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1. MATTHEW
WILSON
SMITH
ANGELS
I N AMERICA
A ProgressiveApocalypse
I. APOCALYPSE
D E SC E N D IN G
Outside of Chekhov, I can think of no playwright whose characters philosophize so
much about history as Tony Kushner’s do; Kushner’s characters are forever musing
upon, arguing about, engaging with history. But while in Chekhov’s plays such philos-
ophizing talk is generally just that- talk, mere talk- in Kushner’s it is urgent, of the
essence. Which is to say that, for Kushner, talking about history functions not as a
screen behind which the real but unstated (largelyprivate, domestic) drama takes place,
but rather is the “real drama,”in surface and subtext. When Kushner’s characters won-
der, as they often do, whether the world is coming to an end, whether humanity has
ceased to progress, whether a new age is just around the corner, we may psychologize
their questions, but we may not psychologize them away.To do so would be to reduce
them to mere interiorities, and thereby strip them of the political concerns that, as
Kushner writes in the preface to A Bright Room CalledDay,“aretrue passions for these
people, not pretexts for private feelings.”lAt the risk of oversimplification: in Kushner’s
plays the political is the historical is the drama itsel6 we witness, in these plays, individ-
uals and groups thrown into the midst of history, arguing the direction of the tide even
as it pulls them under or along.
There are many visions of history inAngels inAmerica,but none is so memorable,
so shocking, as the apocalyptic. Harper tells us that “theworld’s coming to an end,”and
warns of an imminent “Judgment Day”; the Angels refer to “the grim Unfolding of
these Latter Days,”prophesy a catastrophe in which “millions”will die, and speak of
“ApocalypseDescending”; Prior and Hannah look forward to the return of the waters
of Bethesda fountain, “when the Millennium comes. ...Not the year two thousand,
but the Capital M Millenniuml’2 Indeed, the whole play may be said to unfold like a
landscape of ruins, of ‘‘beautifidsystems dying, old fixed orders flying apart” (22). Sarah

2. S M I T H
Ironson’s burial at the outset of “Millennium Approaches” marks the disintegration of
Jewish immigrant culture just as the Oldest Living Bolshevik‘s speech at the outset of
“Perestroika”marks the end of Marxist Leninism. The AIDS crisis, though never per-
mitted to serve as mere metaphor, takes on a decidedly apocalyptic tenor in the play,
and becomes one of a larger web of catastrophes that reads like signs of the Endtime:
the destruction of the environment, the ascendancy of the Reagan Right, the abandon-
ment of Creation by God.
The apocalypticism of the work lies, too, in the significance of vision in the play.
The poetics of apocalypse has always privileged vision over the other senses; the term
apokalypsis means, literally, “to unveil,” and originally connoted the marital stripping of
a veiled virgin. Even as the word changed its dimensions and came to signify a divine
revelation of the end of history, the poetics of apocalypse continued to emphasize sight
and a certain erotics of disclosure.3 In Angels, too, sight is privileged: Harper and Prior
receive visions of the other world, whether in the form of angels, rising souls, or impos-
sible dreamscapes. Harper is so thoroughly immersed in her eschatological visions (not
to mention her depressants) that by the end of the play she is virtually defined by her
“astonishing ability to see things.” An even fuller sense of apocalypse is explored in
Prior’s visions, which are so erotically charged that his penis becomes a barometer of
heavenly presence and orgasm a sign of revelation (a sensus dei he shares, incidentally,
with Hannah). The explicit eroticism of Prior’s visionary scenes recalls the erotic roots
of apocalypticism and testifies to the sharp, and potentially dangerous, attraction of the
apocalyptic blend: vision, violence, radical transformation, sublimity, sex.
Angels confronts us, as well, with two great modern millenarian faiths, one reli-
gious, one secular. Mormonism, a religion with its roots in the millenarian enthusiasms
of nineteenth-century America, “lives on a threshold between this world and Millen-
nium . . . and holds on hard to this world and the next.”4Mormonism helps shape the
apocalyptic discourse of the play through its influence on Harper, Joe, and Hannah,
characters who retain a certain millennial fervor even as the influence of the Latter-day
Saints over their lives slips away. While less prophetically inclined than his wife, Joe
still brings to his admiration of the Reagan Right something of Harper’s millennial
mood: “America has rediscovered itselc he says of the 1980 election. “Its sacred position
among nations. This is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored” (32). Joe’s admi-
ration for Reaganism recalls the nativist impulses behind Mormon millenarianism, the
emphasis in Mormon theology on America as the chosen nation, site of the New
Jerusalem. Finally, Joe’s mother Hannah takes the existence of angels for granted,
exhibits an uncanny ability to recognize them, and by the end of the play (though now
a New Yorker in dress and spirit) anticipates the coming of the angel of Bethesda and
a New Jerusalem.
I 5 4

