political beliefs. This fundamental belief actually informs all of Kushner's work. However, it is most apparent in Angels which is extremely political as when Louis is discoursing on democracy or when Roy is bragging about his own power and influence in Republican circles. For Kushner, the personal is, invariably, political, even when his political objectives are not simply socialist propaganda. Here in the world of Angels, all representatives of the American society coexist, whether Democrats or Republicans, they all argue, debate, and generally grow stronger out of this tension and conflict. The play's opening monologue appropriately defines America as "the melting pot where nothing melted" (Kushner, Angels 16), where a certain level of discord is requisite. Similarly, Perestroika, the second part of Angels, begins with the voice of a one-man contradiction, a Communist Reactionary; already ambivalent, he engenders further conflict in the audience who is placed in a contradictory position in which he rejects the play's opening oration, recognizing that the play's stance is in fact

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completely oppositional to its first counterpart. Through such an opening Kushner insists that the reader/audience too must experience this tension, standing in opposition to false voices and remaining open to new ones. Talking in a live television interview with Charlie Rose, Tony Kushner reflects upon Roy Cohn's character in Angels saying that " in a certain sense, [Roy Cohn's] dying of this disease [AIDS] made him a part of the gay and lesbian community even if we don't really want him to be a part of our community" (Rose, 46). Kushner's words make it clear that despite his aversion and despise for Roy, Kushner still believes that he is part and parcel of the American community. Due to his infection, and consequently his death, by the AIDS epidemic, Roy becomes an integral part of the gay community which he, right from the very beginning of the play, despises. The question now is: why does not Kushner exclude Roy from the gay community? Phrased differently, why does Kushner incorporate such a dissenting voice into his work? The answer to the aforementioned questions is that Kushner still wants to promote dialogue and progress through contesting viewpoints. This has actually happened at the expense of the overall political stance of the play. To put it simply, Kushner, by granting his enemies – one of which is, of course, Roy Cohn – a voice and enabling them to coexist, unaltered, in his world alongside with his heroes, fails to promote the socialist platform which would more radically punish its opponents. Instead, he supports the American mosaic that permits/grants all different types a place within the body politic. Commenting on this issue, David Savran argues eloquently that despite this diversity, Angels remains unambivalent in its politics and fails to treat its disparate characters equally, as the inclusion of extreme conservatives such as Roy Cohn does not obviate the play's incontestable liberal stance. Kushner does tolerate 'The Enemy,' incarnated by Cohn, in favor of the play's American ethic of mutual coexistence. Angels at once resists fully forgiving Roy and yet simultaneously refuses to exclude him from the American mosaic, which Roy himself articulates as his greatest fear. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of the play is that Kushner achieves sympathetic moments for his most monstrous and misbehaving characters, like Roy Cohn, whose venomous self-loathing is one of the play's ambivalent aspects. Cohn's character is most vividly demonstrated in his scathing denial of his own homosexuality when, near the end of the Millennium Approaches first act, he learns from his doctor that he is suffering from AIDS: Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I

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fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a puissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. (Kushner, Angels 51 )

Attempting to include such a power-hungry man while rejecting all what he stands for, the play has some difficulty in swallowing Roy Cohn; how to integrate this diabolical figure into an angelic community without suffering the contamination of his hatred and hatefulness? Roy's contagion is everywhere evident: he fights Joe and spills his own infected blood on Joe's shirt; he threatens Belize. However, one can also argue that Roy can never fully infect the play's moral center due to his strong resistance to integration with the rest of the characters which is actually a rejection of the very principles of forgiveness and mercy that form the cornerstones of their moralities. Kushner jokingly refers to Roy and his ilk as a lost cause, claiming, "No playwright exists, not even Shakespeare, who could make Bob Dole into a smart or an honest or a descent man" (Vorlicky, 194). Yet this refusal to even attempt to alter the man or his basic values permits Roy the right to remain Roy, unchanging and unapologetic. It keeps the play's parallel of American multivocality intact, struggling with the dissenting voice but insisting on its inclusion. Moreover, Roy's inclusion is so important to the play's ethos that he is never fully written out of it, managing to return twice after his own death. The devilish figure appropriately delivers his parting shots from hell, happily continuing in the afterlife the law career that sustained his mortal existence. Although Kushner isolates Roy in the inferno, he permits his villain to be precisely what he is throughout the entire play condemned to endless fire. As Prior's celestial journey confirms, the overall stagnation of heaven would have bored Roy to tears. Thus, in the end Roy, with his octopean power hunger, his diabolic charisma, and his compelling mania, is tolerated and granted the gift of continued selfhood and a separation from other characters that he wants rather than renounces. Roy's death is a complicated matter for Angels, and his character can fascinate as well as shock through his sheer excesses, his ruthlessness, and his stubborn refusal to succumb to man or disease. In laying him to rest, Kushner therefore offers two opposing positions on his death, one unrelenting and the other forgiving. The first is Ethel Rosenberg's speech over Roy's deathbed to voice her immense hatred from beyond the grave:

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"I came to forgive but all I can do is to take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I'd get to see you die more terrible than I did . . . And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all" (Kushner, Angels 246). On the other hand, Belize offers an antithetical perspective over the corpse: "A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness" (Kushner, ibid 256). Being sympathetic and wise, Belize offers the New Testament version of mercy to counter Ethel's Old Testament of justice, and the audience/reader is left torn between two testimonies. While affirming the current American political system, the coexistence of these two opposing beliefs creates some obstacles in the play's communitarian impulses as Roy refuses to melt into the rest of the play's pot. Ross Posnock discerns this as a problem of consistency: Kushner's audacity in giving Cohn centerstage deserves the praise it has received. Yet the meaning of Cohn's presence in the larger thematics of Angels raises the issue of the play's coherence. The muddle of the work derives from the fact that Kushner's ultimate ambitions are at crosspurposes: he aims somehow to assimilate the Nietzschean figure of Cohn to the play's explicitly redemptive and Christian project. (Posnock, 70)

Incoherence is a criticism often directed against Kushner's Angels. Kushner himself is well aware of this problem, though he dismisses questions of consistency in favor of his vision as he argues that "a politics of literary pretentiousness, in which a book, or a play, muddled though it may be, is willing to sacrifice form and coherence in a determined effort to escape the library and become literature no longer—to become, instead, life (Kushner, Thinking 77). Aiming at such a subtle idea of being inclusive, one might anticipate in a play that makes such grand gestures towards inclusion some kind of incoherence. Thus, reading the text of the play as a microcosm of American pluralism gives Kushner's presentation of 'life' its own type of coherence, in that the muddled world of the play mimetically represents Kushner's perception of the American democratic structure. Roy Cohn's character in Angels plays a decisive role in highlighting both Kushner's political vision in general and his political views in Angels in particular. That is to say, the centrality of politics in Angels can be found most obviously in Roy Cohn, the exemplar of traditional American conservatism. Kushner’s Roy Cohn is the epiphany of the historical Roy M. Cohn who was a Jew, a powerful lawyer, and a closeted gay man in New York City during the late twentieth century. In the preface of the play, Kushner explains that his character Roy is based on the real Roy M. Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986:

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Roy M. Cohn, the character, is based on the late Roy M. Cohn (19271986), who was all too real; for the most part the acts attributed to the character Roy, such as his illegal conferences with Judge Kaufmann during the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, are to be found in the historical record. (Kushner, Angels 11)

Thus, Kushner’s characterization of Roy is real and based for the most part on the historical fact. Like the historical Roy Cohn, Kushner’s Roy Cohn is represented as an evil and influential power broker during the Reagan administration. At the beginning of the play, the readers/audience notice his socio-political power in this busy office scene: Roy at an impressive desk, bare except for a very elaborate phone system, rows and rows of flashing buttons which bleep and beep and whistle incessantly, making chaotic music underneath Roy’s conversations. Joe is sitting, waiting. Roy conducts business with great energy, impatience and sensual abandon: gesticulating, shouting, cajoling, crooning, playing the phone, receiver and hold button with virtuosity and love. (Kushner, ibid 17)

Although Roy is a gay man with AIDS, he has political clout which most homosexuals do not have. Hence, Roy refuses to be diagnosed as just another AIDS patient because having AIDS means membership in the disempowered homosexual group. Therefore, Roy, who is a closeted gay lawyer with AIDS, “is defined by [his] power, not [his] sexuality” (Clum, Still Acting Gay 250), because his political power and gay identity remain incompatible and operate in different spheres. According to Kushner’s point of view, Roy Cohn, who is “the heart of modern [American] conservatism” (Kushner, Angels 213), embodies political injustice, hypocrisy, and the irony of self-contradiction. Kushner describes Roy as a symbol of political corruption and hypocrisy in America during the 1980s: “Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan’s children” (Kushner, ibid 80). Roy wants to send Joe Pitt, a closeted Mormon gay man, to the Justice Department in Washington to make him a “Royboy” (Kushner, ibid 70) as “eyes in Justice” (Kushner, ibid 74) for his protection. Roy is about to be tried by the disbarment committee because “he borrowed half a million from one of his clients . . . And he forgot to return it” (Kushner, ibid 72). However, Roy shows his immorality by denying this act because “She’s got no paperwork. Can’t prove a fucking thing” (Kushner, ibid 72). Despite his immorality, Roy wields his political power: “All I gotta do is pick up the phone, talk to Ed, and you’re in” (Kushner, ibid 21) since “Martin’s Ed’s man. And Ed’s Reagan’s man. So Martin’s Reagan’s man” (Kushner, ibid 74). Roy even has political influence over Ed Meese, the Attorney General of the United

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States, and can give Joe a job as “Associate Assistant Something Big. Internal Affairs, heart of the woods, something nice with clout” (Kushner, ibid 21) at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. by just a phone call. Roy’s political immorality and greed are evident in his use of political power to secure the medicine, AZT, which is known as an experimental treatment for AIDS patients and is hard to obtain. Although this medicine has “a two-year waiting list that not even [Henry] can get [Roy] onto” (Kushner, ibid 52), Roy can have it in his own private stash in his room by threatening Martin: So send me my pills with a get-well bouquet, PRONTO, or I’ll ring up CBS and sing Mike Wallace a song: the ballad of adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund . . . Oh you only think you know all I know. I don’t even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow, you two-bit scumsucking shitheel fly-paper insignificant dried-out little turd. A nice big box of drugs for Uncle Roy. Or there’ll be seven different kinds of hell to pay. (Kushner, ibid 161-162)

Although Roy has many boxes of AZT in his stash, he greedily refuses to share it with Belize, who wants ten bottles for his friends: “I have friends who need them” (Kushner, ibid 190). Thus, as seen in Roy’s evil character, his political power does not necessarily constitute socio-political justice and morality. Kushner tries to connect Roy’s immorality and injustice to the American mainstream during the Reagan era, in which he believes there is no political justice. Roy is also responsible for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s trial and their illegitimate execution in the electric chair when they were alleged to be guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage with the communist Soviet Union during the 1950s. As a notorious henchman for McCarthy during the political maelstrom of anti-communist McCarthyism, he illegally became involved in the trial of Ethel Rosenberg and sent her to the electric chair: If it wasn’t for me, Joe, Ethel Rosenberg would be alive today, writing some personal-advice column for Ms. magazine. She isn’t. Because during the trial, Joe, I was on the phone every day, talking with the judge. [. . .] I pleaded till I wept to put her in the chair. Me. I did that. (Kushner, ibid 113-114)

Ethel Rosenberg, a Jew like Roy, is seen as an innocent victim of political McCarthyism. Since Roy has illegally intervened in the trial of Rosenberg

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and consequently her execution, he embodies the irony of self-negation, political immorality, and social injustice. In addition to Roy’s political immorality and injustice, it is quite significant for the readers/audience to understand Roy’s self-contradictory hypocrisy to fully appreciate Angels of America. Roy is a gay man with AIDS like Prior, and he is a Jew like Ethel Rosenberg, but he hates both of them. Roy represents the heart of American conservatism or “White Straight Male America” (Kushner, ibid 96). Like Joe Pitt who is a gay Republican lawyer, Roy has irreconcilable identities because he is a gay man as well as a conservative Republican lawyer. Roy’s self-contradicting irony culminates in his evasion of moral judgment against the gays, which he himself imposes as a representative of the American conservative mainstream. According to Kushner’s political vision, Roy symbolizes “the sum total of the Reagan era” (Izzo, 91), since Roy’s self-contradiction and hypocrisy parallel those of the Reagan administration: “This is reality. I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand” (Kushner, Angels 52). Kushner constantly wants to draw the readers’/audience’s attention to the similarity between Roy and the Reagan administration. Just as Roy is selfish, immoral, and irresponsible, so too is the Reagan administration, and this embodies Kushner’s social critique in this play. Michael Schaller points out that President Reagan was criticized as a hypocrite by his children: Ronald and Nancy Reagan attempted to alter the sexual behavior of many Americans and their attitudes toward abortion and the rights of women. [. . .] President Reagan, who condemned abortion as murder, urged pre-marital chastity and championed the “traditional” family of husband as breadwinner, wife as mother and homemaker. Conservatives predicted that the decade would assure the “end of the sexual revolution.” The president’s words, critics charged, rang false. Reagan was the first divorced man elected president and had married two career women. He had a distant relationship with his children, two of whom, Patti and Michael, had written books that criticized their parents as hypocrites. (Schaller, 92-93)

Roy Cohn revels in his clout and he has no compassion for those who are powerless. Indeed, when Joe confides his feelings of guilt about his decision to leave Harper, Cohn advises that Joe "Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way" (Kushner, Angels 64). In both his interviews and essays, it is quite clear that Kushner is highly interested in the change occurring in the current political environment of

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the American political landscape. In his 1993 essay entitled "Copious, Gigantic, and Sane", Kushner says he considers the renewal of "nationalism and fascism" (Kushner, Thinking 54) as the horrors of the present day. In a keynote address to the Annual OutWrite Conference, Kushner states, "pretentiousness, overstatement, rhetoric and histrionics, grandiosity and portentousness are, as much as they are also the tropes of fascists and demagogues everywhere, American tropes" (Kushner, ibid 62). Angels in America deals with the dueling ideologies of progress and stasis. Todd London writes that "progress means liberation—racial, sexual and individual liberation—and the mysterious work of building a better world" (London, 45). Stasis is embraced by the conservative Roy and by the angel whose message is for society to stand still. Kushner also demonstrates how corrupt, hypocritical, and harsh the ideology of fascism is. He wants his audience to notice several negative aspects of fascist ideology through Roy. Intolerance, expressed in selfishness and hatred of those who are different, isolates Roy from the society in which he lives. In Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Kushner asserts that the fascist trait of intolerance is becoming increasingly visible in the American culture: Intolerance implies a passive, xenophobic bridling at forgiveness . . . In other countries, where it is polite to use the word, the agents of what we are calling intolerance are called fascists. And Tolerance [sic] is not an adequate response to fascism . . . If you are oppressed, if those characteristics which make you identifiable to yourself make you loathsome to a powerful majority which does not share those characteristics, then you are at great risk if your existence is predicated on being tolerated. Toleration is necessary when power is unequal; if you have power, you will not need to be tolerated . . . The dismaying lack of solidarity for the oppressed by the oppressed is historically at its worst when the Right is most successful (Kushner, Thinking 42-43).

