‘Perestroika’ Confronts Prejudice and Overturns an Established Social Order

“Angels in America” sweeps back into focus for its second night, more vibrant and complex than the evening before. The second half, fittingly called “Perestroika,” a Russian term for restructuring, initiates and affects a profound upheaval in the emotional and spiritual lives of its characters.

As the vague connections between all six main characters begin to develop into close relationships, the masks slip from their faces, revealing what truly lies at their core. The most gentle characters, like Harper and Belize, turn out to have the greatest strength of mind and character, while characters that are accustomed to controlling the people closest to them, such as Joe and Roy, lose their power throughout the course of the play.

In the end, a total catharsis has occurred in the lives of every character. The play is able to speak to all elements of American life, demonstrating that behind the dichotomous ideals of seemingly incongruous elements of contemporary America—homosexuality and religion—is the same desire for truth and honest self-expression.

The characters of “Angels in America,” who, as Mormons and gays, represent contradictory elements of life in America, find themselves forced to confront their innate prejudices. In “Perestroika,” the conflict is heightened by the addition of a new dimension: the supernatural. Prior (Jonah C. Priour ’09), whose dignified response in “Millennium Approaches” (part one of the play) to the fact that he has AIDS invites general sympathy and approbation, is increasingly plagued by a mysterious voice.

In Act Two, the disembodied voice finally crashes through Prior’s bedroom ceiling in the form of an angel, played by Isabel Q. Carey ’12. Carey—who also plays the Mormon Mother and Prior’s Nurse—knows precisely how to hold her head to convey a sense of otherworldly detachment and disdain for the world necessary to her part. She also gracefully pulls off swinging precariously through the air and dangling in space on pulleys with considerable aplomb. With an artistry of appearance, Carey’s angel invites a series of questions: is Prior insane? Has the strain of AIDS and abandonment at last gone to his head?

The Angel reveals a prophetic book to Prior—hidden, oddly enough, in a suitcase beneath the tiles in his kitchen—and announces that he is a Prophet. His message is stasis; humans, with all their change and movement across the Earth, have compelled God to leave heaven and abandon the Angels. Why continue to live, the Angel asks, when life is so painful? Whether or not Prior has temporarily lost his mind, this vision provides him, and the audience, with a compelling sense of truth that is lacking in the rest of his life.

As “Angels in America” departs more and more from reality, the logic of insanity becomes increasingly attractive to the characters. As he slowly dies of AIDS, Roy Cohn, the villain of the play, is consigned to a hospital bed and, horror of horrors, the use of a phone with no hold button. “How am I supposed to perform basic bodily functions?” he howls.

Benjamin K. Glaser ’09 manages to make Cohn’s vitriolic hate charismatic; he may be entirely depraved, but he is vibrantly alive. As he lets go of life, he slips into a madness that may or may not be drug-induced. His conversations with Belize, the night nurse, become increasingly hallucinogenic, but even stranger is his relationship with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Roy killed Ethel, and now she is back to watch him writhe in agony alone on a hospital bed. Rachel E. Flynn ’09 conveys with her eyes, from 50 feet away, a schadenfreude-inflected delight as she hovers over him.

As the play spirals further into fantasy, the stage artfully descends further into ruin. In the beginning, props and staging are wheeled in and out neatly; by the end, furniture lies askew across the stage. We are surveying the ruins of order as the definition of place and belonging change forever.

“Perestroika” begins with a rigidly demarcated world in which we know where everyone belongs—Mormons in Utah, gays in New York City. As the play goes on, the lines blur and the established order shifts. Personal insanity is just a symptom of the upheaval, and in fact, seems to be a small price to pay for the final, emotional catharsis that is affected at the end, in which differences are resolved. “The Great Work begins,” a radiantly confident Prior announces at the end of the play. Is it his Great Work, or our own?