3. A N G E L S I N AMERICA
Mormonism shapes the play in other ways as well, most notably in the revelation
of the apocalyptic tablets to Prior. The entire scenario of the angelic visitation, the
command to unearth the sacred book, and the donning of magical glasses in order to
read it are influenced by Joseph Smith‘s account of the discovery of the Book of Mor-
mon. Smith‘s discovery was itself marked by apocalyptic overtones. One of the most
frequently cited series of verses of the Book of Mormon is 3 Nephi 21:1-7, in which
Jesus promises the Nephites “a sign that ye may know the time when these things shall
be about to take place- that I shall gather in from their long dispersion, my people, 0
house of Israel.”That sign,Jesus goes on to explain, is the discovery of the Book of
Mormon itself, which shall serve as a millennial milestone. But just as Harper is no
Joseph Smith, so Prior’s apartment is no Palmyra, New York the Book is located
underneath the kitchen tiles, and Prior refuses to unearth it because he worries about
losing his security deposit. This is a slip-shod revelation, one in which even the
prophetic dreams that were supposed to prepare Prior for the event are lost in the heav-
enly bureaucracy. The signs of millennium are still there, but the religious myths that
once supported them have declined into semiparody.
The same might be said of the other great modern millenarian faith of Angels,
Bolshevism. This decaying system is chiefly presented through Aleksii Antedillu-
vianovich Prelapsarianov, the Oldest Living Bolshevik. It is a parodic personification,
but, as with the Angel’s visitation, it is touched with melancholy and a sense of shat-
tered hope. The Bolshevik‘sevocation of the once-great promise of Soviet socialism is
at the same time stirringand anachronistic: “You can’t imagine,”he tells us,
when we first read the Classic Texts, when in the dark vexed night of our ignorance
and terror the seed-words sprouted and shoved incomprehension aside, when the
incredible bloody vegetable struggle up and through into Red Blooming gave us
Praxis,True Praxis,True Theory married to Actual Life. (166)
The “ClassicTexts” the Bolshevik speaks of can no more be a source of redemption
than can the Angel’s sacred Book. But there is a poignancy at their loss, and a sense that
the historical questions they pose are still before us. The millennial structures, secular
and religious, may have broken down, but the millennial longings remain.
At the outset of “Perestroika,”it is the Oldest Living Bolshevik who poses these
questions most pointedly: “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?In Time?”(165).The Bolshevik admits of the possibility of apocalypse
(“Arewe doomed?”)at the same time that he contrasts it to another historical possibil-

4. S M I T H
ity, one in which we are released from the past and able to “Change . . .In Time.”We
might be able to avoid collapse, he suggests, if we are able to reinvent ourselves, to
evolve.
11. M I L L E N N I U M
V E R S U S P E R E S T R O I K A
This second view of history is an optimistic, evolutionary one, one typified not by fate
and doom but by human agency, the possibility of self-salvation. It is a view of history
that we might term progressive, if we mean by that a sense of history as a gradual
motion toward greater happiness, equality, and freedom. Progressive in this sense
includes both liberalism and moderate forms of socialism. Broadly speaking, the
socialist sense of history as a series of developmental stages toward ever greater eman-
cipation may be termed progressive, while the occasional belief in the inevitable, his-
tory-ending nature of the revolution and the utopian nature of the state to follow is
closer to the apocalyptic model. This often-uneasy combination of progressive and
apocalyptic views of history has been at the heart of socialist theory since its inception,
and is mirrored here in the musings of the Oldest Living Bolshevik- as well as those
of Kushner himself.
O n the face of it, the apocalyptic and the progressive are radically different
visions of history. In the apocalyptic worldview, transformation is generally sudden and
total: complete destruction and complete rebirth, eternal separation of the damned
from the saved. At the same time, both the destruction and the rebirth of the world are
unstoppable and externally motivated; mortals do not, ultimately, shape their own his-
tory. In the apocalyptic, it is only when history comes to an end that liberation is truly
possible; the Kingdom of God lies outside of history, not within it. The progressive
worldview might almost be defined as the precise opposite of such beliefs: instead of
sudden, radical transformation, progressives tend to see the world evolving slowly, see
history as a gradual, painful growth toward liberation. Humanity is a powerful agent in
this upward drive, if not the only agent; self-liberation, self-salvation, in difficult stages,
is the hope of the progressive. The progressive worldview, then, tends to embrace the
fruits of human inventiveness, whether scientific, scholastic, technological, or indus-
trial, as means toward the improvement of our collective condition.
The apocalypticism ofAngels must be seen in the light of a contradictory impulse
toward progressivism in the work. This rift inheres in the titles of the parts themselves:
“Millennium Approaches” evokes an image of impending, mystical transformation, the
ticking of an other-worldly clock, whereas “Perestroika”recalls a historical event, Gor-