Roy, who is Kushner's representative of the Right in Angels, illustrates the self-destructive effects of intolerance. Roy is intolerant of those who are weak, of blacks, of women, of Jews, and of homosexuals. This intolerance explains why he never refers to his own Jewish heritage and why he never admits his homosexuality. When he gets AIDS, he denies it because of the weakness it brings about in him and, more importantly, because it makes him one of the people he despises. Ironically, Roy ends up a victim of the Right. Because of his intolerance and denial, Roy dies alone. His utter isolation is, ironically, a perversion of both his fascist beliefs and the contradictory impulse toward individuality. Through Roy's character,

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Kushner makes it clear that people should not lead their lives in isolation. This is most obvious in Prior's struggle with loneliness; a struggle which is the antithesis of Roy's aggression. This is why one can safely argue that connectedness, or human communion, is the major premise of Kushner's politics. Kushner strongly believes in the supreme importance of interconnectivity and interdependence between all members of a society. In "With A Little Help From My Friends", Kushner states, "Anyone interested in exploring alternatives to individualism and the political economy it serves, Capitalism, has to be willing to ask hard questions about the ego, both as abstraction and as exemplified in oneself" (Kushner, Thinking 34-35). These 'hard questions' have to do with the individual's willingness to find/view his identity as part of a group. Angels shows that there is much to be gained from doing so. Through Roy, Kushner reveals what is to be lost. Roy isolates himself from the empathy and companionship of other characters. He holds Belize at arms' length and finally rejects even Ethel's genuine human compassion. In essence, then, he repudiates his own humanity: "I don't want to be a man. I wanna be an octopus" (Kushner, Angels 247). In this statement, Kushner shows that humanity is defined by compassion and connection. Not to connect is simply stopping to be human. One of Angels' great ironies is that the political establishment Roy supports has ignored the AIDS epidemic. President Ronald Reagan did not address the problem of AIDS until 1987, "after 20,798 had died from AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses" (Kramer, 149-150). Most gay activists, one of them, of course, is Tony Kushner, believed that the Reagan administration was very slow to respond to AIDS because most of those who were dying were gay men; that is the politically marginalized 'Other'. Through the ironic clash between Roy's ideology and his disease, Kushner wants his audience to see that what politicians view in terms of public policy affects individuals' personally. Before contracting the disease, Roy represents the political establishment which views AIDS as insignificant and which fails to act to find a cure for that lethal disease. But once he suffers from that illness, Roy no longer views AIDS in terms of political policy. While publicly denying that he has AIDS, Roy cannot ignore the suffering that it brings him. And neither can the spectator who must watch him die. Roy's death from this disease makes him a victim of his own fascist ideology, which has suppressed research for a cure. Thus, Kushner himself reveals how AIDS is emblematic of the 'fascist' politics in America in the 1980s and 1990s. He expresses his disgust with the politics of intolerance:

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Chapter Three The scariest congress this country has ever elected is energetically, industriously, enthusiastically dismantling the federal government. The America we live in today, still racked, starved, burned, brutalized and unrecovered from the pillaging it endured in the eighties, this present ravaged America will seem in ten years' retrospect a paradise . . . Affordable public higher education will be virtually nonexistent. This will help make people even more docile when faced with downsizing, which surely must produce prodigious rates of unemployment; and there will be no organized labor and no social net. Multinationals will have nearabsolute sway over the workplaces and breathing spaces and landscapes and mindscapes and airwaves and informational pathways; corrupt and unaccountable state legislatures will be big business's eager foot-servants; minorities will have no legal protectional guarantees and will be ruthlessly dominated and policed by a pseudo-majority whose real power derives, not from brute numerical superiority, but from an unchallengeable stranglehold on realpolitik finances by multinationals . . . And it is no exaggeration to say that as a direct result of the laws and amendments these criminally reckless, criminally stupid, mendacious neo-barbarians are enacting, millions of people will die. (Kushner, Thinking 55-57)

To conclude this part, Angels in America is a play that is unique to its time and place. Inseparable from the text are the very real political and cultural forces of the 1980s – the reelection of Ronald Reagan, the perceived shift of the country to the right, and the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. Roy Cohn is a person that was a direct manifestation of this changing political and social reality; his love of power and prestige, as well as his standing within the conservative movement, forced him to publicly reject and conceal his personal lifestyle choices. In this, he was representative of a large number of closeted Americans, who through a combination of political and social pressures, felt that they had to hide who they really were. Ultimately, the play highlights the destructive repercussions of concealing one’s true identity, and provides a cultural testament to the importance of being honest and forthcoming not only with the public, but with one’s self. Kushner never wants his audience to forget that though Angels is set in the not-so-distant past, the behaviors and ideas still apply now. It is not just AIDS that is killing people but in a broader sense, the policies and laws made by the nation's most powerful people. Life for Roy is satisfying only in terms of externals: money, power, and prestige. A lack of internal/emotional development leaves Roy very shallow, and this is specifically evident on his deathbed where he rejects the overtures of love made by Belize and Ethel. A nation full of people like Roy, striving only for external goals, creates an environment where few people can be trusted

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and where the powerful will use the power to their own benefit without concern for anyone else's well-being. Through Roy's character, Kushner mainly wants to illustrate how the American society will regress if it continues to embrace the attitudes and behavior Roy illustrates. Since Kushner does not wish his society to remain this way, he kills Roy, the symbol of fascist ideology, and presents a more hopeful and humane ideology through the character of Prior Walter. Prior Walter is the boyfriend Louis abandons after Prior reveals that he has AIDS. He is the character most easily identifiable as the play's protagonist, precisely because he is the play's chief victim. Prior begins the play at the mercy of everyone and everything around him: abandoned by Louis, infected with a disease that takes control of his body and its functions. Moreover, as a homosexual, an effeminate man and a person with AIDS, he is also the victim of social prejudice inflicted upon him by the society in which he lives. Due to such horrible psychological and physical painful sufferings, Prior has been in dire need for connection. According to Tony Kushner, gays have struggled with the idea of connection and community: AIDS is both a destroyer and a creator of community. It is not a single entity but a syndrome with ill-defined boundaries and categories, and as such it spreads biologically and politically, making important connections between communities of the disenfranchised by uniting them in pain, in anger, and helping to clarify which lives are regarded as dispensable by America's ruling class. Those in the margins, unless united in resistance, die. (Blanchard, 43-44)

Homosexuality, like AIDS, crosses boundaries of religion, race, and politics. Kushner believes that 'community' is the answer to the selfish individualism and ego-centeredness that Roy's fascist behavior displays: I don't think community can simply be defined as like-minded individuals banded together for common cause. That's a political movement. . . . I guess I like the word community because it's a civic term. It privileges the notion of collectivity over something more neutral like society, which doesn't tell you anything. To say something's a community is to imply there's something that is called the communal good and there's a way the individuals within this group behave in service to the communal good. . . . Community is an entity that it much slower moving, more diffuse, and by its nature harder to define. (Shewey, 204)

Prior's illness and aloneness cause other characters to form a community around him once he begins reaching out. Prior, the antithesis of Roy, is a

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solipsist: he accepts himself only as a reality and rejects society so that he can accept himself. By contrast, Roy accepts only society and rejects his real self so that he can conform to an image acceptable to his society. In the end, Roy dies miserably not because he has AIDS but because Kushner wants the audience/reader to realize that Roy cannot continue to live in such an extreme state without some internal substance. Prior triumphs because he has been able to integrate himself within the society and embrace what exists outside his own reality. He consolidates his individuality with his place in society. As he begins to make connections outside of himself and become part of the society he rejects and feels rejected by, Prior not only begins to heal himself but also takes part in healing the society in which he lives. When Prior first appears in Angels, he is attending the funeral of his lover's grandmother. Louis, his lover, apologizes for not introducing Prior to his family. Louis says, "I always get so closely at these family things" (Kushner, Angels 25). Prior is looking in on this funeral as an outsider for another reason; he is about to die from AIDS. Associating himself more with the dead grandmother than with the living relatives, Prior says of the rabbi, "A definite find. Get his number when you go to the graveyard. I want him to bury me" (Kushner, ibid 25). Obviously, Prior is in great despair due to his inevitable death by AIDS. Because of AIDS, Prior does not have any self-esteem, loses his human dignity, and feels guilt about his infected body: “I don’t think there’s any uninfected part of me. My heart is pumping polluted blood. I feel dirty” (Kushner, ibid 40). What this suggests is that Prior does not see himself as a man of dignity, but as a guilty, polluted, and morally corrupt individual. Abandoned by his lover and isolated in his room, he is the quintessential social outcast in homophobic American society, which results from the mainstream’s judgmental prejudices against gays during the 1980s. However, Prior, unlike Roy who uses aggression when he knows that he has the disease, uses humor to alienate himself from the pain of dying from AIDS. Prior draws on humor when he shows Louis the first Kaposi's sarcoma scar, which is a sign of AIDS, on the underside of his arm. He uses his sense of humor to alienate himself from the fact that he is dying. It is also worth noting that Prior's humor distances the audience from pity; the ultimate effect is that the audience thinks about instead of feels Prior's miserable situation. Right from the very beginning of the play, Prior is portrayed as an alienated person. Kushner successfully shows such feelings of alienation while, at the same time, revealing the indifference of a nation slow to respond and to take responsibility for this fatal health crisis. Prior's utter pain and isolation are further intensified and revealed at the

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beginning of Act Two when he screams, "Louis, Louis, please wake up, oh God" (Kushner, ibid 53). Prior does not even want Louis to call an ambulance: “NO! NO! Don’t call, you’ll send me there and I won’t come back, please, please Louis I’m begging, baby, please . . .” (Kushner, ibid 54). Lying on the floor, Prior cannot breathe and passes blood. Despite his critical condition, he begs Louis not to call an ambulance. He fears that he will never return home if he goes to the hospital. Even though he suffers the pain of the disease and needs to be treated at a hospital, he is not willing to go because he is so intensely aware of the biased social prejudice against homosexuals and, at the same time, he is afraid of being shunned as a deficient sexual 'Other' by the straight mainstream. Kushner opposes this Othering of Prior because of his homosexuality and AIDS. Instead, he thinks society should provide a more comfortable environment for persons with AIDS to take proper medical treatments which they need without worrying about social condemnation. Kushner wants society to see Prior as a patient with a normal disease just like other patients. According to him, AIDS needs not evoke imagery of sexual immorality, debauchery, or human deficiency. Although Prior is abandoned by his lover because of AIDS, Prior does not have to treat himself as a social reject. On the contrary, Kushner, viewing hope, sees only the pure soul of a man in him, just as Harper, who is Joe Pitt’s Valium-addicted wife, says to Prior: “Deep inside you, there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease. I can see that” (Kushner, ibid 40). Even though Prior’s body is infected and destroyed by AIDS, his soul remains pure, which Harper knows by “Threshold of revelation” (Kushner, ibid 40). Jeff Johnson also interprets Harper’s comment as “a clear allusion to [Prior’s] calling, [Prior’s] being chosen, like a martyr, to exemplify redemption through suffering” (Johnson, 33). There is no moral blemish or corruption in him; merely a different sexual orientation and a physical disease. To Kushner, therefore, what is worse than Prior’s infected body is American society, where “things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving away” (Kushner, Angels 23). In Act Three, two of Prior's ancestors, the fifth Prior Walter and the seventh Prior Walter, appear and point out that they also died from a plague even worse than AIDS, the former died from the Black Death of the 1200s and the latter from the plague outbreak of the 1660s. They make a point of saying that they died alone, like Prior. Prior's deterioration becomes even more worse as he remains all alone, finally accepting to visit a hospital where he as well as his nurse seem to be the only ones who really know all that Prior suffers, at least physically:

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Chapter Three Ankles sore and swollen, but the leg's better. The nausea's mostly gone with the little orange pills. BM's pure liquid but not bloody anymore, for now, my eye doctor says everything's OK, for now, my dentist says 'Yuck!' when he sees my fuzzy tongue, and now he wears little condoms on his thumb and forefinger. And a mask. . . . My glands are like walnuts, my weight's holding steady for week two. (Kushner, ibid 103)

In the climax of Millennium Approaches, Prior's prophetic visions culminate in the appearance of an imposing and beautiful Angel who crashes through the roof of his apartment and proclaims, "The Great Work begins" (Kushner, ibid 125). This is actually the most remarkable event in Millennium Approaches, where the extraordinary image of the Angel is crashing through Prior's ceiling in the final scene. It is the culmination of Millennium in the sense that it is the moment of greatest chaos and destruction. The emotional wreckage that the characters have been creating is made literal. Millennium describes the destruction of an essentially stable network of relationships and individuals. The Angel's entrance is a fittingly magnificent image to mark this key transitional moment. Yet, even at the height of his drama, Kushner resorts again to Brecht's distantiation by making Prior whisper, "Very Steven Spielberg," (Kushner, ibid 124) humorously undercutting the grandeur of the moment and ensuring that it remains closely related to the human world of daily life. In sum, throughout Millennium, Kushner has shown Prior abandoned by a nation and by his lover. His own body fails him too. He rejects the society and the reality in which he lives as he continually tells people around him to go away. In the second part of the play entitled Perestroika, Tony Kushner works at rebuilding that destroyed network of relationships and individuals into a changed but ultimately recreated whole. Over the course of the play, Prior, or the chief victim of the play, gains power and authority far beyond what could be imagined he was capable of. However, Prior's track towards that new life is not an easy path, for his journey has been extremely difficult. He has to overcome several obstacles and endure much suffering to understand how to find the balance within himself. The possibility of change in Prior takes place when the Angel crashes through the ceiling. Kushner says that some day the American society will be a community in the process of change "when the gray forbidding wall of Oppression starts to crack, when a space opens up between the sky and the horizon, when change becomes possible" (Kushner, Thinking 54). The ceiling-shattering entry of the Angel marks the true beginning of Prior's journey. It draws clear-cut lines between the former phase of his life in which his AIDS infection renders him weak and victimized, and the latter stage where he

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manages to transcend that mere victimization, gradually surviving and becoming part and parcel of his community. Kushner succeeds to portray the gradual development of Prior's journey towards such a new life employing a number of ways. One of these ways Kushner presents earlier in the first Act when Prior wakes up from sleeping the same night the Angel appeared. Prior looks under the sheets and says, "Will you look at this! First goddam orgasm in months and I slept through it" (Kushner, Angels 153). Throughout the play, Prior gets sexually excited when the Angel approaches. This is meant to contrast with Prior's psychological and physical pain and feebleness, and show that his world and reality can be penetrated. On one occasion, Prior has sexual intercourse with the Angel. This is actually a turning point for him. It symbolizes a new creation and shows Prior's ability to explore the world outside of him. Then the Angel delivers her message to Prior to grow roots and stand still: Forsake the Open Road: Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow: If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress: Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic: You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy, You do not Advance, You only Trample. (Kushner, ibid 178)

Prior stands up to the Angel. He says, " I. WANT. you to go away. I'm tired to death of being done to, walked out on, infected, fucked over and now tortured by some mixed-up, reactionary angel, some . . ." (Kushner, ibid 179). At this point Prior realizes that the Angel cannot save him. Therefore, he begins to change his sense of reality to include a reality that exists outside of himself: Then I'm crazy. The whole world is, why not me? It's 1986 and there's a plague, half my friends are dead and I'm only thirty-one, every goddam morning I wake up and I think Louis is next to me in the bed and it takes me long minutes to remember . . . that this is real, it isn't just an impossible terrible dream. (Kushner, ibid 181)

Prior, again, becomes a prophet when he is visited by the Angel who continually visits him. The Angel is actually an important part in Prior's journey. She, along with the other angels who represent other continents, want Prior to be their messenger and tell the world to stop progress. They wish him to carry their message because God has abandoned them. Unfortunately, Prior determinately rejects the angels' prophecy:

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We can't just stop. We're not rocks—progress, migration, motion is . . . modernity. It's animate, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for. Even if we go faster than we should. We can't wait. And wait for what? God. . . . (Kushner, ibid 263-264) .

In fact, Prior proves to be wiser than the angels in rejecting their doctrine of stasis in favor of the painful necessity of movement and migration. He finally learns that he can reject the element of society he hates, the element that does not care if he lives or dies. Instead, he can include only what he values, which are the people in his everyday life. In the same vein, in his refusal to succumb to the Angel's bid, Prior embodies a rejection of conservatism and stasis, and rather he embraces a painful but necessary spirit of change. It is highly important to notice that Prior's last line reminds the reader/audience with Samuel Beckett's absurd play Waiting for Godot, where Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon are trapped in an existential void and endangered by an unknown source. Kushner's Prior, by contrast, has finally discovered the way out of this vicious circle, having found answers within himself through rejecting his Angel-imposed prophecy. It is highly important to notice that Prior’s wrestling with the Angel takes on deep symbolism in the play. Jeff Johnson understands Prior’s wrestling with the Angel as “a struggle against transcendence, a resistance to relinquishing passion, expressing his desire for an earthly life, robust and committed” (Johnson, 35). However, Prior’s struggle with the Angel symbolizes his heroic opposition to the conservative social mores of the American mainstream during the 1980s, since the angel represents the authoritative, stagnant, and oppressive ethos of the Reagan administration. The Angel herself embodies the powerful authority as the “CONTINENTAL PRINCIPALITY OF AMERICA” (Kushner, Angels 251), which is similar to the powerful, authoritative Reagan administration and Roy. The Angel asks Prior to stop 'human progress,' 'migration,' and 'forward motion', which means stop moving and progressing: “YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING!” (Kushner, ibid 178). According to the Angel, God abandoned the angels and left Heaven because of human movement: ANGEL:

He began to leave us! Bored with His Angels, Bewitched by Humanity, In Mortifying Imitation of You, his least creation, He would sail off on Voyages, no knowing where. Quake follows quake, Absence follows Absence: Nasty Chastity and Disorganization:

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PRIOR: ANGEL: PRIOR: ANGEL:

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Loss of Libido, Protomatter Shortfall: We are his Functionaries; It is BEYOND US: Then: April 18, 1906. In That Day: The Great San Francisco Earthquake. And also . . . In that day: [. . .] The King of the Universe: HE Left Abandoned. And did not return. We do not know where HE has gone. HE may never … And bitter, cast-off, We wait, bewildered; Our finest houses, our sweetest vineyards, Made drear and barren, missing Him. (Kushner, ibid 176-177)

Kushner's message seems to be for people to live in the here and now; for people to rely on each other rather than God and the hereafter. Only then, the American society can/will find answers to social ills and injustices. Allen J. Frantzen argues that “The tradition and stasis that constitute Prior’s Anglo-Saxon heritage draw her; she believes that Prior will be a worthy prophet precisely because he is a worthy WASP” (Frantzen, 139). However, the angel’s request that human beings should stop moving to bring God back to heaven is too selfish for Prior to accept because it is just for angels in Heaven. Prior challenges the angels’ request and returns the Book to them in heaven because human beings cannot stop progress. From Kushner’s point of view, the angels’ opposition to human progress parallels the American conservatism of the 1980s. In that vein, the selfish, authoritative, and demonic angel is like Republican Roy, who is “Fascist hypocrite lying filthy …” (Kushner, Angels 243). She tries to make human beings stay put in the status quo, as did the conservative mores of the Reagan administration, which represented a reversion to the past and its traditions. However, Prior, along with Kushner, thinks that society needs to change and progress for gay rights and social equality, which means, at least for them, social justice. In Kushner’s view, as represented by Harper, America is “a Promised Land, but what a disappointing promise!” (Kushner, ibid 196). Roy himself admits that America is not for the infirm: The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for sick. Look at Reagan: He’s so

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Chapter Three healthy he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm. (Kushner, ibid 192)

Prior’s challenge against the Angel symbolizes Kushner’s political challenge against the oppressive Reagan administration. Furthermore, Prior spiritually grows and acquires the authority to criticize even God, who irresponsibly has deserted Heaven and human beings: If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph or whatever in the Garden again . . . if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see. . . how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That’s my only contribution to all this Theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He. [. . .] I want to be healthy again. And this plague, it should stop. In me and everywhere. Make it go away. (Kushner, ibid 264)

