Call an animal "Little Sheba" and you can't expect it to stick around. Besides, it's a dog's name. He sprayed my books. Babylonians sealed them up in bricks. Dogs have brains. That's why Sheba left, because she knew. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais. He removes his jacket, rolls up his sleeve, shows Louis a dark-purple spot on the underside of his arm near the shoulder See. Pause Tell me.
Lesion number one. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire's disease. I'm going to die.
Grabbing Prior, embracing him ferociously : No. No wall like the wall of hard scientific fact. Bang your head on that.
Letting go Fuck you fuck you fuck you. A mature reaction. Let's go see if the cat's come home. Pause Then you'll come home? Scene 5 Same day, later on. JOE: It's an incredible honor, buddy, and. JOE: Well I do. JOE: We could live in Maryland. Or Georgetown. Well happy enough! That's better than nothing. JOE: It's time to make some changes, Harper. JOE: Why? I've been chief clerk for four years.
I make twenty-nine thousand dollars a year. That's ridiculous. I graduated fourth in my class and I make less than anyone I know. And I'm. I'm tired of being a clerk, I want to go where something good is happening. We'll forget church teachings and buy furniture at I have too much to do here. JOE: Like what? JOE: What things?
I know, I. It just isn't done because I never get time to finish it. You have all the time in the world. You could finish it when I'm at work. I heard someone in there. Metal scraping on the wall. A man with a knife, maybe. JOE: Not this morning either. You were at work this morning.
There's something creepy about this place. Our apartment looks like that one. Wasn't that apart- ment in Brooklyn? JOE: NO, it was. It did. Georgetown's worse. The Exorcist was in George- town. JOE: The devil, everywhere you turn, huh, buddy. JOE: How Everywhere. Only three. Pointing at the coffin : Why are there just two little wooden pegs holding the lid down? I pretended for years that she was already dead. When they called to say she had died it was a surprise. I abandoned her. Kenig Lear.
Maybe because this person's sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time.
Maybe vomit. I'm a sick old rabbi facing a long drive home to the Bronx. You want to confess, better you should find a priest. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt. The life she had, she'll stay put. She's better off. But try to understand what it means to me. Will you try? JOE: Good. Really try. I think things are starting to change in the world. For the good. Change for the good. America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations. And people aren't ashamed of that like they used to be.
This is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored. That's what President Reagan's done, Harper. He says "Truth exists and can be spoken proudly. We become better. More good. I need to be a part of that, I need something big to lift me up. I mean, six years ago the world seemed in decline, horrible, hopeless, full of unsolvable problems and crime and confusion and hunger and. More now than before. They say the ozone layer is. And today out the window on Atlantic Avenue there was a schizophrenic traffic cop who was making these.
JOE: Stop it! I'm trying to make a point. It only seems that way to you because you never go out in the world, Harper, and you have emotional problems. You stay in all day, fretting about imaginary. You don't know what I do. Yes you do. When you walk. JOE: I'm sorry buddy, I didn't mean to. You have all these secrets and lies. JOE: I want to be married to you, Harper.
You never should. Pause Hey buddy. Hey buddy. JOE: What? JOE: Harper. It was a little Jewish lady with a German accent. This is a good time. For me to make a baby. Joe turns away. Over Antarctica. Skin burns, birds go blind, icebergs melt.
The world's coming to an end. Scene 6 First week of November. JOE: Oh, um. I don't know your name. Word processor. The lowest of the low.
I'm with Justice Wilson. Counselor Pitt. Chief Clerk. JOE: Were you What a nice man. JOE: Not so nice. You sure you're. JOE: What's wrong? JOE: Sorry. Look, thanks for asking. He starts crying again Sorry, sorry, sick friend. JOE: Oh, I'm sorry. Three of your colleagues have preceded you to this baleful sight and you're the first one to ask. The others just opened the door, saw me, and fled. I hope they had to pee real bad.
JOE Handing him a wad of toilet paper : They just didn't want to intrude. JOE: Oh, Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers. JOE: Twice. JOE: Excuse Well, oh boy. A Gay Republican. JOE: I'm not.
