St. Mary's College of Maryland
Research Component of a St. Mary's Project in Dramatic Arts
Submitted to
The Faculty of the Department of Dramatic Arts
and the Office of the Associate Provost
In Candidacy for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts
Media and Performance Studies
By
St. Mary's City, Maryland
May, 1999
Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Wyskida
All rights reserved
In New York City tonight, people left alone sit talking nonsense to
the air, imagining . . . beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart
. . . water no longer seeks its own level, there are fourteen inches to the foot,
six days in the week, seven planets in the solar system . . . temperature can
no longer be measured. Two hundred degrees at last reading. Last Reading. Last
Reading. Barometric pressure is at a standstill. Jones Beach has fallen into the
Atlantic. . . . A glorious flash of white light and all seem to disappear in the
wild light of the new millennium . . . the Angel descends into the room and floats
above the bed. . . . Greetings prophet. The great work begins. The messenger has
arrived. Blackout. Blackout. Blackout.
With the coming of the next millennium and the rising tensions that frame it, postmodern dramatists are confronting issues of apocalypse and millennial terror. Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, Marisol, by Jose Rivera, and Weldon Rising, by Phyllis Nagy, interspersed above, reflect a range of apocalyptic visions, as well as a shared emphasis on environmental calamity as the result of societal breakdown. In Staging Place: Geographies of Modern Drama, Una Chaudhuri writes referring to Angels and Marisol, that "no heroism of departure can redeem the wasteland to which the world has been reduced,"1 as efforts to escape from social and ecological mayhem in all three works not only fail, but also yield a violent apocalypse. Depictions of place are configured in each work to show the failing ideation of desertion, as themes of rootlessness and travel create a constant sense of motion in each script, juxtaposing the continual movement of characters against the ecological conditions that trap them.
Each work configures compartmentalized place and insular environments against wide open expanses. The first act of Marisol is a series of short scenes set in insular compartments (offices, subway cars, apartments), while the second act transpires in a harrowing streetscape aftermath, mirrored structurally by Rivera as a single, continuous act devoid of scene breaks. Weldon Rising resembles act two of Marisol, beginning on the street and running as one unbroken scene without set changes or an intermission. Angels in America is a complex juxtaposition of interiors, street scenes, and dreamscapes as Kushner, much like Rivera, shows a series of compartments set against open expanses by locating scenes in Salt Lake City, Central Park, and a delusional Antarctica visited in a dream by Harper Pitt. Kushner also utilizes split scenes, showing, for example, the enclosed spaces of New York City refracted against the expansiveness of Harper's imagined Antarctica.
In all three plays, characters rely on these compartmentalized interiors to sustain illusions of identity, progress, and success, creating a false sense of security and protection in the world of each play. Marisol begins in a subway car that shuttles Marisol Perez between two other compartments: her publishing office and her apartment in the Bronx, a veritable fortress with multiple locks on the doors, bars on the windows, and a cornucopia of cheap, religious trinkets (plastic Buddha, crosses, rabbits feet, etc.) under her bed. At the start of act two, however, Marisol finds herself alone on a barren street, with all of the compartments stripped away. She encounters The Woman with Furs, who was burned and tortured for exceeding the line of credit on her Mastercard. Invoking the status formerly conferred on her by compartmentalized habitats, Marisol tells her that "I don't belong out here. I have a job in publishing; I'm middle class." The Woman with Furs also refers her identity to the lost measurements of a bordered world. "I'm a lawyer," she tells Marisol, "with a house in Cos Cob and personal references a mile long."2 Marisol then encounters Man with Scar Tissue, a former air-traffic controller who is savagely burned by Neo-Nazis. Marisol realizes in talking to Scar Tissue that her publishing job, and the white-male dominated constructs of her office, have forced her to shroud her Puerto-Rican heritage. "I commuted light years to this other planet called -- Manhattan," she tells him, " I learned new vocabularies, wore weird native dress . . . and amputated neat sections of my psyche, my cultural heritage . . . so much pain kept deep inside my Manhattan bosses and my Manhattan friends and my broken Bronx consciousness never even suspected."3 In the endless expanse of Rivera's streetscape, "middle class" Marisol eats out of trash cans, urinates behind dumpsters, and is nearly attacked twice. The endless streetscape exposes constructs of power and progress as illusions contingent on insular space, which do not protect Marisol in the wasteland.
