Afterword

With a Little Help

from My Friends

Angels in America, Parts One and Two, has taken five years to
write, and as the work nears completion I find myself think-
ing a great deal about the people who have left their traces in
these texts. The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation,
and that artistic accomplishment is exclusively the provenance
of individual talents, is politically charged and, in my case at
least, repudiated by the facts.
While the primary labor on Angels has been mine, over two
dozen people have contributed words, ideas and structures to
these plays: actors, directors, audiences, one-night stands, my
former lover and many friends. Two in particular, my closest
friend, Kimberly T. Flynn (Perestroika is dedicated to her), and
the man who commissioned Angels and helped shape it,
Oskar
Eustis, have had profound, decisive influences. Had I written
these plays without the participation of my collaborators, they
would be entirely different—would, in fact, never have come
to be.
Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the
Individual: We have no system of universal health care, we
don't educate our children, we can't pass sane gun control laws,

283
ANGELS IN AMERICA

we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable

processes like aging and death. Way down close to the bottom
of the list of the evils Individualism visits on our culture is
the fact that in the modern era it isn't enough to write; you
must also be a Writer, and play your part as the protagonist
in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be
in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic; the pun-
ishment dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of
value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserv-
ing the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your
creativity.
When I started to write these plays, I wanted to attempt
something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be
accused of straying too close to ambition's ugly twin, preten-
tiousness. Given the bloody opulence of this country's great
and terrible history, given its newness and its grand improba-
bility, its artists are bound to be tempted towards large ges-
tures and big embraces, a proclivity de Tocqueville deplored as
a national artistic trait nearly two hundred years ago. Melville,
my favorite American writer, strikes inflated, even hysterical,
chords on occasion. It's the sound of the Individual balloon-
ing, overreaching. We are all children of "Song of Myself."
And maybe in this spacious, under- and depopulated, as yet
only lightly inscribed country, the Individual will finally
expand to its unstable, insupportably swollen limits, and pop.
(But here I risk pretentiousness, and an excess of optimism to
boot—another American trait.)
Anyone interested in exploring alternatives to Indivi-
dualism 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.
Bertolt Brecht, while he was still in Weimar-era Berlin and
facing the possibility of participating in a socialist revolution,

284
 AFTERWORD

wrote a series of remarkable short plays, his Lehrstiicke, or

learning plays. The principal subject of these plays was the
painful dismantling, as a revolutionary necessity, of the indi-
vidual ego. This dismantling is often figured, in the learning
plays, as death.
Brecht, who never tried to hide the dimensions of his own
titanic personality, didn't sentimentalize the problems such
personalities present, or the process of loss involved in letting
go of the richness, and the riches, that accompany successful
self-creation.
Brecht simultaneously claimed and mocked the identity he'd
won for himself, "a great German writer," raising important
questions about the means of literary production, challenging
the sacrosanctity of the image of the solitary artist and, at the
same time, openly, ardently wanting to be recognized as a
genius. That he was a genius is inarguably the case. For a man
deeply committed to collectivity as an ideal and an achievable
political goal, this blazing singularity was a mixed blessing at
best and at worst, an obstacle to a blending of radical theory
and practice.
In the lower right-hand corner of the title page of many of
Brecht's plays you will find, in tiny print, a list of names under
the heading "collaborators." Sometimes these people con-
tributed little, sometimes a great deal. One cannot help feel-
ing that those who bore those minuscule names, who expend-
ed the considerable labor the diminutive typography conceals,
have gotten a bum deal. Many of these effaced collaborators,
Ruth Berlau, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, were
women. In the question of shared intellectual and artistic
labor, gender is always an issue.
On the day last spring when the Tony nominations were
being handed out [May 1993], I left the clamorous room at
Sardi's thinking gloomily that here was another source of anx-