Forget it. Not Republican? JOE: Not gay. I'm not gay. Blows his nose loudly It's just. JOE: Yes? I mean you sound like a. Like what? Joe knows he's being teased; Louis knows he knows. Joe decides to be a little brave. Sound like a. Like a. Republican, or JOE: DO you what? JOE: Like a. My name is Louis. But all my friends call me Louise. I work in Word Processing. Thanks for the toilet paper. Louis offers Joe his hand, Joe reaches, Louis feints and pecks Joe on the cheek, then exits.
Scene 7 A week later. Mutual dream scene. Prior is at a fantastic makeup table, having a dream, applying the face. Harper is having a pill-induced hallucination. She has these from time to time. For some reason, Prior has appeared in this one. Or Harper has appeared in Prior's dream. It is bewildering. One wants. But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?
One does not. One gets fucked. Fuck this shit. He almost crumbles; he pulls himself together; he studies his handiwork in the mirror I look like a corpse. A corpsette. Oh my queen; you know you've hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.
Harper appears. Who are you? You're in my dream. Feigning dismay, shock, he mimes slashing his throat with his lipstick and dies, fabulously tragic.
Then : The hands and feet give it away. I don't recognize you. You're not.. Are you my. I have emotional problems. I took too many pills. Why are you wearing makeup? I promised him. No more pills. Lots of Valium. I'm not addicted. I don't believe in addiction, and I never. And I never take drugs. Valium; in wee fistfuls. It's terrible.
Mormons are not supposed to be ad- dicted to anything. I'm a Mormon. Great book, Angels in America pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. The Free by Willy Vlautin. Kaleb Tank. Loading Preview. Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking. Your email address will not be published.
Home book free best books pdf download pdf free download pdf pdf book pdf. Another Saturday Night by Alan Lowe Set mainly in a Singles Bar it is the story of a young couple who meet again after many years, a widow who is befriended by a lothario a couple who are ready to divorce and a couple who are both looking for love. It has popular songs not newly written ones. Breathe by Arcadia Ewell After her best friend, Rebecca, commits suicide Kristie has a hard time coming to terms with the loss.
She'll need the support of her friends, family, and even an unlikely friend or two to learn to forgive Rebecca and move on with her life. Angels in America by Tony Kushner. The Free by Willy Vlautin. Plague of Angels by John Patrick Kennedy.
We may call this progress, or perhaps only call it change, but theres nothing either beautiful or inevitable about it. Hannah leaves the safety of Salt Lake City, reversing the Mormon trek, to help her homosexual son, Joe, and then, when he rejects her help, she creates a new family among those not of her blood or her religion: Prior, Louis, and Belize, a black male nurse.
Harper finally walks out of the script of the Mormon wife, leaving Joe, and heading west, not on a wagon train headed for Salt Lake City, but on an airplane headed for San Francisco. Each woman has lived through a rupture, a great break with the histories they have known and inhabited, and while this rupture is dramatized as part of a personal narrative, it is also emblematic of the queer and querying relationship to history that the play repeatedly enacts.
The women, perhaps because they are not the heroines of the diorama, have the courage to swerve away from the sectarian histories in which their destinies are inscribed and to insert themselves into new histories. Painfully, each woman finds her way away from Salt Lake City and away from the teleological vision of an Elect nation planting a new Zion in the American wilderness.
Geography emblematizes the new histories of which each would be a part. They end up single and uncoupled in the great coastal, cosmopolitan and gay cities of San Francisco and New York. By contrast, Joe Pitt, the central figure in the dioramas vision of Mormon history, never entirely frees himself from the Mormon narrative that has repressed his sexuality and caused him to embrace a self-wounding Republican rectitude that, we infer, has caused his bleeding ulcer.