If the Angel is the symbol of Roy and President Reagan, then Heaven symbolizes America, a dystopia, which is barren, deserted, and messy like San Francisco after the great earthquake in 1906: “It has a deserted, derelict feel to it, rubble is strewn everywhere” (Kushner, ibid 252). Heaven, where the angels gather “in the Council Room of the Continental Principalities” (Kushner, ibid 259), looks like chaos, and the angels are arguing with each other in a disordered way. This is not the real biblical picture of Heaven, where God reigns. This is a false Heaven because, as the angels say, God deserted Heaven and left. David Savran understands this Heaven as “a kind of museum, not the insignia of the Now, but of before, of an antique past, of the obsolete” (Savran, "Ambivalence" 20). Thus, “Heaven commemorates disaster, despair, and stasis” (Savran, ibid 20). Therefore, this is Kushner’s satirical version of Heaven as his acidic critique of conservative, chaotic America, where there is no justice, no order, and no love. Returning from Heaven, Prior's character has undergone considerable change. He turns the emotional tables on Louis, essentially from being a feeble person to having the wisdom and the power to reject Louis's entreaties. Louis appears and asks Prior if he can come back, to which Prior replies, "I love you Louis. . . . I really do. But you can't come back. Not ever. I'm sorry. But you can't" (Kushner, Angels 273). It is highly significant to notice the transformation which has occurred in Prior's character. He does not need Louis now. He has a community of people around him. He is no longer afraid of dying because he sees the promise of

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the future. His AIDS continues to plague him but not to dominate him. Prior's internal progress has been so difficult and painful. Yet, he struggles for himself and succeeds to integrate himself into the society where he lives. External progress on the societal level is no less difficult. For the society to move forward and progress, there should be an even more difficult and painful struggle on both the social and the political fronts. And most spectacularly, the prophet who once wanted nothing more than to run from his Angel, ends up frightening the assembled ranks of Heaven with an impassioned bit of theology, wresting from them that which he believes he deserves physically as well as intellectually. The Epilogue, which occurs in 1990, four years after most of the play’s action, explains that in the intervening years the Berlin Wall has fallen, the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of 'Perestroika' or 'radical change' has helped bring an end to the Cold War, and America has emerged as the sole leader of nations. Still, the ragged band of survivors, including Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah, gathered around Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. They address the state of the world saying: LOUIS: Whatever comes, what you have to admire in Gorbachev, in the Russians is that they're making a leap into the unknown. You can't wait around for a theory. The sprawl of life, the weird . . . HANNAH: Interconnectedness . . . LOUIS: Yes BELIZE: Maybe the sheer size of the terrain. LOUIS: It's all too much to be encompassed by a single theory now. BELIZE : The world is faster than the mind LOUIS: That's what politics is. The world moving ahead. And only in politics does the miraculous occur BELIZE: But that's a theory. HANNAH: You need an idea of the world to go out into the world. But it's the going into that makes the idea. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory. (Kushner, ibid 278)

Hannah leaves her comfortable life in Salt Lake City and, like her ancestors before her, migrates to a new land, New York City, to be reinvented. Her struggle will continue. Louis and Belize remain, at best, marginal members of society, still misunderstood, still mistreated, and still struggling for the rights enjoyed by society’s heterosexual majority. In addition, Prior, though he has survived his disease much longer than he expected, knows his story is not the end but only a beginning for homosexuals with AIDS in America. Prior has successfully survived because he becomes part of society. He integrates himself with the society; he believes that he must work for change instead of apathetically accepting

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society's view of him. Prior, on behalf of all the oppressed, marginalized human beings, defiantly warns his society “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. . . The Great Work Begins.” (Kushner, ibid 280). In this moment, the other characters are immersed in a heated discussion surrounding the statue of Bethesda while Prior speaks to the audience of survival and hope. Death, whose threat pervades the conclusion of Millennium, is entirely absent from these final moments of Perestroika. AIDS remains present, throughout Prior's words, but it has become a challenge rather than a crisis. In the end, Prior is not to be pitied as the play's tragic hero. Along with AIDS sufferers, Kushner's Angels unveils the corruption rampant in all parts of America, ranging from Reagan's political corruption to the destruction of the ozone layer while, at the same time, permitting only the AIDS victim to rise above the aches and pains to receive regular visits from the Angel. If Prior is unjustly burdened with disease, he appears fortunate in contrast to Louis who has been ruthlessly condemned for abandoning the man he loves. For failing to stand by Prior, Louis becomes the only one in quite a number of characters that has been renounced by the play as abnormal: Louis: Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need? Rabbi: Why would a person do such a thing? Louis: Because he has to. . . . [Because] maybe that person can't, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit . . .and sores and disease . . . really frighten him, maybe . . . he isn't so good with death. Rabbi: the Holy Scriptures have nothing to say about such a person. (Kushner, ibid 31)

Louis is outside the Holy Scriptures, outside of religion, outside of forgiveness. Joe, though perhaps less condemned by Kushner, likewise abandons the wife who loves him for a quest of personal fulfillment and exploration of his sexuality. After their ill-fated affair, neither Louis nor Joe is allowed to return; both Prior and Harper reject their exlovers'/abandoners' pleas for reconciliation. Through their equation, Prior's disease becomes little more than Harper's valium addiction: a persistent problem/challenge, but one that is simpler in comparison to those who reject connection for individualistic interests. It is highly significant to notice that Tony Kushner does not present Joe in a sympathetic light or offer him the chance to defend himself; Joe only reappears briefly in two scenes, mostly pleading ineffectually with Harper,

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and he is excluded from the triumphant epilogue at the Bethesda Fountain. As I have previously explained, all other characters are forgiven to some degree, including Roy. Joe alone is ruthlessly excluded from the play's society. His only 'crime' is that he is personally and politically conservative; a crime that can never be tolerated or forgiven either by Kushner or the world of characters he creates. This exclusion has led some critics to ask whether Kushner is fair to Joe. In this respect, John M. Clum writes: Kushner drops Joe off the face of the earth shortly before the end of Perestroika, as if he is unredeemable or simply not very interesting…Yet in every production of Angels in America I have seen, Joe is the character I care about, anguish over. (Clum, Acting Gay 315)

It is quite clear that Joe's struggle to come out of the closet with dignity, to contribute to society or to maintain what seems to be a sincere spirituality counts for nothing, with Louis or with the playwright. His apparently heartfelt love for Louis is disregarded and unlamented. In the end, he cannot escape that most dreadful label to Kushner, 'Republican.' It is an aberration in Kushner's sympathetic and generous vision to expel Joe out of the community of angels, for Joe deserves to be included in that angelic society Kushner creates at the end of the play. In short, the play finally seems to abandon Joe, excluding him from its vision of the good society because of his ideology; an omission that I believe is intolerant and unjustifiable. It is also against Kushner's own political ideology of inclusion and inclusiveness for which he strives to achieve in his dramatic works. However, one can also argue that Kushner's utopian dream of representing all different voices of the American society has also its limits, which is the next point to be discussed. Towards the end of Angels in America, Kushner emphasizes inclusiveness by bringing together characters of different personalities, cultures, and beliefs. Moreover, his communitarianism extends from a thematic interest in interconnectivity to an investment in the authorial responsibility to provide a voice for the general populace. In his desire to achieve this representational democracy within his art as it occurs within the American people, Kushner sets himself the challenging task of encompassing all of America's voices in each of his plays. This driven attempt at multivocality forms the cornerstone of Kushner's work, particularly from a political point of view, but it remains an extremely difficult task. In effect, no single writer can speak for all voices, and so is Kushner. The significance of multivocality to both his work and his

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political platform deserves more extensive consideration of this impossible dream of all-encompassing theatrical performance. In "With a Little Help From My Friends", Kushner dismisses what he refers to as "the fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that artistic accomplishment is exclusively the provenance of individual talents" (Kushner, Thinking 33). As much as any author may accredit various friends and acquaintances with elements of inspiration, however, Kushner remains ultimately an individual author who acknowledges his work as his own. As he told Michael Cunningham in an interview, "Of course, I'm compromised. I live in a capitalist society. I own these plays. I did the lion's share of the work on them so I can sort of justify it to myself in that regard" (Cunningham, 70). It is after all his singular highly distinctive voice that brings these multifarious characters to life and to the public eye. The question now is: can art created by an individual be multivocal? The answer to the previously mentioned question comes from Robert Vorlicky, the anthologist of Kushner's interviews, who views Kushner's recorded conversations as one way of escaping authorial univocality through necessary dialogue with others; as he puts it, "The interview format is a spontaneous performance of multiple selves" (Vorlicky, 3). For him, Kushner has the ability to speak for all even without an interrogative partner, as each of the myriad voices expressed in his plays is in some way an accurate representation of the author himself: Kushner's voice crosses the boundaries of intersecting, marginalized cultures as his subject position fluidly moves among a range of identities, all of which are Tony Kushner: son, brother, uncle, lover, queer, agonistic, Southerner, democrat, socialist, Jew, feminist, political activist, Manhattanite, and theatre professional—playwright, director, essayist, and artistic collaborator. (Vorlicky, 5)

In view of Vorlicky's words, one can safely argue that Angels grants voice to the many; with only eight actors, Kushner moves admirably towards a representation of the multiple American identity. Due to such grand ambition, the play is frequently criticized for its supposedly incomplete representation. The most notable, and, to a great extent, valid example in this regard centers on Kushner's depiction of women in Angels. Several critics have discussed this topic in detail, observing that Kushner, who is an avowed feminist, constructs an unambivalent prioritization of the male over the female. Although it is difficult to avoid reading the play as such, I briefly want to suggest a defense of Harper, the play's principal female character. Despite Kushner's presentation of her as a Valium-addicted

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trapped in a failing marriage who hallucinates and invents imaginary characters to escape her troubles, Harper gains at least a fairly small amount of credibility through her honesty, a trait notably absent in most of the male characters. Though she may well be a "mentally deranged sexstarved pill-popping housewife" (Kushner, Angels 42), it is Harper herself who coins this descriptive phrase, demonstrating an ability to confront hard truths about herself and proves completely different from her closeted husband, Joe. Kushner himself seems to defend Harper when he describes her as having "a mild Valium addiction and a much stronger imagination" (Kushner, ibid 137), attempting to work against her degradation as an addled addict. Deborah Geis is even harsher on Harper, calling her sanity into question by noting that her so-called revelations only concern events that "have already occurred within the narrative of the play" (Geis, 200). Angels' conclusion, however, grants Harper autonomy from her entombing home, a physical closet to parallel Joe's equally self-imposed emotional one. Airborne, prepared for new horizons, she speaks her final words: "In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead" (Kushner, Angels 275). Harper's dependence on Joe becomes secondary as she, like all the characters in the play, has struggled with the pain of abandonment and loss and comes through it as one of the few to achieve rational acceptance. Harper ends the play the farthest from where she began: as an independent, confident woman newly in love with life and setting off to build her own life in San Francisco. Heading for a new life in San Francisco, she aims forward, embracing the play's manifest ethic of progress. My point in defending Harper is to demonstrate that Kushner is certainly alluding towards a feminist representation by attempting to give his female protagonist the depth and originality of his myriad male characters. However, despite these details, the play's overall representation of women remains problematic. Of Angels' three principal female characters, only Harper is fully developed; Hannah is depicted simplistically as the tough mother figure, and the Angel makes only one appearance in the first part of the play. Indeed, it is only Harper who remains Harper during the whole play, as Hannah and the Angel shift into as many as five different roles within one performance, most of them male ones. This is actually one of the most notable postmodern features of the play. In Angels, there are various deliberate cross-gender casting as, for example, the young actress with an obviously fake beard playing the old Jewish rabbi at the opening of the play; a postmodern technique which forces the audience/readers to confront a profound separation between the actor and his or her role. Although Harper catches a jumbo jet for San

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Francisco in the end, such escape removes her from the play's central community. This is why one can safely argue that the play's grand concept of community, which truly exists between its male characters in one way or another, does not exist between its women as the three principal characters in the play have gone astray, each to a different direction. While the text offers ample evidence for critiquing Kushner's portrayal of women, it seems that every identity politics critic has somehow charged the play of inadequate representation. Framji Minwalla, for instance, observes that Angels' only principal black character, Belize, is "cipher, an enigma, a blankness" (Minwalla, 105). He claims that despite Belize's pivotal role as the connecting force between the other characters, he is given neither past history nor his own name. This is why Minwalla claims that Kushner is not properly speaking for the Other, specifically what is Other to himself. Minwalla also argues that Kushner fails to render an experience alien to his own. Kushner, on the other hand, is fully aware of this dilemma, as he states in an interview with Bruce McLeod: When I was writing this part I was wrestling, and I'm still wrestling, with the whole question of representation and the rights of representing different people's experience. The issue of a white writer writing a black character is so loaded. […] There is a way in which Belize refuses to let you in and doesn't give away very much and that just became part of who he was. (McLeod, 80)

Although Kushner himself certifies the fact that it is very difficult to describe an experience which is not his, one can also defend Kushner's portrayal of Belize, for despite his lack of personal description, Belize is the moral center of the play; the character who is the most continually ethical, reasonable and fair. Minwalla points out that Belize serves as an intermediary who at various times connects or brings together Roy and Prior, Prior and Louis, Louis and Roy, Prior and Joe. Unafraid to confront those in power, like Roy, Belize holds his ground in conflicts and brings humor and gentleness to friends like Prior when they are in need. He is the characters' sounding board and confidant, the person who comes closest to articulating Kushner's ideal politics. In fact, Belize is Roy’s “negation” (Kushner, Angels 208), but, ironically, Roy is cared for and companioned by his negation until his last moment of life. Even though Belize has no clout at all as an African American homosexual, he has love and compassion for other human beings. As Belize says, “Justice is simple. Democracy is simple. Those things are unambivalent. But love is very hard” (Kushner, ibid 100), which he demonstrates. Belize shows his companionship to people in need: “Whatever happens, baby, I will be here

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for you” (Kushner, ibid 67); he tries to secure some AZT for his friends from Roy’s private stash, and most importantly, he asks Louis to pray Kaddish for Roy: He died a hard death. So maybe …. A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at least. Isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for? (Kushner, ibid 256)

Roy is not only given companionship by Belize but also he is forgiven and blessed with Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, by Louis and Ethel, whom he hated most. Even Ethel Rosenberg, who was illegally and unfairly executed by Roy in the past, comes to “forgive” (Kushner, ibid 246) him, and she sings a song for him when he asks her to do it like his mother. Ethel calls 911 for the ambulance when Roy falls with great pain, and when Louis stutters for Kaddish, she joins and helps him to finish the prayer for Roy. Their benediction can be understood as “an act of forgiveness which breaks down the most obvious wall” (Clum, Still Acting Gay 257) between the mainstream and the others. In that sense, Kushner insinuates that, on the contrary, these socio-politically marginalized people are the real angels of America, who can change dystopian America into the real 'promised land' At the same time, many critics have severely criticized Kushner for even attempting such portrayals/presentations, including those he considers part of his own in-group: specifically Jews, homosexuals, and socialists. Jonathan Freedman writes an insightful account of how Kushner necessarily elides Jewishness in an effort to fulfill Angels' more important ambition of creating a global/universalized community. Noting that Roy Cohn is characterized by his "stereotypical Jewish lasciviousness and greed" (Freedman, 95), and Louis Ironson by being "querulous and ineffectual" (Freedman, ibid 98), Freedman views the play's rebirth and redemption conclusion as a means of removing the Roys and ironing the Ironsons, so that "what remains is harmonic and decidedly un-Judiac" (Freedman, ibid 100). Similarly, Alisa Solomon condemns Kushner for misrepresenting Jewish characters in Angels: She writes: Having recalled and critically examined three Jewish American cultural and political traditions in Roy, Louis, and dead Ethel, Kushner suggests that American Jews, having achieved a level of comfort and even clout in the United States, have abandoned their commitment to erotic and political liberation. If the millennium is approaching, the religious tradition of Judaism is being supplanted by the worldwide reign of Christianity. (Solomon, 131)

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So, in a word, the Jew is not Jewish enough, and, as I have already explained earlier in this chapter, the leftist is never leftist enough; but even more surprising is the accusation that this homosexual play inadequately or inappropriately represents homosexuals. Thus, again, the gay, Tony Kushner, is not homosexual/queer enough. Some other critics argue that Tony Kushner has definitely underrepresented another important segment of the American populace; it is the Anglo Saxon. Allen J. Frantzen objects to Prior's name and inclusion in the Bayeux Tapestry, which is "an embroidery that measures 231 feet by 20 inches, is a record of the political and military events surrounding the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066; it has long been regarded as a lucid statement of Norman claims to the English throne" (Frantzen, 139), both of which are apparently inappropriate for any selfrespecting WASP. He also protests most of all that Anglo Saxons are certainly not the static people Kushner depicts, but descend from a long line of highly migratory and brave ancestry. Moreover, the Washington Times critic Richard Grenier strongly condemns the play for misrepresenting the Anglo Saxons saying that the play "is not for White Bread America. It's for people who eat bagels and lox, dress in drag, and hate Ronald Reagan. It was funded by (who else?) the National Endowment for the Arts. For shame, Kushner-for shame" (Grenier, B3). It is quite impossible to include all furious attacks on Kushner's Angels over misleading representations. However, regardless of its validity, the fact remains that universal incorporation is an impossibility, even for a gifted playwright like Tony Kushner. Steven F. Kruger most succinctly summarizes this point by commenting: "Despite the presentation of identity as complex, as multiply determined, as relational, identity stubbornly remains identity, a marker of something unique to—given and intractable in—the person" (Kruger, 154). In fact, this harsh criticism against Kushner's Angels is, in fact, due to his limitless aspirations to multivocality, which leave him vulnerable to attacks such as those stated above. Despite all the credit Kushner generously shares with his collaborators, friends, and family, the authorial voice remains his own. He truly comes to a fuller understanding on this score after the completion of Angels. At the New York "Tolerance as an Art Form" conference in 1993, he eloquently spoke of the artistic process: The embrace of difference can be instructive: The artist is involved in a process of synthesis when imagining the Other—synthesis and not compromise. As in any process of synthesis, the two principles, the Self and the Other, create something new without losing those features which make each principle distinctly itself. This process is difficult and doomed