5. A N G E L S I N A M E R I C A
bachev’s attempt to liberalize the Soviet Union peaceably from within. Compare, too,
the apocalyptic warnings of the Angels with, for example, the quote from Ralph Waldo
Emerson that Kushner chooses to open “Perestroika”:“Becausethe soul is progressive,it
never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer
whole” (163).The sentence might serve as a summation of the kind of trust in a process
of gradual, intuitive awakening that is the very opposite of the apocalyptic. In John’s
Revelation, all was to be uprooted, suddenly, either transplanted into new ground or
tossed into the everlasting fire; Emerson, on the other hand, imagined the soul opening
like a rosebud, by degrees. If the Angels tend to take John’s view, then Emerson’s is also
present in the play. We see it in somewhat parodic form in Louis’s(self-described) “neo-
Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress toward happiness or perfection
or something,” and, of course, in the cautious optimism of Prior, who insists on “More
Life,”and assures us, at the end of the play, that “theworld only spins forward” (31; 298).
Often Angels gains its apocalyptic force from a sharp indictment of progress.
Consider, for example, Harper’s visions of the destruction of the ozone layer. Early on
in the play, Harper speaks of the ozone layer as a spiritual realm, as “a kind of Gift,
from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world” (22). Its destruction is for
Harper an eschatological sign, a signal that “everywhere,things are collapsing, lies sur-
facing, systems of defense giving way” (23). There is an implicit attack here on modern
progress- the decay of the ozone layer, as we all know, is linked to the rising tide of
industrial pollutants- and a spiritualization of that attack, a rendering of it in terms of
Revelation. Harper returns to this image of the ozone layer at the end of the play, see-
ing its restoration in terms of the apocalyptic vision of the rising dead, so that the dead
themselves are the stuff of ozone, healing the sacred skin by their ascension.
It would be wrong, though, to associate Harper too closelywith any single posi-
tion: her metier is closer to bewilderment than conviction, and her views change over
time. The play’s more consistent and unambiguous agents of antiprogressive apocalyp-
ticism are the Angels. When we first see them as a group, a radio is broadcasting a
report of the Chernobyl disaster and the resulting environmentalfallout (“radioactive
debris contaminating over three hundred thousand hectares of topsoil for a minimum
of thirty years” [279]). The Angels, listening with disgust to this report, find in it yet
more evidence of “ApocalypseDescending,”calling the modern age “the threnody chant
of a Poet, / A dark-devising Poet whose only theme is Death,” and predicting that
“uncountable multitudes will die” (279). The Angels are the representatives of an
antiprogressive, indeed antimodern,impulse taken to its furthest extent: “Surelyyou see
towards what We are Progressing,”says the Angel of America to Prior,
I 5 7

6. S M I T H
The fabric of the sky unravels:
Angels hover, anxious fingers worry
The tattered edge.
Before the boiling blood and the searing of skin
Comes the Secret catastrophe. (196)
It is an indictment and a warning which recalls other modern apocalyptic dramas.
There are echoes here of Georg Kaiser’s Gas trilogy, in which prophetic characters warn
that a world-ending explosion will result from the continued production of gas; there
are echoes of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, in which the author rails against
the forces of “modern progress” that led to World War I and concludes that he has
“written a tragedy whose doomed hero is mankind”;’ and there are echoes, too, of
Rachel Rosenthal’s L.0.W in Gaia,in which an angry Mother Earth warns humanity
that it is doomed to “crash.”
The Angels’ solution to this suicide-by-progress, however, goes beyond anything
suggested by these earlier apocalyptic dramas. According to the Angels, humanity must
reject intermingling, progression, migration, understanding:
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. (197)
In passages like this, the Angels are sublime, poetic reactionaries, a combination that
forces us to question the status of sublimity, and poetry, in Kushner’s world. Consumed
by a terror of progress and the modern world, hurling versified warnings of the End
from on high, the Angels come across as virtual parodies of modernist prophets of
apocalypse, winged grotesques of Heidegger, Eliot, Pound. For the sake of humanity,
they urge humanity to cease being human.
There is another irony as well to the apocalypticism of Kushner’s Angels.
Heaven, the site of the Angels’ attack on human progress, is itself a ramshackle store-
house of the instruments of such progress. The table around which the Angels sit is
covered with “an ancient map of the world” on which lie
archaic and broken astronomical, astrological, mathematical and nautical objects of
measurement and calculation; heaps and heaps and heaps of books and files and
bundles of yellowing newspapers; inkpots, clay tablets, styli and quill pens. The