285
ANGELS IN AMERICA

iety, another obstacle to getting back to work rewriting

Perestroika. In the building's lobby I was introduced to the
producer Elizabeth I. McCann, who said to me: "I've been
worried about how you were handling all this, till I read that
you have an Irish woman in your life. Then I knew you were
going to be fine." Ms. McCann was referring to Kimberly T.
Flynn; an article in the New Yorker last year about Angels in
America described how certain features of our shared experi-
ence dealing with her prolonged health crisis, caused by a seri-
ous cab accident several years ago, had a major impact on the
plays.
Kimberly and I share Louisiana childhoods (she's from
New Orleans, I grew up in Lake Charles); different but equally
complicated, powerful religious traditions and an ambivalence
towards those traditions; Left politics informed by liberation
struggles (she as a feminist, I as a gay man), as well as social-
ist and psychoanalytic theory; and a belief in the effectiveness
of activism and the possibility of progress.
From the beginning Kimberly was my teacher. Though
largely self-taught, she was more widely read and she helped
me understand both Freud and Marx. She introduced me to
the writers of the Frankfurt School and their early attempts at
synthesizing psychoanalysis and Marxism; and to the German
philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, whose importance
for me rests primarily in his introduction into these "scientific"
disciplines a Kabbalist-inflected mysticism and a dark, apoca-
lyptic spirituality.
As both writer and talker Kimberly employs a rich variety
of rhetorical strategies and effects, even while expressing deep
emotion. She identifies this as an Irish trait; it's evident in
O'Neill, Yeats, Beckett. This relationship to language, blended
with Jewish and gay versions of the same strategies, is evident
in my plays, in the ways my characters speak.

286
 AFTERWORD

More pessimistic than I, Kimberly is much less afraid to

look at the ugliness of the world. She tries to protect herself
far less than I do, and consequently she sees more. She feels
safest, she says, knowing the worst, while most people I know,
myself included, would rather be spared and feel safer encir-
cled by a measure of obliviousness. She's capable of pulling
things apart, teasing out fundamental concerns from their
camouflage; at the same time she uses her analysis, her learn-
ing, her emotions, her lived experience, to make imaginative
leaps, to see the deeper connections between ideas and histor-
ical developments. Through her example I learned to trust
that such leaps can be made; I learned to admire them, in lit-
erature, in theory, in the utterances people make in news-
papers. And certainly it was in part her example that made the
labor of synthesizing disparate, seemingly unconnected things
become for me the process of writing a play.
Since the accident Kimberly has struggled with her health,
and I have struggled to help her, sometimes succeeding, some-
times failing; and it doesn't take much more than a passing
familiarity with Angels to see how my life and my plays match
up. It's always been easier talking about the way in which
I used what we've lived through to write Angels, even though
I sometimes question the morality of the act (while at the
same time considering it unavoidable if I was to write at all),
than it has been acknowledging the intellectual debt. People
seem to be more interested in the story of the accident and its
aftermath than in the intellectual genealogy, the emotional
life being privileged over the intellectual life in the business of
making plays, and the two being regarded, incorrectly, as sep-
arable. A great deal of what I understand about health issues
comes from what Kimberly has endured and triumphed over,
and the ways she's articulated those experiences. But Angels is
more the result of our intellectual friendship than it is autobi-

287
ANGELS IN AMERICA

ography. Her contribution was as contributor, teacher, editor,

adviser, not muse.
Perhaps other playwrights don't have similar relationships
or similar debts; perhaps they have. In a wonderful, recently
published collection of essays on creative partnerships, entitled
Significant Others, edited by Isabelle de Courtivron and
Whitney Chadwick, the contributors examine both healthy
and deeply unhealthy versions of artistic interdependence in
such couples as the Delaunays, Kahlo and Rivera, Hammett
and Hellman, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—
and in doing so strike forcefully at what the editors call "the
myth of solitariness."
We have no words for the people to whom we are indebted.
I call Oskar Eustis a dramaturg, sometimes a collaborator; but
collaborator implies co-authorship and nobody knows what
"dramaturg" implies. Angels, I wrote in the published version
of Perestroika, began in a conversation, real and imaginary,
with Oskar Eustis. A romantic-ambivalent love for American
history and belief in what one of the play's characters calls "the
prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward
and growing up" are things Oskar and I share, part of the dis-
cussions we had for nearly a year before I started writing
Millennium. Oskar continues to be for me, intellectually and
emotionally, what the developmental psychologists call "a
secure base of attachment" (a phrase I learned from Kimberly).
The play is indebted, too, to writers I've never met. It's iron-
ical that Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Olivier Revault
d'Allonnes' Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, provided me
with a translation of the Hebrew word for "blessing"—"more
life"—which subsequently became key to the heart of
Perestroika. Harold Bloom is also the author of The Anxiety of
Influence, his oedipalization of the history of Western litera-
ture, which when I first encountered it years ago made me so

288
 AFTERWORD

anxious my analyst suggested I put it away. Recently I had the

chance to meet Professor Bloom and, guilty over my appro-
priation of "more life," I fled from the encounter as one of
Freud's Totem and Taboo tribesmen might flee from a meeting
with that primal father, the one with the big knife. (I cite
Bloom as the source of the idea in the published script.)
Guilt plays a part in this confessional account; and I want
the people who helped me make this play to be identified,
because their labor was consequential. I have been blessed
with remarkable comrades and collaborators: 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 human unit is two people,
not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the
social world, human life springs. And also plays.