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to failure—if the Other is to stay truly Other then failure is axiomatic. But when an audience watches an artist in this process it is exhilarated, because a miracle of sorts is taking place, in which the Self's isolation is being discarded but not at the cost of its integrity. It is in moments like these, when art is most successful, that it may perhaps teach useful gestures to society, to political action. (Kushner, Thinking, 45)

While the aforementioned essay "With a Little Help from my Friends" seems to overlook the issue of singular artistic inspiration in favor of a larger, more collaborative viewpoint, this excerpt gives a more complete vision of the problematic relationship between author and creation, and author and reader. In a word, in creating/writing a work of art, friends contribute, playwrights assist, but the finished product is still invariably Kushner's. To conclude this chapter, I strongly believe that Tony Kushner's political vision in Angels has best been illustrated by delving deep into two major characters of the play: Roy Cohn and Prior Walter. Although they have a commonality as gay men with AIDS, they provide a striking contrast to each other in many aspects in this play. First, a clear disparity exists in the power relationship between these two gays with AIDS at the beginning of the play. However, as the play proceeds, their power relationship reverses: whereas Roy deteriorates and loses his power both physically and politically, Prior survives and becomes stronger and stronger as an autonomous and subjective individual. While Prior spiritually grows and challenges the mainstream’s mores, Roy remains a closeted gay man to the last moment of his life. Prior and Roy symbolize the two opposite sides of the socio-political American phenomenon regarding the issues of homosexuality and AIDS phobia during the 1980s. By contrasting Roy and Prior, Kushner reveals the value of a gentle communal approach to crisis over the harsh alienation of self. In Kushner's world, community transcends politics through a shared humanity that invests one's dignity in others. Clearly, Kushner's political concerns go far beyond gay rights to embrace the need for national reform, and this is why he subtitles the play, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Kushner thinks the gay community, ironically because of AIDS, is at a place where it can find a better way of life: "Our unhappiness as scared queer children doesn't only isolate us, it also politicizes us. It inculcates in us a desire for connection that is all stronger because we have experienced its absence. Our suffering teaches us solidarity; or it should" (Kushner, Thinking 32). Kushner is not just talking about the struggle before gays. He says that if a person is progressive, he or she intervenes against injustice, avoids

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separation, and seeks connection. Kushner believes that AIDS has brought about connection that has never existed before: We've advanced politically as a result: The advancement of the interests of one oppressed group is absolutely dependent and interdependent on the advancement of all. Also, AIDS has demanded that gay men rethink certain priorities; it's pushed the gay male community into a more collective politics, a more communitarian politics, into a politics of caretaking. (Blanchard, 44)

In Kushner' point of view, AIDS may be a metaphor for what plagues the whole nation, but progress begins when people of different backgrounds and beliefs and cultures come together to create something better for everyone. John Lahr writes that, "while his play refuses ideology, it dramatizes, as the title suggests, both the exhilaration and the terror of restructuring perception about gay life and about our national mission" (Lahr, "Beyond Nelly" 129). Kushner lets the audience take part in answering the big question he poses; what ideology should America as a nation embrace? In "Some Questions About Tolerance," Kushner offers one possible answer: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery and help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected. Marx was right: The smallest indivisible unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs. (Kushner, Thinking 39-40)

Kushner believes that change should occur not only in our external world but also in our internal worlds. Roy was unable to transform himself to move past his masochistic behavior to become part of the society. As a result, he dies a lonely pitiable person. Not only could he not accept himself, but he also could not fully accept the people around him. Roy's struggle was in attempting to consolidate his true self with the corrupt social world he created for himself. He has the opportunity to forgive Ethel. Similarly, Belize and Joe show him acceptance and love. However, Roy can only focus on external conflicts such as being disbarred. He does not learn to address his internal conflicts because he rejects the very core of his being. Prior, on the other hand, triumphs as he struggles with forces both outside of and within himself. Prior is a victim of double oppression: physically through AIDS and socially through abandonment; taken together, the two create real social ostracism. Because of AIDS, he is

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abandoned by his lover, Louis Ironson, and is isolated first in his apartment and later at the hospital. However, as the play proceeds, Prior, as Kushner’s alter-ego, overcomes his social marginalization, gains sexual autonomy and subjectivity in his life, and morphs into a prophet of hope, change, and progress for social equality in the future. It has been a very difficult process for Prior. He initially has to reject society as a whole so that he can accept himself as a gay man with AIDS. When he learns to forgive, he begins to move on in his life. In Belize, Hannah, and Harper, he sees people having strength to accept; Belize accepts Roy; Hannah accepts Joe, her gay son; Harper, who at one point in Angels has gone so mad that she gnaws down a tree in the park, finally accepts Joe's homosexuality. All the characters in the last scene of the play accept Prior. Prior's ability to learn from them and to accept external conflict really helps him find an internal balance within himself, and consequently, to survive. In other words, unlike Roy Cohn, a closeted AIDS victim, Prior shows the readers/audience his transformation from a helpless AIDS victim to a powerful challenger of the biased social mores of the time. As a result of his own spiritual growth, Prior not only survives AIDS but also insists on America’s changing and embracing sexual 'Others' as members of the community. To put it simply, Prior succeeds because he is willing to change whereas Roy is not. Kushner has faith in the American system of democracy, but not in the way it is now or in the way it is represented by the Angel: The strain in the American character I feel the most affection for and that has the most potential for growth is American liberalism, which is incredibly short of what it needs to be, incredibly limited and exclusionary—and predicated on all sorts of racist, sexist, homophobic and classist prerogatives. And yet, as Louis asks, why has democracy succeeded in America? I really believe that there is the potential for radical democracy in this country, one of the few places on earth where I see it as a strong possibility. (Savran, "Tony Kushner Considers" 27)

Roy is actually that 'racist sexist, homophobic and classist' American whom Kushner kills off in the play while allowing Prior to live. Kushner reflects the character of Prior as not only compassionate but also kindred, believing that Prior offers "a way out of death into life and life's political, social concomitant: liberation" (Kushner, Thinking 50). Paradoxically, Prior has achieved liberation only because he has suffered. To sum up, Kushner seems to be suggesting that the struggle is within every American, to find a humane foundation to work from in communities

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where everyone is accepted. Only then, the problems of injustice, intolerance, and exploitation can be eliminated.

CHAPTER FOUR SLAVS! THINKING ABOUT THE LONGSTANDING PROBLEMS OF VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s has been a major event in world history. There are various reasons for the decline and ultimate decay of the Soviet Union. Yet, despite the various schools of thought on this issue, these causes can generally be placed into two different scopes: the domestic and international arenas. Much emphasis is placed on the role that international factors played in the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, particular domestic factors that the Soviet Union was faced with during its relatively brief historical existence were possibly the most damaging elements. There is no doubt that various international factors such as the Cold War and the policy of the American administration played a major role in the dissolution of the USSR. At the same time, the Soviet Union encountered huge domestic problems such as a rapidly failing economy and a one-party political system, the Communist Party, which was not very adaptable to the political and social conditions that the country was subject to. These elements, which placed a huge amount of internal pressure on the Soviet system, combined with these international factors and created a mixture of external and internal pressures which, in the end, resulted in the demise of the Soviet system. Tony Kushner's third major play, Slavs! Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness attempts to delve deep into the aftermath of the downfall of a great country. In Slavs!, the emphasis is, again, on political debate and governmental failure as seen through the sad consequences of a collapsing country; i.e. the crumbling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the late 1980s. The play deals with the Soviets' crisis where abandoning the social theories of nearly a hundred years, embracing capitalism too quickly, and change without any guiding principles to replace those of the past, resulted in a catastrophic dissolution of a country that was, for a long time, one of the two superpowers dominating the world. In Slavs!, Kushner attempts to appropriate the

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transformation of the Russian social landscape as a symbol for the ways in which shifting political winds profoundly affect the lives of ordinary individuals. Although the play is set in Russia, its resonance with latetwentieth-century American life is unmistakable. The inspiration for Slavs! comes from Kushner's response to the catastrophic Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Slavs! is similar to Kushner's previous plays A Bright Room Called Day and Angels in America in the central role played by Kushner's moral outrage, as well as in his desire to draw lessons from the historical events on both personal and political levels. The play's serious questions about the demise of old values in a time of moral, political, racial, and sexual division are issues pervading most of Kushner's dramatic works. In his advisory notes to the play, Kushner makes it clear that Slavs! is anything but a documentary. As a chronicle of a Russian revolution, Kushner explains that he has never visited Russia and intends to imagine the situation there rather than to represent it accurately. Kushner imagines the decaying Russian society in this turbulent period of time as embodying/incarnating diverse elements of despair mixed with hard reality and deep emotional disappointment. As in A Bright Room Called Day and Angels in America, Kushner's characters are ordinary individuals attempting, with varying degrees of success, to survive horrifying tragedies of human history in such a dark and bleak reality. Although Kushner's characters are ordinary individuals, the ideas they debate are profoundly complex as they discuss troubling questions which not only affect the Russian future but international community as well. They reflect on various themes which truly influence the whole world around them: the rupture of the old and the fear of the new, the social dissolution resulting from economic upheaval, moral confusion, and the ongoing catastrophe of polluted land, water, and air. Tony Kushner poses these philosophical and historical issues in a purposely simplistic way, only to make way for his true message that revolutionary social change continues to challenge existing social structures and hope is difficult to come by when considering the wreckage of the past and the seemingly unsolvable problems society faces. Although the play is set in Russia, Slavs! is a parable of the latetwentieth-century American landscape. Elements of racial prejudice, corporate damage to the environment, and a general lack of compassion in human affairs are certainly as much American concerns as they are Russian. In Kushner's view, the only significant difference between the two countries is that the United States is currently economically successful, while the Russian economy lies in ruins. The most radical elements in Slavs! are to be found in the parallels Kushner draws between

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the Soviet collapse and the ravages of American capitalism. Surprisingly enough, Kushner identifies many ways in which the long decline and decay of Russia are like the extraordinary prosperity of America: both countries are multiethnic cultures structured by the theoretical underpinnings of a great social experiment that has a comparatively short history, both currently suffer, to varying degrees, from a profound political disappointment based on the failures and corruptions of their governments, and both have experienced a decline in the power and influence of the liberal elements within their political spheres. When he was preparing the play for its New York production, Kushner told New York Times interviewer William Harris that he was pessimistic about the state of American politics in the wake of the 'Republican Revolution' of the mid1990s feeling that: people who have the ability to shape and influence culture, we failed terribly. We haven't addressed the right issues. These are very bleak times. There's a tendency inside of me to sentimentalize and reassure, because I'm a person who is always desperately craving comfort. I think it's a very bad thing to offer reassurance when people shouldn't be reassured. I also believe in entertaining people. That's the struggle in me: the necessity of presenting a sufficiently terrifying vision of the world so that it can galvanize action – which is something art should aspire to – and really wanting people to have a good time and to get solace from what I do. (Harris, "In Slavs! Are the Echoes of Angels" 36)

This is actually the wellspring of Kushner's art and the key reason that even the bleakest and most frightening issues and visions in his plays are burnished by his hopefulness, his optimism as well as his need as a dramatist to find a modicum of progressive possibility in the darkest moments of his plays. In the late twentieth century, Kushner explains, "When I say I'm a Socialist, people look at me as if I had just said I was a Druid" (Harris, ibid 5). In fact, at the threshold of the third millennium, one can safely argue that socialism's disrepute throughout the world comes as a result of many factors. Kushner says that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, "Free-market capitalism is the coming thing, but that doesn't mean we have to assume it's a good thing. I wanted the play to speak about the particular dilemma that we're faced with now, those of us who believe there's still a necessity for the collective, as well as the individual" (Harris, ibid 5). For Kushner, Russian history "has always been a great other history to examine questions that are significant to my own life. It's a kind of meta-narrative that's always been tremendously important to me, a

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history and collection of legends that I've always been very moved by" (Dixon, 4). Certainly, anyone observing historical currents and the stresses of social change would be attentive to the devastating developments in Russia during the past twenty years or so. Tony Kushner also feels a great affinity for Russian writers and artists and for the goals of the Bolshevik Revolution. He believes that Slavs! is "a completely outside American reading of the collapse" (Dixon, 4) in Russia, "hence the outsizedness of some of the characters and situations – and it's completely intended to be read as metaphoric" (Dixon, 4). Kushner also intends to make clear that there is still an enormous amount in the literature of socialism that is tremendously valid. He also believes that "many of the problems facing this country [the United States] are problems that can only be hoped to be addressed once we start to understand the importance of economic as well as social justice, and deepen our understanding of ways in which society is collective as well as individualist" (Dixon, 4). Kushner's Slavs! attempts to answer a question that has been posed by previous writers; It is actually an extremely difficult question to answer: "What is to be done?" (Kushner, Slavs! 185). In order to delve deep to find an answer to that question, Kushner introduces characters which attempt to answer this question but fail, paralyzed, to some extent, by the sheer weight of social catastrophe and individual sufferings that overwhelms them all. Kushner's miserable characters wonder how they can proceed when the system in which they have lived their entire lives has fallen to bits and pieces around them. How can they survive that shaking turbulent life which they lead after the traumatic collapse of their own country? There are, of course, no obvious answers to these questions and some of the characters only seem prepared to proceed tentatively, and mostly blindly, into a frightening future. The subtitle of Slavs!, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, is inspired by the British socialist philosopher and literary critic Raymond Williams. In his 1985 essay, "Walking Backwards into the Future", Williams describes socialism as "based on the idea and practice of a society" (Williams, 283). He points to two sources of confidence inspiring socialists: "a moment in history when the world would be changed" (Williams, ibid 281) and the discovery of "the laws of movement in history" (Williams, ibid 282). Williams postulates that the realm of socialism is more than merely a place for "stranded utopians and sectarians" (Williams, ibid 282). He writes: The idea of a society was to distinguish one form of social relationships from another, and to show that these forms varied historically and could change. Thus, in thinking about the longstanding problems of virtue and

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happiness, people who began from the idea of a society did not immediately refer the problems to a general human nature or to inevitable conditions of existence; they looked first at the precise forms of the society in which they were living and at how these might, where necessary, be changed. The first uses of socialist, as a way of thinking, were in deliberate contrast to the meanings of individualist: both as a challenge to that other way of thinking, in which all human behaviour was reduced to matters of individual character and more sharply as a challenge to its version of human intentions. Was life an arena in which individuals should strive to improve their own conditions, or was it a network of human relationships in which people found everything of value in and through each other? (Williams, ibid 283)

These questions provide a foundation for aspects of both Slavs! and Angels in America. In Williams's essay, there is a belief that with socialism, the "power of private capital to shape or influence these decisions is replaced by active and often local social decision, in what is always in practice the real disposition of our lives," (Williams, ibid 285) and that there is "an immense and widespread longing for this kind of practical share in shaping our own lives. It has never yet been fully articulated politically and it is our strongest resource, if we can learn to deal honestly with it, for a socialist future" (Williams, ibid 285-286). Williams envisions that future as one in which "the public interest is not singular but is a complex and interactive network of diversity, and encourages the true social processes of open discussion, negotiation and agreement" (Williams, ibid 285-286). In fact, a closer look at Williams's concept of a socialist society clearly demonstrates the fact that it significantly shapes Kushner's conception of America under President Reagan. For Kushner, Reagan leads an abandonment of the notion of a society concerned with the 'longstanding problems of virtue and happiness'. By portraying the miserable conditions of a collapsing country, Kushner, by way of contrast, calls for a reordering of the American society along lines suggested by Williams's socialist theories. A reformed society built on a progressive, compassionately humanist doctrine that draws its strength from the hard lessons of the past is central to both Williams's theories and Kushner's drama in general. For the characters in Slavs!, proceeding into the unknown future seems too frightening, too painful, and too confusing. Walking backwards into the future, as Williams suggests, is a possible route Kushner presents. However, such a possible way embracing the values of the past is both triumphant and catastrophic. According to both Williams and Kushner, for a better future, one must consider what is behind him as well as what might be in front. It is a kind of guarded optimism won through terrible

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personal ordeals and a belief in the power of humanity to survive its own failings. It is highly important to notice that Williams's desire to seek a definition of society and notions of the ways in which inevitable changes in social structure impinge on individual lives is, again, as significant in Slavs! as it was in Angels. Kushner's admiration of Williams's assertion of the importance of a social theory opposing capitalism and the worth of socialism as a social principle does not blind him to the fact that such views can only be "made convincingly by looking honestly at the disastrous wreck of the Soviet system" (Dixon, 4). Such sweeping political transformations as those occurred in Russia in the mid-1980s, and continuing with great difficulty into the present, do not happen every day, or even every decade or century. As such, an opportunity to explore these huge transformations emerges. When a social experiment of such scope suddenly reverses itself, what can be understood about the human costs of both change and stagnation? Kushner's Slavs! offers a series of connected scenes depicting the breakup of the Soviet Union through individual lives. It is rife with ideological dogmas as Kushner sometimes provides a touching depiction of the nostalgia Russians feel for their past. It is also replete with Kushner's usual juxtaposition/collision of comic and tragic moments merged with images of the real and the fantastic. Tony Kushner explains that he intends: the movement of the play to be a descent from a sort of delirious optimism about the possibility of change to the grim realities of standing in the way of progress, how much history endangers the future, examining the truculence of the human heart and mind when faced with accepting the necessities of change; and a consideration of the failure of the Soviet experiment, and of classical socialism, to arrive at a theory and practice by means of which human affairs can be rationally planned and re-ordered so as to accomplish the goals of economic and social justice. (Dixon, 3)