7. ANGELS IN AMERICA
great chamber is dimly lit by candles and a single great bulb overhead, the light of
which pulses to the audible rhythmic surgings and waverings of a great unseen gen-
erator.
At the center of the table is a single bulky radio, a 1940s model in very poor
repair. It is switched on and glowing, and the Angels are gathered about it, intent
upon its dim, crackly signal. (278)
This space at once presents a schema of the history of human knowledge (cartography,
exploration, literacy, electricity, the radio) and recalls a dilapidated Eastern-bloc state-
room just before the collapse of the Wall. The Angels, then, appear to be complicit in
the very systems of progress they condemn, an irony accentuated by the fact that the
Angels receive their information about the Chernobyl disaster not through divine
inspiration but through the bulky, crackling radio at the center of the table. Despite
their aspiration to timelessness, the Angels are as dependent upon the instruments of
progress as the mortals are.
Oddly enough, Prior’s reply to the Angels may be unique in the literature of
modern apocalyptic drama: while not denying the future horrors that the Angels pre-
dict, Prior refuses to relinquish his belief in progress. Returning the prophetic Book to
the Angels, Prior explains,
We can’tjust stop. We’re not rocks-progress, migration, motion is ...modernity.
It’s animate, it’swhat living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness,
it’s still desirefor. Even if we go faster than we should. We can’t wait. And wait for
what? God. ..
(Thunderclap.)
G o d . . .
(Thunderclap.)
He isn’tcoming back. (282)
Even Prior’s insistence that God “isn’t coming back” is rendered here in progressive
rather than apocalyptic terms. Compare the loss of God in Prior’s account to that in
Samuel Beckett. In Beckett, God’s disappearance is final and irrevocable-Godot will
never arrive, we know this, and there will be no miracles in Hamm’s sunken bunker-
and this total loss marks his play worlds as postapocalyptic. In Prior’s account, on the
other hand, God is not dead but off wandering, “sail[ing] off on Voyages, no knowing
where” (19s).
Though Kushner places the date of God’s departure at the beginning of
the twentieth century (in 1906, the year of the San Francisco earthquake), it seems that
IS 9

8. S M I T H
Kushner’s God is not so much swept away by modernity as swept up in it: divinity wan-
ders now “in Mortifying imitation of. ..his least creation”(195)
and faces, it seems, all-
too-human confusions in the face of the rapid transformation of our age. There is at
least the suggestion in Angels that God, like so many of Kushner’s characters, must
wander off now in order to grow. Taking after his “least creation,’’ God himself may
need to progress in order to live.
But perhaps I am making too much of this dichotomy ofprogressive and apocahptic
-there is a sense, after all, in which Angels is profoundly confused. Almost every critic
who has written on Angels has pointed to its “postmodern ambiguity,” and it may well
be that Angels is a work that, taken as a whole, reflects Harper’s desperate millennia1
confusion at the outset of “Millennium Approaches.” “I’mundecided,”she says,
I feel .. . that something’s going to give. It’s 1985. Fifteen years till the third millen-
nium. Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there’ll
be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe
companionship and love and protection, safety from what’s outside, maybe the door
will hold, or maybe . . . maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and
the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison and light,
or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I’m only crazy thinking oth-
erwise, or maybe not, maybe it’seven worse than I know, maybe . . .I want to know,
maybe I don’t.The suspense, Mr. Lies, it’s killing me.
MR. LIES: I suggest a vacation. (24)
“Maybe. . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .”: Harper’s millennial dreaming here is a distinctly
contemporary fantasia: a stream of references half-digested, at turns apocalyptic, pro-
gressive, pop psychological, paranoiac, utopian. To add to the confusion, Mr. Lies’s
response to the speech puts the lie to any reading of the play as a simple celebration of
change against the reactionary forces of stasis. For though Mr. Lies is an agent of
migration (indeed, he is a travel agent) the “vacation”he offers is mere escape without
progression. In this sense he is the twin of the Angel, whose exhortations of stasis
threaten life as much as Mr. Lies’s seductions of motion. In Harper’s early monologue,
then, a complex of themes we have seen to be central (millennium, apocalypse, motion,
progress) are rendered as “undecided”and, maybe, undecidable. Maybe, then, this is the
mood of Kushner’s work as a whole; maybe Harold Bloom is correct when he says
about Prior that this “gallant, ill gay prophet simply has no prophecy to give us.” It is,
Bloom writes, “the ultimate aesthetic weakness” of the work.6
160