Tony Kushner
November 15, 1993

289
 ABOUT THE PLAY

Angels in America, Parts One and Two, was commissioned by

the Eureka Theatre Company through a special projects grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts. The plays were
first seen in San Francisco and at the Mark Taper Forum in
Los Angeles. Part One: Millennium Approaches ran for a year
in London at the Royal National Theatre. Perestroika opened
there, in repertory with a revival of Millennium, on November
20,1993. Millennium began its run at the Walter Kerr Theatre
on Broadway in May 1993 and was joined by Perestroika on
November 23, 1993. The Broadway production was followed
by an extensive U.S. national tour.
Angels received two Fund for New American Plays/American
Express Awards, two Drama Desk Awards for Best Broadway
Play of 1993 and 1994, two Outstanding Theatre Awards from
the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, two
LAMBDA Literary Awards, the 1993 Los Angeles Drama
Critics' Award and Tony Awards for Best Play of 1993 and
1994. Millennium was awarded the New York, London and
San Francisco Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play; the
1993 Outer Critics' Circle Award for Best Broadway Play; the
1991 National Arts Club's Joseph Kesselring Award; the 1991
Will Glickman Award; London's Evening Standard Award for
Best Play and the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
A partial list of additional English-language productions of
Angels includes the Intiman Theatre Company in Seattle,
Washington; the Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta,
Georgia; the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco,
California; the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas; the Sydney
Theatre in Sydney, Australia; the Melbourne Theatre Company
in Melbourne, Australia; the Court Theatre in Christchurch,
New Zealand; the Adelaide Festival Centre in Adelaide,
South Australia; the Theatre Foundation in Auckland, New
Zealand; the Circa Theatre in Wellington, New Zealand; the
Truk-Pact Repertory of South Africa; and the Abbey Theatre
in Dublin, Ireland.
Foreign-language productions have been performed in
Buenos Aires, Argentina; Vienna and Lenz, Austria; Brussels,
Belgium; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Prague, Czechoslovakia; Copen-
hagen, Denmark; Aubervilliers (Paris) and Avignon, France;
Helsinki, Finland; more than a dozen cities in Germany;
Athens, Greece; Rotterdam, Holland; Budapest, Hungary;
Reykjavik, Iceland; Tel Aviv, Israel; Rome, Italy; Tokyo, Japan;
Oslo, Norway; Manila, Philippines; Gdansk, Poland;
Barcelona and Madrid, Spain; Stockholm, Sweden; Zurich,
Switzerland; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
In 2003, Angels in America was named one of the top five
Tony Award-winning plays of all time. It shared this honor
with Death of a Salesman, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The
Crucible and Long Day's Journey into Night. It was also chosen
by London's Royal National Theatre as one of the Best 100
Plays of the 20th Century.
In 2003, Angels in America (Parts One and Two) was made
into an epic movie by HBO Films, directed by Mike Nichols.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tony Kushner's plays include Homebody/Kabul, A Bright Room

Called Day and Slavs!; as well as adaptations of Corneille's The
Illusion, Ansky's The Dybbuk, Brecht's The Good Person of
Szechuan and Goethe's Stella. Current projects include: Henry
Box Brown or The Mirror of Slavery; and two musical plays:
St. Cecilia or The Power of Music and Caroline or Change. He is
collaborating with Maurice Sendak on an American version
of the children's opera, Brundibar. Mr. Kushner has been
awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Tony Awards, the
Evening Standard Award, an OBIE, the New York Drama
Critics Circle Award, an American Academy of Arts and
Letters Award, a Whiting Writers Fellowship, a Lila Wallace/
Reader's Digest Fellowship, and a medal for Cultural Achieve-
ment from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He
grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he lives in New York.