In Slavs!, the Soviet people are shown, to some degree, as being made dupes by their government, as having to pay an overwhelming price for the corrupted brand of socialism that the Communists brought to the Russian society. However, Kushner is not in any sense mocking the Russian people. Instead, he finds "a great amount of courage and optimism" (Dixon, 3) in the willingness of the former Soviets to embrace perestroika, realizing the price that the individual within that society must pay for the change. Kushner strongly values the Russian people's awareness of the absolute necessity of change. However, he also realizes

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that such a change is extremely difficult, for a society to move forward and break free of a past that provides some sense of stability and comfort, is actually a difficult choice that the Russians have been willing to make. Kushner also views the connections between Angels and Slavs! as falling within the range of questions of change when he asks, "How much is change possible and what kinds of models for change and transformation do we have beyond the traumatic, beyond the revolutionary, which seem to me to be what the main questions of the historical event of perestroika were" (Dixon, 3). The brief prologue of Slavs! features two old babushkas sweeping the continually falling snow from the steps of the Kremlin's great Hall of the Soviets in March 1985. As they work, the two old women discuss the implications of the new politico-economic state in a highly intellectual debate that is interrupted briefly by the arrival of two elderly high-ranking Politburo members: Vassily Vorovilich Smukov who is "a pessimistic man in his seventies" (Kushner, Slavs! 91) and Serge Esmereldovich Upgobkin who is "an optimistic man in his eighties" (Kushner, ibid 91). At the approach of these two government officials, the two old women promptly metamorphose into good-natured, uneducated snow-sweeps. They have stopped talking about politics, immediately transforming themselves into what the apparatchiks want to see, "sweet, toothless old ladies, smiling, head-bobbing, forelock-tugging mumblers" (Kushner, ibid 100). Comforted by this image, Smukov and Upgobkin enter the hall as the babushkas continue their highly political debate, returning to their doctoral-level discourse and acknowledging the "big doings today . . . " (Kushner, ibid 102). Act One, Scene 1 proceeds immediately as Smukov and Upgobkin arrive in an antechamber just steps away from where the debate rages. Kushner calls the first act of Slavs! "treacherous" (Kushner, ibid 94), and "more or less a clown show—the characters are highly fantastical, the style heightened—and it's about change and the fear of the future" (Dixon, 3). For Kushner, it is extremely important for the audience "to think . . . a lively, active, vigorous, passionate thinking . . . thinking hard, discussing" (Kushner, Slavs! 94), in the first part of the play. This actually explains Kushner's use of Verfremdsdung, or the Brechtian concept of alienation and estrangement that he achieves through comedy. He indicates that these early scenes should be played as farce, despite a few clearly serious moments. He also stresses the importance of status among the governmental characters and underscores that the varying ranks of the Politburo members are critical for distinguishing the complex categories of power that eventually lead to disturbing conclusions later in the play.

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As the first scene commences, the two old men debate the rapidly shifting currents of politics in the collapsing Soviet Union. Smukov laments the current perplexing situation in Russia, arguing that "people are not capable of change" (Kushner, Slavs! 105) while he and Upgobkin drink tea from a steaming samovar. He also insists that the masses will not tolerate the deprivations they once endured to create the socialist system. Right from the very beginning of the play, Kushner skillfully describes how much the Soviet people suffered and endured to build and protect the system in which they believed. In this respect, Vassily Smukov laments saying that: in the old days you could ask anything of the people and they'd do it: Live without bread, without heat in the winter, take a torch to their own houses—as long as they believed they were building socialism there was no limit to how much they could adapt, transform. Moldable clay in the hands of history. (Kushner, ibid 105)

Smukov continues by arguing that "people would rather die than change" (Kushner, ibid 106) as "Stagnation is our only hope" (Kushner, ibid 106). Upgobkin disagrees, counting that he believes "precisely the opposite" (Kushner, ibid 107) and that the Russian people "have been ordered into Motion by History herself" (Kushner, ibid 107), believing that the Russians "Would rather change than die" (Kushner, ibid 107). Worrying about staying awake for the endless debate, they reluctantly enter the Great Hall in the next scene, just in time to hear Alexii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, "the world's oldest Bolshevik" (Kushner, ibid 107), delivering an oration on the current state of affairs with intense passion. It is highly significant to note that Prelapsarianov's speech previously featured as the prologue to Kushner's perestroika; the second part of his Angels in America. This speech actually underscores the connection of Slavs! with Angels, but more importantly, it establishes the play's central concept: past foundations of Soviet society have failed, but nothing exists to replace those foundations except the ruins of that failed system or an acceptance of capitalism. Prelapsarianov, who is considered the play's intellectual conscience and its historical figure as a visible reminder of the Russian Revolution of 1917, argues that change cannot proceed without a new social construction. He poses a number of questions to which he knows the answers: "How are we to proceed without Theory? Is it enough to reject the past, is it wise to move forward in this blind fashion, without the Cold Brilliant Light of Theory to guide the way?" (Kushner, ibid 108). Prelapsarianov believes that such a theory is needed in order to illuminate

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the obscure future. Speaking of the great socialist texts used to support the Soviet experiment, and of "the sheer grandeur of the prospect we gazed upon" (Kushner, ibid 108), Prelapsarianov mocks the "Sour Little Age" (Kushner, ibid 108) of the present. He also wonders what does the present offer to compare with the great theories of the past? He mockingly points out that all they can offer in its place are "Market incentives? Watereddown Bukharite stopgap makeshift Capitalism? NEPmen! Pygmy children of a gigantic race!" (Kushner, ibid 108). However, Prelapsarianov does not simply celebrate the past and mock the present. Realizing that the Russian people must change as he passionately pleads that without theory, "we dare not, we cannot move ahead" (Kushner, ibid 109). The next scene introduces two middle-aged deputies: Ippolite Ippolitovich Popolitipov and Yegor Tremens Rodent, both of whom are agitated over the distressing debate. Popolitipov insists that while external changes may be inevitable, "the heart is not progressive. The heart is conservative, no matter what the mind may be" (Kushner, ibid 109). He is strongly convinced that the heart will go back to the familiar, to "what it loves. That's the function of the organ, that's what it's there for: to fall in love. And love is profoundly reactionary, you fall in love and that instant is fixed, love is always fixed on the past" (Kushner, ibid 109). The two deputies are joined by Upgobkin, who leads the exhausted Prelapsarianov to a seat following his zealous tirade at the podium. They all condemn the madness of the present social circumstances and discuss everything from a disastrous leakage of radioactivity from a plutonium plant to a bizarre rumor that some people have "used black arts to resurrect . . . Rasputin" (Kushner, ibid 112). Popolitipov laments that the current mess "cannot be what Lenin intended" (Kushner, ibid 112) while Rodent bitterly argues that it is all as if "seventy years of socialism had never happened at all" (Kushner, ibid 113). As the conversation continues, the fading Prelapsarianov has a sudden revelation about why Evil triumphs and Good is "cast down in the gutter" (Kushner, ibid 113). It is, he believes, because "God . . . Is Menshevic! Because God . . . Is a Petty-Bourgeois! Because God is a Reactionary, and Progressive People are THE POLITICAL ENEMIES OF GOD!" (Kushner, ibid 113). With this pronouncement, Prelapsarianov suddenly collapses and dies, symbolizing the demise of the Soviet experiment. Here again, it is highly important to notice how Tony Kushner creates, as in his earlier works, a metaphorical convergence of old and new, past and present. Shortly thereafter, in scene 4, Popolitipov comments that Prelapsarianov's "grieving heart avenged itself on the forward-moving mind. The heart drowned the brain in blood" (Kushner, ibid 113) and tells Rodent that

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"illness is a metaphor, Yegor; the human body, the body politic, the human soul, the soul of the state. Dynamic and immobile all at once, lava and granite, the head and the heart. It's all tension and tearing"(Kushner, ibid 115-116). Smukov disagrees, but concurs with the deceased Bolshevik that "we should not move until we know where we are going" (Kushner, ibid 116). Upgobkin is anxious to make the leap into the unknown future. He is so enthusiastic that he literally begins leaping about the room taunting his unwilling colleagues. He continually pushes them by saying: "Will you never dare? Will you be dead forever?" (Kushner, ibid 116). Finally, the strain of the leaping causes Upgobkin to die, and he collapses to the floor beside Prelapsarianov. There is a frozen smile on Upgobkin's face, leaving them to wonder. Now, there are two dead people, two bodies: Prelapsarianov and Upgobkin. The former has died of too much brain whereas the latter has expired from too mush heart. Then, the first act ends with Smukov's wonder about the still-smiling Upgobkin even after he miserably dies: "Still smiling. That smile. What on earth do you suppose he saw?" (Kushner, ibid 119). Kushner describes the second act of Slavs!, which is also set in Moscow, as "very Dostoevskian—dark, full of romantic Slavic torment and angst and spooky folk-magic" (Dixon, 3). In the first scene, Katherina Serafima Gleb, the pretty, self-consciously butch night security guard in a mysterious laboratory containing a horrifying collection of large jars where the Communist Party has stored the brains of its departed leaders and thinkers: "The great minds of the Party. Political minds. Scientific minds. Even an artist or two" (Kushner, Slavs! 129). She also says that it is "an unbroken line of brains stretching back to Red October" (Kushner, ibid 129). All the brains of previous Soviet leaders are there in The Pan- Soviet Archives for the Study of Cerebro-Cephalognomical Historico-Biological Materialism. Lenin's brain, Stalin's brain, Brezhnev's brain, Andropov's brain, and even Konstantin Chernenko's brain, though he died very recently, are all there, "except for those which got flushed in the notorious dead-brain Purges of 1937" (Kushner, ibid 129). Katherina talks of the brains in the jars, telling the audiences that when she feels bored, she shakes them up and the loose tissues "whirl like snowflakes in a crystal snowball" (Kushner, ibid 129). Katherina is actually a very young, aggressive lesbian, courted ineffectually by Popolitipov who attempts to make love to her but she refuses, reminding him that she is a lesbian. Referring to herself as an anarchist, Katherina discusses how fast Mikhail Gorbachev has risen to power. She is also afraid that Gorbachev "will come, trailing free-market anarchy in his wake! Burger King! Pizza Hut! The International Monetary Fund! Billions in aid will flow"

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(Kushner, ibid 132). Although she adamantly denies being anti-Semitic, Katherina compares Gorbachev's intelligent mode of thinking with Jews and insists that with his rise, "there will be no more politics, we will become like Americans" (Kushner, ibid 132). In a lengthy dialogue with Popolitipov whom she calls 'Poppy', Katherina hopes that the surprises of the future of her country under Mikhail Gorbachev may at least help her get rid of the overwhelming sense of boredom and sorrow she feels. As they are drinking vodka, Katherina and 'Poppy' sadly contemplate on the true meaning of love, with the latter insisting that "even in a degraded, corrupt and loveless world, love can finally be born" (Kushner, ibid 133). Here again as in Angels in America, Tony Kushner, even at the darkest moments of existence and in the middle of despair and turmoil, clearly highlights the importance of love and affection in the lives of his characters. For Kushner, love is a priority that can never be dispensed with. Poppy and the vodka have temporarily succeeded in moving Katherina. However, his hopes of having a little romance with her are suddenly aborted when Dr. Bonfila Bezhukhovna Bonch-Bruevich, a specialist in pediatric oncology, arrives. Katherina runs to the arms of her girlfriend. Tension mounts as Poppy attempts to come between Katherina and Bonfila, causing Katherina to angrily insult Poppy. She prefers Bonfila who cures people to an old man like Poppy whom she believes is "an ineffectual aged paperpushing timeserver-apparatchik-with-a-dachalike you who only bleeds the people dry" (Kushner, ibid 136). After a furious argument in which Popolitipov offers harsh criticism of Katherina, he decides to depart leaving Bonfila to fear that he may think of revenge. Relaxed by Poppy's departure, Bonfila has brought Katherina a present, an old religious icon of St. Sergius whose face has been painted over with Lenin's. Bonfila insists that the icon can make miracles. Thus, Katherina prays to the icon to make Bonfila love her. The latter looks sadly at the St. Sergius/Lenin icon and says: (Very softly) Little father: You left us alone and see the state we've fallen into? Shouldn't you come back to us now? We have suffered and suffered and Paradise has not arrived. Shouldn't you come back and tell us what went wrong? She says your brain is in a jar next door: Your body is across town. Pull yourself together, leave your tomb, come claim your brain, remember speech, and action, and once more, having surveyed the wreckage we have made, tell your children: What is to be done? (Kushner, ibid 151)

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As Tony Kushner himself explains, the final act of Slavs! is the heart of the play, as it "addresses the unbelievably awful conditions of life in contemporary Russia." (Dixon, 3). Now, the setting of the play shifts from Moscow to Talmenka, Siberia. It is 1992 as seven years have elapsed and the action proceeds in a medical facility where Bonfila has been transferred by the vengeful Popolitipov following Katherina's insults in the previous act. A little girl, Vodya Domik, is calmly seated on a wooden chair in a Siberian clinic near a nuclear waste-disposal site. Rodent, the hypocritical apparatchik from Moscow enters with briefcase and tries to talk with her. She ignores him. This metaphor of lack of communication is further explained by the doctor. The child is a third-generation nuclear mutant who cannot speak and will die soon. When Vodya's mother arrives, Bonfila introduces her to Rodent who is there to make a report on the workings of the facility that has been established to treat child victims of nuclear and toxic waste accidents. Bonfila explains that many of the resident children have died before the age of six. She recounts that the children are all suffering from "nervous-system damage, renal malformation, liver, cataracts at three, bone-marrow problems" (Kushner, Slavs! 161). Doctor Bonfila also adds that many children, including Vodya, cannot speak or do not learn to walk at appropriate ages. Realizing that Rodent is a representative of an indifferent government, she bitterly criticizes the continual dumping of toxic and nuclear materials in the region. However, Rodent tries to blame it all on the Stalin era. But Bonfila insists that this is not so, that the dumping continues and that Vodya is, as a result, a mutant. She courageously declares that "The whole country's radioactive swamp" (Kushner, ibid 164), adding that there are six hundred nuclear waste sites in Moscow and this is why hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to waste dumps and malfunctioning reactors. Bonfila launches a violent tirade portraying government unresponsiveness and indifference to outcries against plutonium dumping in a cave in a very close area, adding that poorly stored nuclear waste has been piling up there since 1950. She persistently demands to know why it has not been moved, but Rodent tensely mocks Bonfila's anger and her charges against the government, adding in a threatening tone: "In the old days you would not speak to me like this" (Kushner, ibid 164). More directly on the subject, Rodent indifferently dismisses the dumping of the toxins, insisting that there is nothing to be done, as there is no place to put them in. This makes Bonfila even more furious and she becomes increasingly aggressive, claiming that the Soviet government offers to process and store radioactive and toxic waste from the West in exchange for a lot of money to be paid to the Soviet government. Strangely enough, Rodent does not deny Bonfila's

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accusations as he admits that the government is willing and welcoming to dump nuclear and toxic waste in Russian soil as long as Western countries will pay for that. Frustrated and infuriated, Bonfila accuses Rodent of complicity in the Soviet's government's nuclear testing on its citizens, but bitterly admits that she is still a socialist: "Isn't that absurd! After all I've seen I still believe . . . And, and I want to know! And you, SOME ONE MUST TELL ME! How this. . . How this came to pass. How any of this came to pass. In a socialist country. In the world's first socialist country" (Kushner, ibid 166). Strangely enough, after Bonfila's lengthy rant, all she gets from the indifferent Rodent is a one-word sentence: "naïveté" (Kushner, ibid 166). Bonfila's rage against Rodent is directly followed by another encounter between him and Mrs. Domik, Vodya's mother, who wants to know what Rodent, as a representative of the state, intends to do about her poor ill daughter. She angrily tells Rodent that the little girl needs a special care which she cannot afford. She also believes that her daughter, being a victim of the Russian nuclear policy, must receive the maximum amount of medical care and financial assistance. She also demands that Bonfila and Rodent take responsibility for Vodya: "Take her to Yeltsin! Take her to Gorbachev! Take her to Gaidar! Take her to Clinton! YOU care for her! YOU did this! YOU did this! She's YOURS" (Kushner, ibid 171). She storms out, but returns almost immediately to demand that Rodent take his "filthy fucking hands off my child" (Kushner, ibid 171). Rodent tremulously attempts to explain the current political situation to Mrs. Domik, insisting that the government has fallen into the hands of those more interested in selling out the interests of Russians to foreign dollars. However, his feeble attempt at sympathy is undermined by his efforts to blame these problems on various sects and races from the Caucasus region such as Muslims, Asiatics, Jews, and dark-skinned people who, he believes, have flooded into the country. Rodent's misleading and hypocritical speech causes Mrs. Domik to explode. In a fury, she screams that she is not a Russian, but she is Lithuanian because: fucking Stalin sent my grandma here fifty years ago. My grandpa and my great-uncles and great-aunts died tunneling through the Urals on chain gangs. Their father and his brother were shot in Vilnius, their children were shot fighting Germans, my sister starved to death and my brother killed himself under fucking Brezhnev after fifteen years in psychiatric hospital, I've tried twice to do the same—and my daughter . . . Fuck this century. Fuck the state. Fuck all governments, fuck the motherland, fuck your mother, your father, and you. (Kushner, Slavs! 172173)