Made sick by a history he internalizes, he nonetheless remains true to his Mormon heritage, innocently susceptible to the political ideas of his second father, Roy Cohn, and closed to the alternative possibilities evoked by Louis, briefly his gay lover. Joe cant change. The Mormon narrative of a people apart, progressing through adversity to the New Zion, straightjackets him. Despite his obvious respect for his Mormon characters, Kushners treatment of Joe Pitt is the plays most powerful indictment of a peculiarly American understanding of history, one given powerful and dangerous affirmation in the years of Ronald Reagans Presidency when Kushner was writing this play, years in which Reagan renewed the rhetoric of America as an Elect nation, a city on a hill, a beacon and moral example to the world.
Jacobs Angel. One of the amazing and difficult things about Kushners play, however, is how it layers one history on top of another to create something new. The angel that crashes through Priors ceiling is not only a memory trace of the angel Moroni; its also, simultaneously, the angel in the Bible called a man, but most often in commentary called an angel with whom Jacob wrestled as he left the land of his father-in-law, Laban, and returned to the land of his father, Isaac, and his brother, Esau, in the book of Genesis.
On this journey, an angel came to Jacob at night, and Jacob wrestled with him, as Prior wrestles with his angel, and Jacob would not let go of the angel, even though he received a wound in his thigh, until he received the angels blessing Genesis The angel finally concedes that Jacob has prevailed, and he blesses him and gives him a new name: Israel.
Again, Kushner plants details in his play that deliberately cue the audience to the relevance of the Genesis story to Priors situation. Prior is told by Hannah Pitt to wrestle with the angel, and he does, crying, I will not let thee go except thou bless me Perestroika v.
In the struggle, the Angel pulls a muscle in her thigh, while Prior, whose leg has been hurting for months, walks with a cane throughout the later part of the play. In interviews, Kushner has said that his meditations on the Jacob story were influenced by Harold Blooms account of this figure in his commentary on The Book of J. There, Bloom speaks of Jacob as a figure of struggle, suffering, and trickery. Jacob fought with his brother Esau in the womb, defrauded Esau of his fathers blessing, through sharp practice won the better part of his father-in-law, Labans, sheep, and wrung from the angel a second blessing on the eve of his reunion with his brother after twenty years of living in the land of Laban.
As Bloom suggests, His lifelong agony to receive and secure the Blessing is the source of his fascination. Literally it translates as more life, the words which Prior himself speaks to the theater audience at the end of Perestroika as he stands by the Bethesda Fountain. In Jewish tradition, this is sometimes taken to mean more progeny. Jacob, after all, had many sons, and he gave his name to a people: the Israelites.
Prior has no progeny; in this he is very unlike Jacob. But Bloom discusses what else more life can mean in the particular context of Jacobs story. For Bloom, the Blessing is extracted from a very particular angel, the angel of death, on the night when Jacob fears he will be killed by his brothers forces the next day.
What Jacob wins from the angel, by his persistence, is the right to cross over the river Jabbok into the land of his fathers and to survive there, though lame in his hip and weighed down by the loss of his wife Rachel.
As Bloom says, what matters is that this lifelong struggler indeed held out, Bloom , which is what Prior, the AIDS survivor, does, though not as the progenitor of a race or nation, but as someone who persists, though wounded, and who makes something new from the shards of his old life. Prior, then, who is neither Mormon nor Jewish, is the figure where two histories meet: the Mormon story of the angel Moronis revelation to Joseph Smith of the destiny of the Mormon people to found a new Zion in Utah; and the Jewish story of the blessing bestowed on the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob, which promises that he will survive and be the progenitor of a chosen people.
While the stories of Mormon and Jew are hardly the same story, Kushners play shows a moment of convergence in the belief in special revelation, in chosen-ness. Prior reconfigures both histories. Prophet without progeny, the founder of no race or religion, but, indeed, their confounder, he is used to critique histories of election and exclusion. Kushner, himself both Jewish and homosexual, makes the treatment of Jewish history in Angels in America especially complex.
Millennium Approaches opens with the funeral of the Jewish immigrant, Sarah Ironson, grandmother of Louis, who, in the aged rabbis account, was a survivor like Jacob; Perestroika ends with a debate at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park about the present actions of the modern-day state of Israel.