Rivera populates exposed place with characters formerly of the insular
world. Marisol's friend and co-worker June shares an apartment with her dysfunctional
brother, Lenny, whom she evicts during a fit of exasperation in the first act.
Life on the street shows Lenny -- and the audience -- the insular world's flight
from social problems:
"It's incredible there. Logic was executed by firing squad. People
tell passionate horror stories and other people stuff their faces and go on.
. . . There are no verbs to describe the cold air as it sucks on your hands.
And if there were words to describe it, Marisol, you wouldn't believe it anyway,
because, in fact, it's literally unbelievable, it's another reality, and it's
actually happening right now. And that fact -- the fact that it's happening
right now -- compounds the unbelievable nature of the street, Marisol, adds
to its lunacy, its permanent deniability."4
The concept of "permanent deniability" is crucial; Rivera develops the street as a place where social problems become inescapable. The experience of Lenny, Marisol, and the cadre of homeless depicted on the street exposes old notions of power and social order as folly. The expanse dispels illusions of progress and identity in Marisol, as the loss of spatial regimentation yields stasis: no way to progress, no way to succeed, and no markers of identity except for the corporeal realities of the body.
In Weldon Rising, the temperature in New York City is rising rapidly (climbing to over 200 degrees by the end of the play), leaving characters powerless to save themselves in the expansive stasis that defines the play. The protagonist, Natty Weldon, flees his apartment after bystanding the violent murder of his boyfriend Jimmy. The opening image of Weldon Rising shows Natty on the street surrounded by his vanity and wardrobe, clinging to the very trappings of insular space that constituted his self-identity. Onstage with him is a homeless character, a drag-queen prostitute named Marcel who also witnessed Jimmy's murder. Marcel speaks of himself in the third person; when asked why, he says, "Marcel is the third person."5 He is reified as "the other," marginalized from mainstream constructions of place and stripped of subjectivity. In the apocalyptic circumstance of hyperbolic global warming, however, all of the characters are situated in stasis and confronted with the third person improvisations of Marcel.
In Angels in America, the critique of compartmentally-configured illusions of progress and identity lies in Kushner's multi-layered depiction of place. Kushner's array of sites -- the vacillation among interiors, exteriors, and dreamscapes; the use of split scenes; and the sheer number of locations depicted in Angels -- is the postmodern hallmark of the script, configuring a complex web where every site in the play is refracted by, read against, or mediated by another. The character placed on the outside of the compartmentalized world, similar to Lenny and Marcel, is Woman in the South Bronx, an intransient transient who portends the nature of the coming apocalypse. She describes the supposed future-seer Nostradamus as "some guy I went out with somewhere. Prophet . . . outcast . . . eyes like, scary shit."6 She tells Hannah Pitt, who has stopped her to ask directions, that "Oh yeah, I think in the next century, we will all be insane."7 The Woman forces the audience, and Hannah, to face the prospect of apocalypse, echoing Rivera's warning against permanent deniability. Kushner configures her as a woman defined by a tag name, linking her to Marcel and to the "tagged" characters in Marisol and establishing the street as a place where identities conferred by insular place no longer pertain.
Roy Cohn, conversely, never crosses the boundaries that falsely construct his identity, creating his own compartments and crafting the illusions that they propagate. Cohn the lawyer moves from the office to the restaurant to his house, schmoozing with Reagan officials and wielding his considerable political power. His power is a construct of place; as the straight, white, conservative male he fashions himself to be, he is respected in these sites. The reality of Cohn's life, however, is homosexuality and AIDS. Cohn asserts that homosexuality is just a political label. "Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men," he tells his doctor, Henry, "Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council . . . AIDS is what homosexuals have . . . I have liver cancer."8 In order to fit into the parameters set by the insular spaces he inhabits, Cohn denies the biological reality that ultimately kills him.
Joe Pitt is Cohn's protege, a Mormon lawyer whose two crises in Angels are articulated by the two places that define his life: the Hall of Justice and his apartment. Joe sees the Hall of Justice as emblematic of his beliefs and dreams of success; a structure where law and order provide Joe the opportunity for upward mobility in the ranks of government. His entire life is invested in the meanings of the Hall, yet he has a recurring nightmare where those meanings are exposed as illusion. "It just flashed through my mind," he says, "The whole Hall of Justice, it's empty, it's deserted, it's gone out of business forever. The people who make it run have up and abandoned it."9 This vision is a crisis of faith for Joe -- a realization that the goals and ambitions fashioned by the Hall of Justice only hold up because people inhabit them; they are self-fulfilling prophecies. Where the Hall of Justice represents Joe's professional goals, the apartment he shares with his wife Harper is a site emblematic of domestic ideals. Mainstream constructions of place configure apartments as the site for the nuclear family, but Joe's repressed homosexuality leaves him terrified of his wife and the expectations of the apartment, and thus marginalized by the space. Instead of coming home, he wanders Central Park, seeking an outlet for his marginalized identity.