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Holding the poor little girl by the hand, Mrs. Domik furiously departs, leaving Rodent "ashen with terror" (Kushner, ibid 173). Reflecting on the power of Mrs. Domik's impotent rage, Kushner explains its relation to electoral apathy in America: It leads her to reject fascism, as it leads her to reject any form of government. But whether or not she can ever be reached again or be brought to believe in any system again is scary. It's also a situation we're faced with all over the United States. The people who voted in the Newt Gingrich are only a fifth of the population. The people who didn't come out and vote are the people who basically decided that there is no hope for them, that there is no government that will serve them, that there is no ideology they can cling to. (Lahr, "Hail Slavonia" 86)

In the wake of Mrs. Domik's fury, Rodent simply departs, offering no solutions to the disastrous situation. In the meantime, Bonfila explains her own persistence in the face of the horrifying problems: "Because I thought I could do some good here. In the face of all this impossibility, twenty thousand years, that little girl who won't live five more years, I still believe that good can be done, that there's work to be done. Good hard work" (Kushner, Slavs! 174). The epilogue of Slavs! is of primary significance for the overall understanding of the play. That scene is intended, as Kushner explains, as "a kind of philosophical discussion about what's to be done now. Is there anything in the whole wreckage of the Soviet Union and the history of socialism in the Soviet Union to be recuperated?" (Dixon, 3). The final scene's setting is like a gloomy place "like a city after an earthquake" (Kushner, Slavs! 179), where the two deceased Politburo members of the first act, Upgobkin and Prelapsarianov are playing cards in the afterlife. Despite the fact that they have been dead for more than ten years, they cannot find peace. Being bored with card playing, they consider looking down to see how things are turning out in Russia, or in other troubled places like Cuba, Rwanda, Bosnia, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Finally, they have decided not to know as they believe that "it is depressing" (Kushner, ibid 181). The two old men notice the arrival of a child – Vodya – in heaven, being fully fluent now, and talks with them. She reveals that she has died of cancer caused by her exposure to plutonium, that a "wild profusion of cells; dark flowerings in my lungs, my brain, my blood, my bones; dandelion and morning glory vine seized and overwhelmed the field; life in my body ran riot" (Kushner, ibid 182). Prelapsarianov reveals that he died from talking too much and that Upgobkin expired from leaping symbolically into the future. The two old

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men admit that they had no wisdom, as they have not been able to see the new. Vodya postulates that maybe the guiding principles of the past were always wrong: "Perhaps it is true that social justice, economic justice, equality, community, an end to master and slave, the withering away of the state: These are all desirable but not realizable on the earth" (Kushner, ibid 183). She also laments that the failure of socialism in the East may only be the result of the politicians' failure to organize justly the production and distribution of the wealth of nations. The end-result of such failure, Vodya continues, is that "chaos, market fluctuations, rich and poor, colonialism and war are all that we shall ever see" (Kushner, ibid 183). She concludes by saying that the most dangerous problem is not that socialism fails and capitalism triumphs, but it is that there is no conceivable alternative to it, revealing that she is terribly sad, and this is why she needs to hear a story. Upgobkin recounts the tale of a seventeenyear-old boy called Vladimir who was sad because the secret police had just hung his brother for plotting to kill the Czar. Because he missed his brother, the boy grew up "to become Great Lenin, and read his brother's favorite book whose title and contents ask the immortal question: what is to be done? A question with which Lenin: stood the world on its head; the question which challenges us to both contemplation and, if we love the world, to action; the question which implies: Something is terribly wrong with the world, and avers: Human beings can change it; the question asked by the living and, apparently, by the fretful dead as well: What is to be done? (Kushner, ibid 185).

Kushner's end in Slavs! leaves the door open for various interpretations. Is the end of the play a clear statement of the complete hopelessness of the situation, both in Russia and in regard to the worth of the socialist model? Is it a call to action, demanding a powerful rising out of the ruins? The answer to the aforementioned questions is left to the critical faculty of the audiences. In order to find an answer to such highly philosophical and extremely difficult questions, the audience needs to think deeply about the past and the present, about the real reasons behind the collapse of the Soviet Union, and consequently of the socialist experiment. In this sense, Kushner attempts to dramatize problems and raise challenging questions about them without offering pat answers or suggesting specific solutions for man's problems. Thus, one can safely argue that Kushner chooses the Brechtian method of inviting the audience to contemplate the issues and to consider what next. He literally asks in the play: what is to be done? To conclude this chapter, it is quite clear that Slavs!, following the fulllength Angels in America, is an exploration of other directions in the style

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and structure of Kushner's plays. He certainly demonstrates that he can explore immense themes in an epic style within a narrower framework than his earlier work. While holding to his particular notions of Brechtian episodic structure, Kushner moves further away from the traditional realistic theatre in a play that seems on the surface to be like a political satire. It is, however, much more, especially as the play proceeds to its desolate conclusion. In Slavs!, Kushner focuses on historical rubble and disarray, on the need to find a glimpse of hope in chaotic and tragic situations, and on eras of social and political fluctuations. He points forward to the possibilities of change and the hope of the future and away from the wreckage and failures of what has gone before. In Kushner's point of view, the most catastrophic problem for Russia is the lack of a guiding theory. As Prelapsarianov explains, Russia is like a snake that is shedding one skin before another is ready. This actually makes the Russian society much more vulnerable to disasters. In his prose works and interviews, Kushner tends to promote the idea that such disasters in the Soviet Union were the result of poor leadership and false implementation of Marxist theory. Michael Gorbachev, the Soviet leader in the mid 1980s has rushed into a process that Marx believed would occur gradually. In his interview with Craig Lucas, Kushner says: "The idea of socialism is still completely valid, and the collapse of the Soviet system doesn't in any way mean that capitalism has succeeded" (Lucas, 36). This is the heart of the matter for Kushner. As a socialist, he desires to preserve something hopeful from the collapse of the great socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. Without another social theory to balance the excesses of capitalism, Kushner insists that a serious look back at Marxism is essential: When a very great theory, and Marxism is a very great theory, suffers the outrages of history, as it has—as well as having caused a few outrages of history—then we're left reexamining what that was, why that happened, and what we're going to do now. There are some lessons that the collapse of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union needs to teach us. (Harris, "The Road to Optimism" 150)

However, the conclusion of Slavs! discards any possibility that socialism may someday achieve revival in its ideal Marxist formulation. Such conclusion proposes not only a critique of the Soviet system, but also an interrogation of the very principles of socialism itself.

CHAPTER FIVE HOMEBODY/KABUL

Tony Kushner's next play, Homebody/Kabul, is about Afghanistan. The play, as almost all of Kushner's plays, is a forum for social and political debates on questions of immediate concerns. Prior to 9/11, the play is about a middle-class British woman's fascination with the past and present of Afghanistan. It famously opened in New York in December 2001, mere weeks after the attacks on the New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania. After 9/11, Homebody/Kabul appears prophetic in shaping the questions that, all of a sudden, face the United States as the sole superpower that dominates the whole world. One of the most important questions is: were the tragedies of 9/11 the direct result of a long history of American foreign policy? Due to high expectations of controversy because of the subject of the play, Kushner was asked to write a statement for the press. This is what Kushner writes: Homebody/Kabul is a play about Afghanistan and the West’s historic and contemporary relationship to that country. It is also a play about travel, about knowledge and learning through seeking out strangeness, about trying to escape the unhappiness of one’s life through an encounter with Otherness, about narcissism and self-referentiality as inescapable booby traps in any such encounter; and it’s about a human catastrophe, a political problem of global dimensions. It’s also about grief. I hate having to write what a play is about, but I suppose these are some of the themes of the play. (Kushner, An Afterword, Homebody/Kabul, 142)

Located in the heart of Central Asia, Afghanistan is a country of towering mountain ranges. The capital of Afghanistan and its largest populated city is Kabul, which is located in the east-central part of the country. The people of Afghanistan represent a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups, shaped by the country’s history, which includes large-scale migration and conquests. Afghanistan has been subject to continual invasion and rule by outside powers—from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to Queen Victoria's armed forces. Modern Afghanistan becomes a battleground in struggles over political ideology and commercial influence, but each time,

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the invading foreign powers have been defeated. In the late 20th century, Afghanistan has suffered ruinous effects from invasion by the Soviet Union in 1979 to Soviet military presence which ended in 1989 at the hands of the Mujahideen as well as the continuing civil afterwards. Pashtu and Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi are the official national languages of Afghanistan. Pashtu was made the national language of Afghanistan and became the language of the Taliban. Dari is the language of the Tajiks, Hazaras, Aimaks and Kizilbash peoples. Pashtuns predominantly inhabit the southern and eastern parts of the country but are also well represented in the west and north. They are divided into a number of clans. The traditional homeland of the Pashtuns lies in an area east, south and southwest of Kabul; many live in contiguous territory of Pakistan. The two most politically important groups of the Pashtun are the Durranis, who formed the modern nucleus of Afghanistan's social and political elite and live in the area around the city of Kandahar, and the Ghilzays, who inhabit the region between Kabul and Kandahar. The Tajiks are mostly farmers and artisans. They live in the Kabul and Badakhshan provinces of the northeast and in the west. In 1994, Islamic students who adopted a radical approach to interpreting Islam formed the Taliban, an ethnic Pashtun-dominated movement in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city and chief trade center. Pashtuns comprise the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and have dominated the government for centuries. Leaders of other major ethnic groups in Afghanistan such the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks formed the Northern Alliance opposition, which battled the Taliban in a prolonged Civil War that left thousands dead, missing or refugees in the 1990s. In 1998, the year in which Kushner's play was set, the Taliban controlled approximately 90% of the country, including the capital Kabul and all of the largest urban areas. Mullah Omar, the leader of Taliban had ultimate authority. Some people in Afghanistan initially saw the Taliban as a positive movement that brought some order to chaos. In this respect, Ahmed Rashid writes: Since their dramatic and sudden appearance at the end of 1994, the Taliban had brought relative peace and security to Kandahar and neighbouring provinces. Warring tribal groups had been crushed and their leaders hanged, the heavily armed population had been disarmed and the roads were open to facilitate the lucrative trade between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia which had become the mainstay of the economy. (Rashid, 7)

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But the Taliban imposed on the country the world’s strictest form of Islam. Among their decrees, banning all material such as music and movies deemed vulgar, immoral and anti-Islamic. Taliban forces were responsible for targeted killings, mass killings, and deaths in custody. In 2001, Taliban authorities blew up 2000-year-old Buddha statues in the cliffs above the central town of Bamiyan, ignoring international pleas for their preservation. Also in that year, Afghan religious minorities were ordered to wear tags identifying them as non-Muslims, and Taliban authorities arrested eight international aid workers on charges of spreading Christianity, an offense punishable by death under the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law. The plight of Afghan women and girls has been, in fact still is, much more than that. Women and girls were harshly treated under the Taliban regime, with the restrictions imposed upon them including the following: Women were not allowed to appear outside the home unless wearing a burqa which is a long veil covering them from head to toe, with only a small mesh screen through which to see. The burqa was previously worn, but it was optional not an enforced dress code. Women could not appear on the balconies of their apartments or houses. They were also forbidden from appearing in public without a mahram; a close male relative such as a father, a brother or a husband. Women who did not obey Taliban rules, or who appeared in public unaccompanied by a mahram, were punished by whipping, beating and verbal abuse. Moreover, women were not allowed to attend school or university or to work outside the home. Needless to mention, they were forbidden from being treated by male doctors until June 1998, when they were permitted to seek treatment from male doctors if accompanied by a male relative. Women were also banned from or appearing in public gatherings of any kind. On the miserable conditions of Afghan women, Abdullah Qazi writes: During the rule of the Taliban (1996 - 2001), women were treated worse than in any other time or by any other society. They were forbidden to work, leave the house without a male escort, not allowed to seek medical help from a male doctor, and forced to cover themselves from head to toe, even covering their eyes. Women who were doctors and teachers before, suddenly were forced to be beggars and even prostitutes in order to feed their families. (Qazi, n.p.)

The suffering and torture of Afghan women received international exposure, particularly from American media and political figures that publicly condemned Taliban policies as brutal and inhumane. In 1999, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright publicly stated: "We (the US) are

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speaking up on behalf of the women and girls of Afghanistan, who have been victimized by all factions in their country's bitter civil war. The most powerful of those factions, the Taliban, seems determined to drag Afghan women back from the dawn of the 21st century to somewhere close to the 13th." (Albright, n.p.). However, the protests of international agencies carried little weight with Taliban authorities, who gave precedence to their interpretation of Islamic law and did not feel bound by UN codes or human rights laws and legislation. The Taliban viewed such laws as instruments for Western imperialism. It is actually against this background that Tony Kushner writes his most recent controversial play Homebody/ Kabul. Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul uses modern Afghanistan to examine ideas of isolation and the difficulties of connection on an international scale. In his Afterword to the play, which, unlike the play itself, was written after 9/11, Kushner suggests that the American people: ought to wonder about the policy, so recently popular with the American right, that whole countries or regions can be cordoned off and summarily tossed out of the international community's considerations, subjected to sanction, and refused assistance by the world's powers. (Kushner, An Afterword, Homebody/Kabul, 144)

Such behavior, Kushner feels, "blinds our government [The U.S administration] to geopolitical reality, to say nothing of ethical accountability and moral responsibility" (Kushner, ibid 144-145). As illustrated in the previous analyses of his plays, Kushner's dramas are always infused with hope, but in Homebody/Kabul, the hope is buried deeper. His play takes the reader/audience into contemporary worlds where civilization is in disarray and the needed collective action has not yet materialized/ concretized. James Reston points out the ways that the United States has historically used Afghanistan as a political tool to further American selfinterest: "Afghanistan was used as an instrument to topple the Soviet Union and end the Cold War, and then the instrument was discarded. The CIA funded the Taliban secretly through Pakistan, exploiting her land as a buffer for Iran, against whom the U.S. was still trying to settle a 20-yearold score" (Reston, 28). Reston calls the play a work for those "who can bear to contemplate the thought that we have participated to some extent in our tragedy" (Reston, ibid 28), and indeed the play works as a critique of the West's denial of its responsibilities as part of a world community. Structurally, the play works its way toward this larger critique through an examination of the lives of a number of isolated characters, beginning with

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a lengthy but extremely powerful monologue by an unhappy London housewife whom Kushner calls the Homebody. In her powerfully expressive monologue, such mesmeric woman admits to talking too much and, as she is slowly revealed, she also cares perhaps too much about the history and present circumstances of Afghanistan. The woman, who feels an inability to connect, is first seen immersed in reading an old guidebook about the Afghan city of Kabul, a place, she says, that "as we all know, has . . . undergone change" (Kushner, Homebody, 9). The deep-rooted disconnection of the Homebody is quickly made apparent. As we meet the character, she has become quite taken with the history of ancient Afghanistan as an exotic, historic crossroads of civilizations that she has read of in her old guidebook. The Homebody speaks of her strange devotion to such outdated materials. In her studies, she seeks "not the source but all that which was dropped by the wayside on the way to the source" (Kushner, ibid 9). For the Homebody, materials such as old magazines and old political tracts are "irresistible, spooky, dreamy, the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known overwhelms" (Kushner, ibid 10). The Homebody's behavior can be seen as simultaneously an avoidance of the present moment and a way of feeling she has some control over history. History, approached in the Homebody's fashion, has a stopping point: it exists safely in the past. The Homebody acknowledges throughout her monologue her own frustrating lack of involvement with life. Seated alone in comfortable isolation, the Homebody reads aloud historical facts about Kabul from her guidebook, illuminating the dawn of history there around 3,000 B.C. when "magic beliefs are immensely strong" (Kushner, ibid 10), before colonization led to the destruction of such beliefs. She talks of the loss of privacy and the necessity for all things to be touched. For Kushner, the past is constantly informing the present moment. Yet such a vision of history as something that is already said and done, safely recorded, is a way for the Homebody to distance herself from the present, with its increasingly dismaying historical circumstances. She laments that "the Present is always an awful place to be. And it remains awful to us, the scene of our crime, the place of our shame" (Kushner, Homebody 11). Continuing to read from her historical guidebook, the Homebody provides an interesting description of Kabul's rich and varied historical past, from the conquests of Alexander the Great to various local tribal wars over territory. She relates the city's history as, from its very beginning, a crossroad of imperial ambitions, of successive waves of migration, slaughter and wars. It is, she says, the very burial place of Cain, "The Grave of Cain. Murder's Grave" (Kushner, ibid 22). Proclaiming that

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she loves the world, the Homebody apologizes to the audience for her way of speaking which, as she claims, comes from having read too many books. In describing her way of speaking, the Homebody says:  I speak . . . I can't help myself. Elliptically. Discursively. I've read too many books, and that's not boasting, for I haven't read many books, but I've read too many, exceeding I think my capacity for syncresis-- is that a word?--straying rather in synchisis, which is a word . . . My parents don't speak like this; no one I know does; no one does" (Kushner, ibid 12-13).