9. A N G E L S I N A M E R I C A
“Joseph Smith
Taking the Golden
Bible from Mormon
Hill.” Frontispiece to
Origin,Rise,and
Progress o
f
Mormonism (1867).
161

10. S M I T H
111. A N E T O F SOULS
Bloom’s reading would seem to fit with Kushner’s skepticism toward any totalizing
vision of history- progressive, apocalyptic, or otherwise. Kushner ultimately lan-
guishes in his own indecision, the argument would go, and his skepticism of universal
historical claims makes genuine prophecy impossible. But behind this skepticism I
wonder whether there doesn’t lie a certain complex conviction, one that elevates the
play above mere ambiguity. Indeed,pace Bloom, I would suggest that Prior does have a
sort of prophecy, as does Harper, one that attempts to combine progressive and apoca-
lyptic narratives into a single, overarching framework. In this respect, the visions of
Prior and Harper at the end of the play echo a central theme of American religious his-
tory: postmillennialism. The term refers to the place assigned to the return of Christ,
which was to occur after, rather than before, the coming of the millennium (hencepost-
rather than premillennial). In an article entitled “Between Progress and Apocalypse,”
historian James H. Moorhead describes postmillennialism as “a compromise between a
progressive, evolutionary view of history and the apocalyptic outlook of the Book of
Revelation.” According to Moorhead, the doctrine of postmillennialism was the domi-
nant theological outlook of nineteenth-century America.’ Though it would be too
much of an imposition to call Angels a “postmillennial”drama, since the Christian the-
ological debates that inform postmillennialism are simply not in evidence here, the play
nevertheless exhibits a spirit of progressive apocalypticism that is reminiscent of this
distinctly American theology.
We can begin to understand this composite vision by noting Harper’s growth
over the course of the play. Her early confusion gives way to the unambiguously millen-
nial vision of her final speech, referred to earlier:
But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such
things:
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who
had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like sky-
divers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of those
departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and
the souls were three-atom molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim
absorbed them, and was repaired. (293-94)
Harper’s use of apocalyptic rhetoric here is far more assured than in her first speech.
While her emphasis on the ozone layer, as discussed earlier, suggests a certain skepti-
cism toward progress (a skepticism she shares with Prior), this skepticism is ultimately
162

11. A N G E L S I N A M E R I C A
subsumed in a broader faith in the evolutionary nature of human history.Thus she fol-
lows this, her final revelation, with a sentiment reminiscent of the lines from Emerson
that open “Perestroika”:“Nothing’s lost forever,”she says. “In this world there is a kind
of painful progress”(294).It is a vision that exhibits both apocalyptic and progressive
views of history.
Harper shares this outlook with Prior, whose final speech also combines the
apocalyptic and the progressive.First Prior looks forward to the season when the Foun-
tain of Bethesda will flow again, an event that has already been imbued with eschato-
logical significance. After this millennial image, Prior turns to the AIDS crisis and the
struggle for gay rights, subjects that could easily be charged with apocalyptic intensity,
but Prior renders them, instead, in a progressive mode:
This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be
commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away.We
won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.
The time has come. (298)
Prior’s painful progressivism at the end ofAngels (reminiscent, like Harper’s speech, of
Emerson) is combined with an optimistic sort of apocalypticism that anticipates an age
when Bethesda will flow again. Indeed, Prior “want[s] to be around to see”this new age
(298).Prior does indeed have somethingto prophesy: he is the prophet, with Harper, of
history as a slow, painful progress inspired by the promise of a New Jerusalem. This
vision partakes of both apocalyptic and progressive elements; if they are not quite
brought into synthesis, then neither are they totally opposed. Confronted with a seem-
ing contradiction, Prior and Harper rehse to divest themselves of either the apocalyp-
tic or the progressive; the composite visions they describe, however, are too uncertain,
too fluid, to qualify as the new theory the Bolshevik searches for. We are left with only
the instinctive (necessary?) belief in human progress, against so much historical evi-
dence, and the hopeful (desperate?)revelation of an eventual utopia that is a genuine
alternative to death: a society of change, of migration, of plurality, of “morelife: what-
ever the cost.
It is this utopian society toward which the drama tends, not only in the visions of
its prophetic characters, but in the structure of the work itself. For ifAngeZs unfolds like
a series of breakdowns, then these breakdowns lead not to chaos and utter fragmenta-
tion (as Rabbi Chemelwitz and the Oldest Living Bolshevik fear and- more frighten-
ing- Roy Cohn gleefully accepts) but to surprising reintegrations. “Imaginationcan’t
create anything new, can it?”asks Harper when she and Prior encounter each other in