In Central Park he encounters Louis Ironson, an employee of the Hall of Justice whose life is similarly configured by place. Louis is terrified of his apartment, a space with illusions of safety and protection that, with the onset of AIDS in his boyfriend Prior, becomes a manifestation of death. While Joe's apartment forces him to confront his own sexuality, Louis' home forces him to confront his own mortality, and the reality that he may also have AIDS. Louis flees his apartment and Prior's hospital room, running instead to Central Park for unprotected sex and a tryst with Joe.
Through depictions of Harper in Antarctica and Hannah Pitt in Utah, Kushner reveals that utopian recourses to expansion and wilderness are also illusions. In the scene set in Salt Lake City, the expansive landscape of Utah is described as "God's country," and the "Land of saints,"10 but these descriptions occur in the context of a real estate transaction. By sending the paradoxically agoraphobic and claustrophobic Harper on a trip to a Valium-induced Antarctica with her imaginary travel agent Mr. Lies, Kushner shows that Americans march through the endless frontier is a delusion. When Harper arrives in Antarctica, her immediate instinct is to develop it. "I want to set up camp," she says, "build a city, an enormous frontier city."11 The irony is that Harper seeks to fill her haven from compartmentalized space with compartmentalized spaces, repeating the pattern of development that conquered first New York and then Utah, the two places that have failed her. The notion of recreating failed utopias is mirrored in Marisol, as the basic premise of Rivera's script parallels Aristophanes's The Birds, in which characters flee a society plagued by high taxes to create a utopia, only to develop a society that is identical to the one that they have just fled.
The plurality of place in each play allows characters to presume that through motion there is always an escape route, a belief that Kushner attributes to an American habituation of rootlessness. Kushner shows the audience that in a nation once thought to go on forever, there is nowhere left to go. Mr. Lies diagnoses Harper's depression as "The price of rootlessness--motion sickness. The only cure is to keep moving."12 As Chaudhuri argues, Kushner sets rootlessness as his point of attack through Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz' eulogy for Louis' grandmother, Sarah, in the play's first scene.13 The rabbi describes the immigrant journey to America, telling mourners "You do not live in America. No such place exists. . . . Your clay is the clay of some litvak shtetel, your air the air of the steppes."14 Kushner keynotes the play with the idea that America is not a place, but a stopping point on a rootless journey: a nation that forsakes its landscape and has no ties to its cultural heritage.
Motion as an escape is also critiqued in Weldon Rising, where the people of New York City try to escape the heat by fleeing in their automobiles, the only compartments left with working air conditioning. Nagy sets the entire play against the perversely beautiful image of New Yorkers circling endlessly in their cars, headlights glaring, trying to flee the city, but finding all the bridges and tunnels melted. Having denied his sexuality to Jimmy's attacker, and tormented by his own perceived inadequacies, Natty Weldon views travel as the only conceivable escape from the condition of his life. The mirror on his vanity is covered with postcards from around the world, representing a mix of nostalgic and hopeful visions. In each postcard he sees either a reminder of Jimmy or the hope of a more beautiful self; "I used to be beautiful in transit," he says.15 Natty romanticizes everywhere from Connecticut to Amsterdam, and reminisces about dreams he shared with Jimmy of building their vacations "around cities that had remarkable airports."16 Nagy's constant references to other places show how trapped the characters really are.
Rivera critiques the idea of travel and motion in the opening scene of Marisol, setting the subway car as a thematic keynote in the same way that Kushner uses the Rabbi. Marisol considers the train car a protected environment, but the Man with Golf Clubs is there threatening her. "Every time you dream," he says, "or close your eyes in some hopeless logic that closed eyes are a shield against nightmares . . . you're gonna think you turned into me."17 Travel and motion lend no haven in Marisol, as motion between compartments does not free an individual of the burdens of the system; the subway, the apartment, the office are all organs of the same infected beast.