 It is highly significant to notice that the woman is so alienated from the world that she has even developed her own language. Her perplexed language truly reflects the overwhelming sense of alienation in which she lives. Noting that her parents do not speak as she does, it is quite clear that the isolation in which the woman lives seems to spark her imagination. The Homebody imagines herself to be in the deeply troubled nation of Afghanistan. Thus, the Homebody's monologue goes on to relate her own experience that takes her out of the realm of the everyday into the world of the magical. Months prior, she has ventured into a small shop in London in search of festive hats for a party she intends to make for family's friends. Struggling to remember where she has seen the shop selling these wonderful hats, the woman explains that she has ultimately found it, and that it was run by Afghan refugees. She shows the audience one of the hats which, she explains, conjures "not bygone days of magic belief but the suffering behind the craft. This century has taught us to direct our imagination however fleetingly toward the hidden suffering" (Kushner, ibid 17). She also muses on the miserable conditions of the maker of such a hat, imagining the Afghan village where the hat has been made as a place which is still "resisting the onslaught of modernity" (Kushner, ibid 17-18). Wearing one of the hats, the woman continues to read from her guidebook about Kabul. She explains that little archeological digging has been done there, but recently, "the bodies of two thousand Taliban soldiers were found in a mass grave in northern Afghanistan, prisoners who were executed, apparently by soldiers loyal to the overthrown government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. So someone is digging" (Kushner, ibid 18). The guidebook reveals centuries of upheavals, slaughters, and tribal conflicts which she compares to the late-twentieth-century tragedies of modern Afghanistan. Returning to her account of purchasing the hats, the woman talks of encountering the shopkeeper who is an Afghan man approximately her age. In fact, the Homebody's encounter with the shopkeeper is highly

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significant to the overall understanding of the play. Her experience with the man is one of those moments where understanding and connection between cultures can become possible, at least for a brief time. It is highly significant to notice that the Homebody is haunted by the past, and her strange experience within the shop, run by Afghan refugees, can be read as a moment when the past manifests itself to the Homebody and even possesses her. The Homebody's seemingly simple business transaction with the Afghan shopkeeper becomes a moment of transformation for her character. As she makes her purchase, she guesses the shopkeeper to be close to her own age and notices that he is missing three fingers on his right hand. She imagines these have been hacked off by a hatchet blade and tries to avoid gazing. However, she has been unable to avoid staring at "that poor ruined hand slipping my MasterCard into the . . . you know, that thing, that roller press thing which is used to . . . Never mind. Here in London, that poor ruined hand" (Kushner, ibid 21). It becomes quite obvious that the woman is totally fascinated by Kabul's turbulent past, as well as its more fluctuating present, resulting from skimming through her guidebook for information about nineteenth and twentieth century upheavals and disarrays. The Homebody's guidebook takes her to the period in which Afghanistan is armed by the Soviet Union against Pakistan; an era in which The U.S. administration refuses to assist Afghanistan. At the same time, "militant Islamic movements form the seed of what will become the Mujahideen, the U.S. begins sending money. Much civil strife, approaching at times a state of civil war" (Kushner, ibid 22), leading to the Soviet invasion during which the Soviets have tried by all avenues to control Kabul and Afghanistan. However, the Soviets have been defeated and swept away exactly as all those empires who have dared to conquer Afghanistan. The Homebody strongly condemns Afghan poverty and the fact that the nation's infrastructure lies in ruin. She launches a severe attack on the fanatic leaders in the Taliban-ruled Kabul: Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. With one of the world's most decimated infrastructures. No tourism. Who in the world would wish to travel there? In Afghanistan today I would be shrouded entirely in a burqa, I should be subject to hejab, I should live in terror of the sharia hudud, or more probably dead, unregenerate chatterer that I am. (Kushner, ibid 23)

In an imaginative leap, typical of Kushner's dramatic representation illustrated earlier in Angels in America, the Homebody realizes that she is suddenly able to speak fluent Pashtu as she pays for her hats. Yet in this moment, there is a ‘movement' at least in the Homebody's imagination,

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towards connection across cultural boundaries. In fact, the idea of language is a central concern of the play. As the Homebody speaks Pashtu, she experiences a brief moment of connection. Such sharing of a common language actually unites both the 'oppressive' West and the 'oppressed' East. Contrary to what she has noticed before about the mutilated hand of the shopkeeper, this time she notices that the man "is very beautiful" (Kushner, ibid 23). Asking about the reasons for the mutilation of the man's hand, the shopkeeper tells the Homebody how he "was with the Mujahideen, and the Russians did this" (Kushner, ibid 23). He begs for salvation "from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West" (Kushner, ibid 24). The Homebody is quite willing to admit her own failure and her own culpability in the world's inaction: We all romp about grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do . . . Awful times, as I have said, our individual degrees of culpability for said awfulness being entirely bound-up in our correspondent degrees of action, malevolent or not, or in our correspondent degrees of inertia, which can be taken as a form of malevolent action if you've a mind to see it that way. I do. I've such a mind. (Kushner, ibid 24)

 The Homebody's conversation with the hat merchant then gives way to a fantasy in which she imagines leaving the shop and finding herself and the shopkeeper suddenly in the beautiful Kabul of her outdated guidebook. She finds herself seeing the places she has read about in the guidebook. As she and the shopkeeper make love, "he places his hand inside me, it seems to me his whole hand inside me, and it seems to me a whole hand (Kushner, ibid 26). In this moment of fantasy, the Homebody, the symbol of the West, seems to merge with the oppressed East, and in so doing, she heals what has been destroyed, as the hand seems 'whole' again. In fact, the Homebody's lovemaking with the Afghan hat merchant is a definite physical manifestation of the possibility of connection between East and West. The moment, in this regard, suggests that communication and interconnection between cultures can help heal oppression of the kind the shopkeeper has experienced. Outside the common language of this rare moment of interconnection, however, the language of Western culture remains one of domination and economic advantage. As her lengthy monologue ends, the Homebody contemplates her own isolation, both from her family and from the world outside the confines of her kitchen. She speaks of withholding her 'touch' from her daughter because, in the mind of the Homebody, connection leads to corruption.

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This is simply because "the touch which does not understand is the touch which corrupts, the touch which does not understand that which it touches is the touch which corrupts that which it touches, and which corrupts itself" (Kushner, ibid 28). Yet, her strange encounter with the shopkeeper has sparked a need for connection that is perhaps stronger than her fears. The Homebody wants to leave her kitchen, to visit Afghanistan which is "a country so at the heart of the world the world has forgotten it, where one might seek in submission the unanswered need" (Kushner, ibid 28). The Homebody's monologue ends with a recitation of a beautiful poem about Kabul by a Persian poet, a thrilling declaration of love. For as the Homebody says: "Oh I love the world! I love love love the world!" (Kushner, ibid 12). Whether audiences or readers, everybody now believes the Homebody does love the world. But the Homebody's plight is that she simply does not know how to enact that love, or how that love might express itself in her closest relationships either with her husband or her daughter. Having bridged the distance between past and present through imagination, the Homebody believes she can accomplish this sort of connection in the real world. In Kushner's world, one can see this 'need' as a search for a common humanity, which is missing in the Homebody's world. In holding itself apart from or above the international community, the West has unwittingly exiled itself, but the Homebody's attempt can be seen as one to break away from the individualistic values that have infected her noble search. However, the end result of The Homebody's attempt at connection between East and West ends in failure. Indeed her absence haunts the second part of the play and her 'unanswered need' overwhelms the characters who search for her. It is highly significant to notice that in the opening monologue, the Homebody refers to herself as a tourist in her own life, and Martha Lavey describes the play as "an investigation—set in the language of contemporary politics—into how we might find the bridge, how we might become a traveler across our boundaries (instead of a tourist)" (Lavey, xi). Yet the Homebody seems to have arrived in Afghanistan literally resembling the stereotypical tourist: one of the explanations offered for her death is that she has literally been torn apart by a mob angered by her roaming the streets with her face uncovered, listening to Frank Sinatra on her Walkman. Such a horrible death - if in fact she has been killed - can be seen as a harsh reminder of the perhaps unbreachable borders between East and West. The Homebody's disappearance is never solved, but her absence haunts the whole play. The fact which remains is that the Homebody's monologue is undoubtedly a brilliant a portrayal of emotional and social alienation.

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The second part of Kushner's Homebody/Kabul takes the reader into a very different urban wasteland: Afghanistan. As the Kabul section opens, Milton Ceiling, the Homebody's husband, and his daughter Priscilla have traveled to Afghanistan in search of the Homebody, who has mysteriously abandoned her family and disappeared. Priscilla, who refuses to believe her mother is dead, embarks on a search for her mother. Unfortunately, the Homebody has gone to Kabul, at what might reasonably be considered the worst possible time in its long history for an unaccompanied female tourist. It is 1998, just after U.S. President Bill Clinton's bombing of several suspected terrorist training camps in retaliation of the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. The Taliban are solidifying their rule and anti-American feeling is at its peak. Mullah Ali Aftar Durranni, one of the major characters Kushner creates in Homebody/Kabul expresses his aversion of America and the West saying: "Since last week President Clinton have bombed the people in Khost, many killed, the people are very angry against Western aggression-disregard-disrespect for Afghanistan" (Kushner, ibid 33). The Homebody is English, not American, but poor, isolated, war-torn Afghans are unlikely to detect the niceties of accent and behavior that convey the difference. Act 2 begins in Kabul with doctor Qari Shah, explaining to the Homebody's husband and daughter that her body has been found. He also explains the nature of her injuries which are brutal. Thus, the Homebody has disappeared into Afghanistan, never to reappear. The official Taliban report is that the Homebody was horribly killed by a mob offended by her apparent defying of Muslim female propriety. But since her supposedly mutilated body has also disappeared, her family does not believe it. Her husband, Milton Ceiling, a computer specialist with a considerable inability to communicate, believes the former story, wondering only why, if it is true, her remains have mysteriously vanished. Her daughter, a rebellious teenager with a history of mental disturbance, finds everything about her mother's trip to Kabul incomprehensible and cannot believe anything the doctor says. This is why she determines to investigate on her own. She goes out in search of her mother, or at least her mother's body, only occasionally remembering to keep her burqa on for fear of ending up a victim herself. Priscilla decides to wander the unsafe streets of Kabul in search of her mother, or at least her mother's body, and runs almost immediately into potentially deadly trouble with the Munkarat, one of the Taliban religious police. Fortunately, she is rescued by Khwaja Aziz, a Tajik poet, who offers to act as her guide and interpreter, and who begs her to take his poems to a colleague in England. Khwaja Aziz offers another explanation for the disappearance of the Homebody. He supplies the

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complicated story that the Homebody has converted to Islam, taken the veil and married a Muslim doctor. Priscilla, thus, discovers that the truth may be far more difficult to bear. There are rumors that The Homebody has abandoned her former identity and converted to the Islamic faith, marrying a Muslim in Kabul and forging a new identity. It is impossible news to imagine, that a citizen of the free world would betray her own culture, her carefree way of life, to assume the burdens of an oppressed woman in Afghan society. Is it possible that a self-indulgent Western woman could willingly sacrifice her own freedom, and her very identity, to become someone else, to embrace and assimilate to a culture and religion so far removed from her own? Kushner presents no answer to the previously-mentioned question as he wants the audience/reader to think deeply about such a possibility. In her desperate attempts at looking for her mother, Priscilla encounters Mahala, an Afghan woman and a librarian who has lived her entire life in the shadows of the Taliban. Driven to near madness by the Taliban regime, whose oppression has led many of her friends and relatives to commit suicide, Mahala is strikingly similar to the Homebody in that she reveres language and books and that she is a woman of intellect and dignity. In fact, Mahala embodies the collision of cultures that her city represents. During her first encounter with Priscilla, she launches a violent attack on the Taliban, arguing that "they call themselves mullahs, the ulema, they wrap themselves in the Prophet's mantle, these refugee-camp gutter rats from Jalalabad, from Khandahar, they sell drugs and murder children and bribe their enemies to give them their victories" (Kushner, ibid 84). Moreover, she furiously expresses her repressed frustration in which she charges that U.S. government and political interests are largely responsible for the strength of the ruthless Taliban and for bringing them to power: The CIA sends these bastards funding through Pakistan, where the military high command, it's all Pashtuni-wallahas, these madmen and terrorists, they'll turn on their masters sooner or later, and still the U.S. pays them money and sends them guns. (Kushner, ibid 84)

Then, Mahala pronounces the most famous line for which Kushner's play has been both celebrated and deplored. Written well before the tragic events of 9/11 attacks, the play seems to forecast the events when Mahala says. "We must suffer under the Taliban so that the U.S. might settle a 20 year old score with Iran. You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York! Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York" (Kushner, ibid 85). In fact, Mahala's very particular line about the Taliban coming to

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New York is of primary significance to the overall understanding of the whole drama. What many have found remarkable is that Kushner has written this line before 9/11. Coverage of the play has been filled with descriptions of his 'prescience' and 'prophesy', the shock being that a mere playwright saw something that to everyone else, including the CIA, seemed impossible. Such timeliness has really impressed both the play's critics and audiences. However, Kushner refuses the label of prophet. His mission is to incite in his audience an emotional, humanizing response to the horrifying moments of existence and survival, as well as to debate vigorous discussions about the political, social, and intellectual topics of the present time. The play is much more than a mere dramatic response to a tragic moment in time; it is actually an exploration of the human soul delivered effectively through language. The Homebody has immersed in language, which is her only friend. Khwaja Aziz, the Tajik poet, is fond of language and poetry, though he has lost his life over Espernato poems which were never poems at all but encoded anti-Taliban reconnaissance. Mahala's anger is best expressed through a number of languages and dialects she employs to express her rage against both the Taliban and the West. It is specifically important to highlight Kushner's portrayal of Mahala's character. Through Mahala, Tony Kushner brilliantly depicts the fate of Afghan women under the Taliban. As I have illustrated earlier in this chapter, Afghan women greatly suffer under the Taliban regime. Apart form the burqa, which is in fact the least of their problems, Afghan women's minds are cut off and atrophied. Describing how Afghan women under the Taliban suffer both physically and intellectually, Mahala rages addressing Priscilla, the symbol of the West: They have close library! Library! This is Islam? Muslims are . . . the people of the Book. Painters, composers, philosophers, mathematicians, we knew how the universe worked centuries before you did, we invented counting and the zero and medicine. And they've closed the library! (Kushner, ibid 86)

Similarly, James Reston writes about Kushner's unique portrayal of Mahala's character: It is from the mouth of the character Mahala in Homebody/Kabul that the counter-argument to the Taliban is forcefully delivered. She is a fascinating theatrical invention: the intelligent, bitter librarian, forced away from work, watching her library closed, losing her mind from disuse and her wits from the oppression both of her society and her household, the spurned wife of the doctor who has driven her from her house and (she is

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convinced) replaced her summarily with this docile, sentimental Westerner, the Homebody. Mahala is the most sympathetic of victims. (Reston, 31)

In depicting the Taliban, Tony Kushner actually exposes the frightening face of religious fanaticism, demonstrating his aversion to any brand of fundamentalism and its inherent intolerance. At the same time, he humanizes other Afghan characters, such as Khwaja Aziz and Mahala, trapped within the harsh oppression of the Taliban. Searching Kabul, Priscilla, finds herself a guide who shows her the world that her mother has embraced. She learns that her mother may be living in this tragic city as a wife of a well-to-do Muslim whose Afghan wife, Mahala, lives in despair. A former librarian who loves language and books, she begs Priscilla to help her escape from Afghanistan. She fears to forget the alphabet: "To leave is a terrible thing. But I must be saved. Yesterday I could not remember the alphabet. I must be saved by you" (Kushner, ibid 90). Mahala's confrontation with Priscilla is, in fact, one of the dramatic highlights in Kushner's Brechtian episodic drama. Whether the Homebody is dead or alive is never confirmed, but this is not what interests Kushner. The collision of cultures, as the Homebody reveals early in the play, is what actually intrigues him: "Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted" (Kushner, ibid 11). The corrupting touch is immersion in another world, another life, and another culture. Priscilla's desperate search is not only for her missing mother, but also for comprehension and for the connection that the Homebody insists are necessary, both among nations and between people. As John Heilpern writes, the play is "a journey without maps to the ravaged, symbolic center of a fucked-up universe" (Heilpern, 1). He also writes that it is a towering drama about: lost civilizations and unsolvable paradoxes, furious differences and opposites and disintegrating, rotting pidgin cultures. It's about desolation and love in land-mined places, child murderers and fanatics, tranquilized existence and opium highs, travel in the largest sense of the word-travel of the mind and soul. To where? An unknowable mystery, perhaps, where all confusion is banished. (Heilpern, 1)

It is highly significant to notice that Priscilla's search for her mother and her relationship with Mahala become the emotional center of the play. In this sense, James Reston writes:

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Strangely enough, the Homebody seems more real to Priscilla when she is gone than she ever did at home in London. Certainly, Priscilla's efforts to find her mother seem to unlock both her repressed love for her mother and her guilt at aborting her own child in the past. In the midst of her anger, Priscilla admits to her father that she has been pregnant and aborted herself. Lamenting the fragile relationship among all the members of the family, Priscilla reflects that they are "far beyond fathers and daughters and all that. You look, look what she's done, where she's brought us. We're at the stage of blood sacrifices, right? And sorry about the progeny, Dad" (Kushner, Homebody 94) Priscilla, daughter of a lost mother and mother of a lost daughter, experiences these absences from both perspectives, and while she does not find her mother, she does find a kind of a mother figure in Mahala. Despite her early assertions in the play that "common humanity. It's crap, really," (Kushner, Homebody 59), Priscilla seems to breach borders in the play in a way that her mother and even her father cannot. Milton works in computer networking, a language just as impenetrable to everyone as the Homebody's self-made language. He tries to explain to Mahala late in the play that he works with "energies, languages traverse a passing through place, a, an . . . intersection" (Kushner, ibid 127). The multilingual Mahala sees such a notion of intersection in more human terms, referring to Afghanistan itself as an "intersection", (Kushner, ibid 127) to which Milton readily agrees: "Oh. Yes. Precisely! Precisely! Afghanistan! That's the metaphor! Armies, and gas pipelines and even Islam, communism, tribes, East and West, heroin, refugees, moving chaotically, and each is a language" (Kushner, ibid 127). Such simple words between Milton and Mahala provide a glimpse of hope for communication between the East and the West. Though international community/communication is filled with language and cultural barriers, Kushner insists that an 'intersection' is possible. It is the utopian goal at the end of this powerful depiction of one of the world's most troubled nations. For Kushner, community is always the ultimate objective, even in a turbulent nation such as Afghanistan. However, to Milton this is all abstraction. He lives in the mind, escaping only through antidepressants and, while in Afghanistan, opium, which take him further away from bodily experience. He seems baffled when Mahala cries for "Poor Afghanistan" (Kushner, ibid 128). Although he has lost a wife, Milton