12. S M I T H
their respective dream states (38). The experience is the first of many such encounters,
both surreal and unexpected: Prior and the Angel, Joe and Louis, Belize and Roy
Cohn, Harper and the Mormon Mother, Prior and Hannah (“This is my ex-lover’s
lover’s Mormon mother,’’ says Prior [zg]). Meanwhile, characters move in and out of
communities in surprising ways: Hannah, for instance, begins her journey as a staunch
Mormon matron; by the time the play is finished, she “is noticeably different-she
looks like a New Yorker, and she is reading the New York Times”(295). If the world of
Angels is coming undone, then it is just as rapidly being knit together again, being
reconnected at the oddest points. The reknitting of Angels exposes the lie of Harper’s
early statement that “[imagination] only recycles bits and pieces from the worlds and
reassembles them into visions” and Prior’s claim that “it’s All Been Done Before”
(38-39); the visions that Prior and Harper experience together, and the “threshold of
revelation” that they share, are signposts of an emergent, previously unimaginable, web
of connections. It is a vision that is given expression, as we have seen, in Harper’s clos-
ing image of a net of souls, and Kushner’s own comments on the play that “Marx was
right: The smallest human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets
of souls societies, the social world, human life springs” (307). The millennialism of
Angels is one that embraces “the weird interconnectedness” of us all, that accepts the
knitting and tearing apart and reknitting of individuals and communities and envisions
a net of souls, in motion, kaleidoscopic. Ironically, the emergence of such connections,
visions, and prophecies amidst the collapse of older explanatory structures echoes the
emergence of Mormonism itself. Historian Gordon Wood, for instance, explains the
early growth of Mormonism by noting that “the disintegration of older structures of
authority released torrents of popular religiosity into public life. Visions, dreams,
prophesyings, and new emotion-soaked seekings acquired a validity they had not ear-
lier possessed.”8
It is this final, utopian vision that at once embraces apocalypticism and subverts
the sort of totalizing, overarching Theory that the Oldest Living Bolshevik longs for.
For what Theory, what Dogma, can incorporate the surprise of the radically Other, the
unpredictability of “weird interconnectedness”?Insofar as apocalypticism has generally
been associated with relentlessly totalizing schemes of human history, Kushner’s apoca-
lypse here is precisely an apocalypse of apocalypses,his “Capital M Millennium” an end
to such all-encompassing units of time. A decentered apocalypse, a progressive mil-
lenarianism: it is the paradoxicality of such a vision that makes it so enticingly utopian
in both the literal and the popular sense, at once a no-place and a paradise. And so
Kushner’s play leaves us with a quixotic sort of prophecy: that the millennium will con-
tinue to approach, and humanity to progress, long after Theory has passed away.

13. A N G E L S I N A M E R I C A
NOTES
I. Tony Kushner,A Bright Room CalledDay (NewYork: Theatre Communications Group,
I994), x.
2.Tony Kushner,Angels inAmerica (NewYork Theatre Communications Group, 1995),
34,251,283,2797283,297.
3.Catherine Keller,Apocalypse Now and Then (Boston: Beacon, 1996),I.
4.Harold Bloom, Omens $Millennium (New York Riverhead Books, 1996), 225.
5. Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, trans. Max Knight and Joseph Fabry, in In These
Great Times:A Karl Kraus Reader, ed. Harry Zohn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
I99d 255.
6.Bloom, Omens o
f Millennium, 225.
7.James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of
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8. Gordon Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,”New York History 61
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