Why “Angels in America” is back

THE man at the heart of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is not content with mere pathological lying. Whenever reality conflicts with his aims, he rejects the very notion of truth: as he tells his doctor after an unwelcome diagnosis, “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean.” He is thin-skinned, and obsessed with loyalty, power and public displays of dominance. “I have clout,” he proclaims. “A lot.” His response whenever anyone questions his ostentatiously false claims is a threat to “destroy” his interlocutor. He has no regard for legal niceties or social conventions, and holds grudges long after their expiration dates.

If that sounds familiar, it is no coincidence. Although Mr Kushner’s subject is not Donald Trump, it is a fictionalised version of the president’s longtime lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn. Cohn made his name as the right-hand man of Joseph McCarthy, a disgraced communist-baiting senator in the 1950s. He spent the remainder of his career as arguably the most feared attorney in New York.

The play’s first part premiered in 1991, and was performed at the National Theatre in London the next year. The full-length, two-part “Angels” has returned to the same venue for a sold-out run ending on August 19th (with live broadcasts in cinemas on July 20th and 27th). At first glance, it might seem a curious choice for a revival. Although its themes of trust, abandonment, pride, shame and self-awareness are eternal, it also focuses squarely on the struggles of five gay men in New York in the 1980s, two of them with HIV. Now that the AIDS crisis has receded and gay civil rights have become standard in rich Western countries, a seven-hour play about gay life in Ronald Reagan’s America might risk looking anachronistic. But many subplots of Mr Kushner’s kaleidoscopic work, from performative, vulnerable masculinity to conflicts within the progressive movement, are still fresh today.

In “Angels”, Roy serves as an object lesson in the cost of self-deceit. As in real life, he is gay, deeply closeted, dying of AIDS—which, even in his final months, he insists to the public is liver cancer—and accused of rampant ethical violations. Feeling obliged to lie about a central truth of his life, he grows so accustomed to deception that it becomes second nature. And he will stop at nothing to maintain his veneer of invincibility. Joe, a closeted, strait-laced Mormon, finally loses his faith in Roy when he asks Joe to abuse a job he has been offered in the attorney-general’s office in order to protect Roy from disbarment.

This is a faithful representation of Cohn, a formative influence on Mr Trump. As Peter Fraser, Cohn’s final lover, told the New York Times last year, “I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly—that bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth. That’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.” The president developed his approach to adversaries by watching Cohn humiliate them, in the media and in court: he once described his attack-dog attorney as “vicious to others in his protection of me”.

Political pundits have consistently misread Mr Trump, predicting either that his star would fade or, later, that he would have to adapt to conventional expectations of the presidency. Mr Kushner’s script would have provided a more accurate prognostication. Roy never changes his spots, remaining hateful even on his deathbed: “Better dead than red!” he screams at the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the accused Russian spy he had helped send to the electric chair 30 years earlier. He refuses to share his precious stash of AZT, an experimental AIDS drug, with his nurse Belize, even when Roy’s looming death means he has no more use for the pills. Those still waiting for Cohn’s former client to “pivot” towards the centre should take note. And the lesson Mr Trump has taken from Cohn’s ultimate defeat at the hands of hated bureaucrats—he was disbarred a few weeks before he died in 1986—was not the importance of playing by the rules but rather the perils of being laid low by illness. In the president’s recollection, “they only got [Cohn] because he was so sick”: a memory that may help explain his publishing a letter from his doctor during the 2016 campaign claiming Mr Trump would be the healthiest president ever elected.

Mr Kushner’s depiction of the schisms that Reagan opened up in the American left also bear a stern message for today’s Democratic Party. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, politicians from both the left (Bernie Sanders) and centre (Joe Biden) have recommended downplaying identity politics, such as support for the Black Lives Matter movement or transgender rights, in the hopes of winning back the white working class. A related debate unfolds in “Angels”, when Louis, a hilariously navel-gazing character, delivers a monologue to Belize, who is black. Louis ostensibly supports the oppressed, but dismisses “the race thing” as “a collection of small problems” that will get “taken care of”. Belize, the play’s conscience, is unsparing in his response, accusing Louis of “transforming [himself] into an arrogant, sexual-political Stalinist-slash-racist flag-waving thug”. The retort leaves little doubt that Mr Kushner thinks the left can downplay non-economic injustice only at its peril.

“Angels” brings the past into the present: one of its AIDS-stricken protagonists dreams he is visited by ancestors dating all the way back to the Black Death. It took only a quarter-century to reveal that Mr Kushner managed to work a healthy chunk of the future into his script as well.