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never seems to feel the human loss all around him. His grief seems tied more to a perceived symbolic loss of human connection "Jesus Christ. I am unmarried," (Kushner, ibid 42) than it does to the grief of palpable human absence. Milton himself is noticeably absent from the play's final scene in which Mahala is rescued from the oppression of her country and takes the place of the Homebody in London. Like Joe Pitt in Angels in America, who has also been absent from that play's final vision of family and community, Milton remains a stranger to others and to himself. He has not appeared again after the Afghanistan scenes. As the play closes, Priscilla and Mahala speak in the kitchen, months after their return to London. Priscilla is now living away from home, but she returns to the house because it makes her feel closer to her mother: "In this house, I knew . . . I could hear her still," (Kushner, ibid 139). The reference suggests a supernatural element, and we get the sense, in the final scene, that Mahala herself is inspired by the lingering presence of the Homebody. Mahala tells Priscilla that she has been reading the Homebody's books. Unlike the Homebody, however, who remained lost in a world of imagination, feeling unconnected to her world, Mahala has begun making a home for herself, planting a garden, used here as a symbol of hope and rebirth. She tells Priscilla that "A Garden shows us what may await us in Paradise" (Kushner, ibid 140). While Kushner leaves Mahala's future deliberately ambiguous, his final image of her surely suggests/helps seeing her as bringing her own culture, often viewed as foreign and frightening, into the West, merging the two. These cultures, Kushner suggests, cannot continue to stand in opposition to each other, but must recognize their common bonds: not language nor politics but something deeper, the kind of common humanity Priscilla has previously rejected. The play's final line in which Mahala says "In the garden outside, I have planted all my dead," (Kushner, ibid 140) is mysterious, yet somewhat hopeful. While this might suggest, at first glance, leaving behind one's past, one's history, we know that this is never the answer in Kushner. The notion of planting 'the dead', the past, suggests that history must remain with a person as a reminder of how to learn from past mistakes. To conclude this chapter, one can argue that in Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner juxtaposes both the culture of Afghanistan and the European culture of the West. Kushner's play vividly illustrates the point at the heart of the play: for better or for worse, these seemingly disparate worlds have long been and always will be connected by infinitely complicated networks of cultural, political and human interaction. The suffering of one cannot be, or it is better to say, must not be separated from the suffering of

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the other. To pretend otherwise is only to sow more pain, and reap more pain. In a word, Kushner's Homebody/Kabul does represent the best sort of political theatre: questioning, moving and linking the fate of individual men and women with great world events. Kushner says that his "greatest hope for a play is always that it might prove generative of thought, contemplation, discussion" (Kushner, An Afterword, Homebody/Kabul, 142), and this is why he counts on an audience who really want to ask a lot of questions and be asked to do a certain amount of thinking. Kushner's Homebody/Kabul definitely justifies that hope.

CONCLUSION PARADOXES AND PERSPECTIVES

By way of concluding this study, I want to briefly summarize the main argument, point out its problems and discuss how Brecht’s epic/political theatre influences postmodern theatre in general and Tony Kushner's postmodern political theatre in particular. I have illustrated that the politically fervent first half of the 20th century was marked not only by a strong modernist political theatre praxis but also a vibrant vernacular one. The concept of political theatre has commonly been associated with European modernism and with avant-garde concepts of art and society. It stands for provocative anti-bourgeois declarations and bold experimentation. Due to its innovative and revolutionary nature, modernist political theatre has been mostly prominent in the twentieth century theatre histories. However, the preoccupation of theatre scholars and critics with this model of political theatre has effaced another form of political theatre, which not only coexisted along with the modernist one but also had a rich tradition of playing an active role in society. The vernacular political theatre was particularly influential on the American stage in the 1930s. Being less radical and innovative than its modernist counterpart, it had often been considered of lesser political and aesthetic value. Rather than engaging in modernist experimentation, that form of political theatre generally chose to convey its political message via conventional modes of representation such as realism and naturalism. What ultimately distinguishes the vernacular political theatre from its modernist counterpart is thus not the use of empathy or Verfremdung, absorption or distantiation, verisimilitude or theatricality, visceral entertainment or intellectual argumentation – although all of them are important factors – but the way political theatre positions itself in relation to the prevailing cultural tradition and the dominant cultural apparatus. The vernacular political theatre clearly situates itself within the aesthetic and commercial venues provided by the bourgeois cultural industry, whereas the modernist political theatre vehemently rejects the dominant cultural practice and attempts to subvert and negate it by producing an

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alternative one. A preference of one or the other actually was dependent on various historical, cultural, and social conditions. This study has also emphasized that both modernist and vernacular political theatre are culturally contingent. How political theatre articulates itself is ultimately determined by various vectors, such as the predominant aesthetic tradition of a culture (e.g. naturalism or avant-garde), and the actual social consistency of the audience (predominantly working or middle-class). These vectors, among others, need to be taken into consideration when analyzing and evaluating political theatre practices. For, as this study has also demonstrated, the goals and methods of political theatre continuously evolve. It is particularly interesting to look at the evolution of political theatre over the past fifty years. Not only has it taken up new topics such as civil rights, feminism, homosexuality, AIDS, and globalization, but it has accordingly also developed new forms, notably performance art. While this study provides a rough outline of basic models and approaches of political theatre and demonstrates their cultural contingency, it also raises a number of questions. First of all, a discussion of political theatre praxis inevitably refuels the ongoing debate over the relationship of stage and audience; a debate that goes back even to Aristotle himself. Theatre director Peter Brook claims that all it takes for an act of theatre to be engaged in is a man walking across an empty space and someone else watching him (Brook, 9). The apparent minimalism of this definition might sound appealing, but is in fact highly deceptive. For the aesthetic and political thrust of a performance is entirely determined by the manner in which the actor crosses the stage, how he positions himself in relation to the audience, and how the spectator reacts to him. In other words, should the presence of an audience be acknowledged by and in the stage, or should the audience be kept at a distance? To what purposes are absorption and distantiation employed in theatre; aesthetic pleasure or political education? How much absorption or distantiation is permissible without breaking up the dramatic situation? And how to heighten the effect on the spectator; by increasing the illusion of reality or by foregrounding the very theatricality of theatre? Political theatre raises this complex set of questions and does not provide one simple answer. In addition to two fundamental models of political theatre practice (modernist and vernacular), there are also two different approaches (absorption and distantiation) neither of which is tied to a particular model. Both modernist and vernacular political theatre resort to techniques that ensure either a high degree of emotional involvement or a high degree of didactic distance. Depending on the preferred pedagogical method of a

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production, an actor can cross an empty stage in a variety of different ways, affecting empathy or shock, inviting participation or leaving the audience for detached contemplation. This actually raises another question which is crucial for political theatre praxis and criticism. How political effect is to be evaluated? How the degree to which an audience is politically activated/mobilized is to be measured? Should one go by the intensity of revolutionary sentiment displayed inside the theatre, by the debates a performance generates, by the degree of popular success, by the degree of critical acclaim, or by the extent to which it resists the status quo? Certainly, all these factors should be taken into consideration without limiting political efficacy of a performance to either of them. But even then, it is difficult to determine what concrete political changes a performance effected in the social realm. Thus, it would be futile to argue, for example, that Tony Kushner's Angels in America is politically more effective than Arthur Miller's political drama The Crucible. What one can evaluate, however, is the clarity of a political agenda, and the methods of translating it on the stage, as well as the relationship of aesthetic choices to dominant cultural practices. In the same way, political theatre, ultimately, constitutes itself not only in the act of critiquing the status quo, but also in the act of resisting it. In this regard, form is indisputably as politically important as content, regardless of whether it is innovative or conventional. Concurrently, innovative form alone cannot carry the political message of a performance by itself, but does need a substantial and clear political argument to back it up. As previously illustrated, there is considerable overlap between modernist and vernacular political theatre. To segregate them into a neat binary opposition would not only be futile but also uninteresting. Thus, I propose to read political theatre as what Alan Weiss calls, though in reference to an entirely different cultural phenomenon, an "aesthetic of complexity, contradiction, paradox" (Weiss, 41). Its praxis, regardless of what kind, is marked by incongruities, problems, and contingencies, which cannot be solved once and for all, but have to be negotiated again and again in daily performance and encountered in academic criticism. But it is precisely these contingencies and paradoxes that allow political theatre to generate ever-new forms of representation in response to an ever-changing cultural and political situation. In short, it is such complexity that makes for lively political theatre praxis. Today's postmodern theatre has been able to assert itself politically. It has done so precisely by redefining its relation to hegemonic cultural practices. As Philip Auslander points out, contemporary political theatre has moved from a politics/aesthetics of transgression and intervention to a

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politics /aesthetics of resistance. This means that even though political theatre is today confined to operating from within the object of its own critique and to recycling and reproducing the hegemonic representational means provided by this culture, it can nevertheless articulate its suspicion of them. And precisely in this respect it is capable of resisting and subverting the status quo. It is, in fact, this articulation/resistance which postmodern political theatre has to offer. There is no doubt that such resistance is needed more than ever, for the lines of political struggle have become increasingly less clearly defined. As Tony Kushner rightly points out, "while we are trained to see the personal dimension of an event, we are often unable to detect its political meaning, particularly since the mass media are strongly invested in blurring it" (Kushner, "Notes About Political Theatre" 22). Thus, wars, political and social injustices, and epidemics are seen as mere human tragedies eliciting only sympathy but, at the same time, preventing people from asking more uncomfortable political questions about what has really motivated these events in the first place and in what social, ethnic, cultural and political contexts they take place. The task of political theatre thus remains essentially the same: to reveal the political at the heart of the seemingly personal, to unmask systems of oppressions behind that which seems human and natural. As before, it is out to unveil "the great historical project of capitalist mythmaking: the transformation of that which is social, cultural, and political, and hence changeable, into nature, which is immutable and eternal" (Kushner, ibid, 21). Today, political theatre needs to be aware of the limits of its practices as well as explicitly acknowledge this awareness to the audiences. In so doing, it is, then, able to address the current cultural situation. Concurrently, postmodern political theatre entails studying the failures of previous political practices and boldly investigating their complexities, contradictions and paradoxes. Only in this manner, can postmodern political theatre avoid what Peter Brook terms the 'deadly theatre', "a theatre that not only fails to elevate and instruct, but hardly ever even entertains" (Brook, 10). The more interesting question to ask at the end of this book is: how does the modernist political theatre tradition of the 1920s and 1930s inform the contemporary political theatre praxis of Tony Kushner? Phrased differently, what are the characteristics of Brecht's epic theatre which are to be found in Kushner's postmodern political theatre? In effect, Brecht's epic theatre uses narrative not plot, episodic scenes and montage not dramatic development, curves not linear development, and scenes that jump not cause and effect. Such characteristics are needed as methodological tools to achieve the desired purposes. Since plot tends to

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draw the spectator into the story, Brecht introduces the use of narratives in which the spectator only becomes an observer. Moreover, it is presented episodically with scenes that can jump to any places or time without the spectator's anticipation. Even more surprising, as a montage, the scenes can be presented in a series of non-linear scenes in which the spectator could not but think about what is going on onstage. Theatre has become an arena in which the spectator is made to think critically in social, political and cultural problems. These dramatic tenets are to be realized in Kushner's highly political dramas due to Brecht's tremendous influence on Kushner's dramaturgy. Kushner has found in Brecht the model to be followed and the fountain from which he absorbs diverse dramatic tools and devices. His Brechtian style has taken shape in his first important play A Bright Room Called Day and flowered fully in Angels in America all through to Slavs and Homebody/Kabul. Kushner, however, has adapted Brecht's methods and techniques to suit his own particular voice, embellishing the method with his own devices. A close analysis of Kushner's plays clearly demonstrates that he has adopted a structure that is both cinematic and Brechtian. At the same time, he has coupled the alienation techniques of Brecht with a fully realized emotional and personal strain drawn more from American lyrical realism than from Brecht whose characters' emotional struggles are often neutralized in his effort to keep the audience focused on the issues. These techniques combine with an outrageous sense of humor as well as a wide-scale theatricality to offer a completely original form of American political theatre. Thus, one can safely argue that Kushner's postmodern political theatre actually represents an innovative amalgamation between modernist and vernacular political theatre. This study has extensively examined Tony Kushner's political theatre by means of close analysis and interpretation of the themes and techniques of his entire dramatic output thus far. It demonstrates how Kushner, influenced by the modernist political theatre of Brecht, uses the stage as a platform for social and political debate and concludes that he is more successful than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in melding an aesthetic drawn from post-naturalistic European theatre with American dramatic realism. In the shattered world of post-9/11, Tony Kushner may have found his time. He has long embraced the label of a 'political playwright', always searching in his own work for the socio-political armature that girds characters and theme. In his A Bright Room Called Day, he charts German social democratic impotence at the rise to power of Nazism; in his most acclaimed work, the two-part epic Angels in America, he presents a 'gay

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fantasia on national themes' that places personal sufferings and betrayal in the larger worlds of disease, homophobia, and reactionary politics; in Slavs, he evokes the death of the Soviet Union amidst chaos and corruption; and in his most recent Homebody/Kabul, he uses modern Afghanistan to shed light on contemporary American politics in relation to ideas of isolation and the difficulties of connection on an international scale. Kushner strongly believes that political art can pave the way toward tangible societal change, and certainly, the staging affects the reception. He tells William Harris: "We must remember the role that art played in the early part of the century, the role that artists of the WPA played in shaping a support for a progressive agenda, and that many artists played in the birth of the Great Society programs of the 1960s" (Harris, "The Road",148). Kushner hopes to restore this role, but much also depends on those who bring their work to life on the stage. Kushner always foregrounds politics and history. He has found a unique dramatic voice in his enduring need for political action despite the loss of ideological faith. As the old Bolshevik, Aleksii Antedilluvianovitch Prelapsarianov, states at the beginning of Perestroika (part two of Angels in America): "The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change?" (Kushner, Angels, 147). Kushner strongly highlights the possibility, or it is appropriate to say, the necessity of change both on the personal and the political level. This must happen even if in the absence of a new political theory. It is now apparent that real social change must be reshaped in a new 'theory' to replace the shed dead skin of socialism. This new beautiful theory has not been found yet. Kushner, however, keeps looking as he is still posing these questions in most of his plays, particularly his impressive play Homebody/Kabul. In his well-known essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin writes of the rise of Fascism that we live in a "state of emergency which has become not the exception but the rule" (Benjamin, 257). He advises that people must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Kushner definitely illuminates such a 'state of emergency' in which the whole world now exists, a conception of history that emerges in the plays of Tony Kushner, which requires that memory keeps the past alive at all times. Aside from the particulars of the plays themselves, one can think of the work of Kushner as a theatre of 'resistance' in itself. Kushner views contemporary America as a society that has lost various essential belief systems that create strong communities. For him, what is missing from the modern world is a sense of 'interconnection' that can unite both the

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divergent cultural sensibilities within the American society itself and that can bond the increasingly disconnected United States to its international neighbors. In Kushner's plays, such interconnection is possible and real. Community, as a term has had a recent resurgence in American culture, perhaps particularly after 9/11. As communities crumble and notions of interconnection continue to decline, everyone is implicated and the only solution is coming together in opposition to the problems. Kushner makes it clear that people should not lead their lives in isolation. Connectedness, or human communion, is the major premise of Kushner's politics as he strongly believes in the supreme importance of interconnectivity and interdependence between all members of a society, and consequently among different nations on an international scale. Similarly, Kushner's political theatre celebrates dissent. Although his works vary widely in setting, ranging from the Nazi Germany to the Soviet Russia and contemporary Afghanistan, they all delight in bringing fractious characters together. What these plays make clear, however, is that not all nations view intellectual and political dissent as congenially as America. In A Bright room Called Day, Tony Kushner unintentionally affirms American values through their very critique. In fact, what many critics have overlooked is that in the context of Nazism, Zillah's outburst against the U.S. administration demonstrates an assertion of her ability, and consequently, Kushner's, to criticize the national government without reprisal. Similarly, Angels in America critiques the U.S. administration of the 1980s while simultaneously lauding America for welcoming the diversity its cast represents. Angels and other works even emphasize this astonishing diversity by presenting only a few actors to play all the roles, indicating that boundaries between categories of race, gender, and sexuality are more permeable than might be assumed. The very fluidity of these categories in a play about America suggests that Kushner perceives his utopian vision not merely as an artistic fantasy, but as a potential reality stemming from America's foundations of openly accepting all peoples. Indeed, Kushner's essays, interviews, and plays all confirm that he sees unified diversity as a realistic possibility for America. Dedicated as he is to political theatre, Kushner views his plays not only as artistic creations, but also as messages intended for public consumption and debate. This actually has been one of the reasons behind his decision to convert Angels into a TV movie, despite the fact that its brilliance and magic depend on being theatrical. This is simply because Kushner's highly theatrical effects are entirely lost in a film. However, the cinematic version has brought Angels in America and its political message to millions of viewers who

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could have never attended it in a theatre production. Kushner's art is always a form of media with a message, idealistically envisioning a new America as incorporating its myriad members under one contended nation.

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