Angels in America, then, is literally bookended by episodes that recall the histories of victimhood, wandering, and modern nation building of the children of Israel. Of Sarah Ironson, the rabbi says that Jews like her crossed the ocean You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppesbecause.
This is one version of the story of Jews in America, a story of perpetual difference and refusal of assimilation. Scene II of Millennium, by contrast, takes us to the law offices of Roy Cohn, a different kind of Jew, at home in the wheeling-dealing world of Washingtons Reaganite politics, a world to which he would like to introduce his young Mormon protg.
Much has been written about Kushners treatment of Roy Cohn, and about the ambivalence with which the play presents his corruption and his charisma. It has been argued that his horrible death from AIDS perpetuates stereotypes about the link between Jews and sexual perversion, and it has been argued that his drive for power and for life counter other stereotypes of the Jew as ineffectual and effeminate. The juxtaposition of Sarah Ironson and Roy Cohn suggests several things about Jews in America: first, that they are not all the same and that their histories in America are not one indivisible history; moreover, running down the spine of both of Kushners plays is a semi-comic and also deadly serious haunting of the dying Roy Cohn by the ghost of another Jew, Ethel Rosenberg.
If Roy has something of Jacobs persistence, struggling and fighting to stay alive and determined to conceal from the world the fact that he has AIDS, Ethel has a different kind of persistence. Roy saw her to the electric chair, but she sees him both to his death and to his disbarment. Slipping from his hospital room, she takes the train up to Yonkers to see how the hearings are going and is the first to bring Roy the news that he will die disbarred.
The bonds of a shared cultural and religious heritage cannot erase the differences between these characters. When Roy finally dies, Louis, urged on by Belize, says Kaddish over Roys body, the words fed to him by the invisible presence of Ethel by his side.
Its a potentially sentimental moment, the three main Jews of the narrativeLouis, Ethel, and Royare united by a religious ritual, but the sentimentality is immediately countered. Ethel and then Louis end the ceremony by intoning, You sonofabitch Perestroika V.
Ethel Rosenberg, of course, as an earnest supporter of the Communist party, had tried to shape an America quite different from Cohns, and her presence at Roys deathbed fills her with a strange sort of excitement and intensity that hint at more than the settling of a private score. In her view, Roys death will coincide with an historical cataclysm.
When Roy says he has forced [his] way into history and aint never gonna die, Ethel replies that History is about to crack wide open. Millennium approaches The Millenium Approaches, , implying that what counts as history is about to be changed, the past blown up, a new age. The play constantly teases the viewer with the possibility that Ethel might be right: that the politics embodied in Roy Cohn can be absolutely defeated; that perestroika will change the history of the world; that reviled peoples will find acceptance and a way to live in peace with their neighbors; that virtue will triumph over evil.
This possibility of a radical and utopian cracking open of history is constantly insinuated, yet it is also the vision of history most insistently and skeptically queried over the two-part course of Kushners epic drama. Benjamins Angel of History. To consider the millennial possibility critically, it is necessary now to turn to Walter Benjamin and his famous discussion of Paul Klees Angelus Novus.
Benjamin is not named in Kushners play, but his ideas are a force in it, as is his famous account of Klees angel portrait. Benjamin was, of course, both a Jew and a Marxist, and he wrote works of philosophy and aesthetic theory in the terrible time that was Nazi Germany. In , he committed suicide while trying to escape to America from occupied France. His thoughts on history are given their most concise expression in his late work, On the Concept of History, written in part as a protest against the ineffectuality of the Social Democrats in combating Fascism.
In this difficult and elliptical work he lays out his view of history, including his critique of the idea of progress and his dissatisfaction with normative history since, in his view, such history always sympathizes with the victors and benefits those who currently rule. That connection occurs in moments when the past flashes up. In such moments, when the continuum of history explodes, revolution is possible.
As many commentators have noted, Benjamins mystical Messianism substitutes a revolutionary prophet for a revolutionary party, and while evoking class struggle, does so in terms of image, memory, and experience, not political forms. A key passage from On the Concept of History, and one of particular importance for Kushners play, involves a picture of Paul Klees described by Benjamin in the following way: There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus.
It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
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