Desertion is represented as a product of greed and capitalism, as the prospect of running away from debt or towards profit is critiqued in each play. Marisol's abandonment of her cultural heritage is rewarded with salary and a job, while the homeless in Marisol see their identity stripped away in lieu of capitalist tags, as in Woman with Furs. Rivera focuses desertion around a Citibank Mastercard plot line, where characters who overspend their credit card limits are dragged to a "huge windowless building," and "violated."18 The concept of debt pervades the world of all three plays. A keynote line in Angels, "History is about to crack wide open. Millennium Approaches,"19 develops the notion of debt, as Rivera, Kushner, and Nagy show desertion as motivated by escape from the mistakes of the past. Joe, on the steps of the Hall of Justice, wants to escape from cultural obligations imposed upon him by his two insular spaces, the office and the apartment; "I just wondered what a thing it would be," he tells Louis, "if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free."20
Marginalization is a motivation for desertion in each play -- constructions of place privilege certain groups, as people of color, gays, women, and the poor are excluded from mainstream depictions of place. Marginalization of gays is the case in Angels, where the most private functions of gay relationships happen outdoors: Prior tells Louis he has AIDS on the street; Joe comes out to his mother on a pay phone in Central Park; and both Louis and Joe have sexual encounters outdoors. The exclusion of gays from mainstream constructions of place cause Louis and Joe to seek refuge in the park. Marisol's desertion of her cultural heritage is motivated by the mainstream exclusion of Hispanics, just as Natty's desertion of Jimmy in Weldon Rising is motivated by fear of marginalization.
Ideations of desertion in Marisol stand as a metaphorical condition endemic to the world of the play. The premise of the script is the abandonment of Marisol by her Angel, who must fight a war in the heavens against a senile God, and leaves the humans on the Earth to fight for themselves and "get some power," as the Angel tells Marisol.21 Themes of desertion are heightened by references to the moon, which has abandoned the earth and hurtled off into space, metaphorizing a lack of balance and equilibrium on the earth.
Each playwright shows the ideation of desertion as a failing proposition. In many cases compartments function as a trap, configured as both marginalizing and vulnerable spaces. Harper's apartment is a trap; she cannot leave, but is afraid to stay. For Marisol, each successive compartment not only serves to marginalize her in a different way, but also fails to protect her from encroachment. The office, for example, marginalizes her Puerto Rican heritage, but also exposes her to an assault by The Man with Ice Cream Cone. These positions are ironic; the walling out of social problems in each play only delays the inevitable consequences of walling out social problems.
Rivera and Kushner also critique desertion by debunking the myth of Angels as saviors. Kushner's Angel appears as a glorious creation, but she is still depicted as a bureaucrat with a seat on the "council of continental principalities." The Angel's divine injunctions are flattened by Prior's deflection of her entrance at the end of Part One, when he instantly associates it with cheap, postmodern mediations. "God Almighty," he says, "Very Steven Spielberg."22 Rivera's Angel is also a bureaucrat -- a functionary who discusses "sending out spies and drafting able bodied celestial beings"23 to fight in the war against God, and, in a delirious speech to Marisol, refers to God as "better armed . . . better organized . . . and, well, a little omniscient." The notion of salvation by angelic intervention is withdrawn by Rivera and Kushner.
Another manifestation of the consequences of falsified environs is marked by the prominence of disease and disfigurement in all three plays. Identity is seen as unstable in each work, and is contingent on the plurality of place to sustain its variability. Natty, for example, hopes that in a journey somewhere else he will discover spaces that mirror him as more beautiful. Just as the potential for alternate compartments sustains the habit of desertion, as depicted in each play's geography, the prospect of variable identity permits the characters an illusion of escape from their bodies. But just as the collapse of artificial borders in each play renders the characters motionless and without recourse to desertion, so the confrontation with extreme corporeal definition and limitation by disfigurement leaves them without recourse to masks of deniability that proffer escape. Each play features characters who are scarred by disease or disfigurement: In Weldon Rising, Natty Weldon's skin boils and blisters as the heat rises and the play nears a climax. In Marisol, Man with Scar Tissue is savagely burned. In Angels in America, Roy and Prior have AIDS. Seated at his makeup table, glamorizing himself, Prior confesses, "You know you've hit rock bottom when even drag is a drag."24 For Prior, as with Roy, Natty, and Scar Tissue, identity is defined by disease, reducing each character to a corporeal finality echoed in Marisol, for example, by insistent self-portrayals of the characters as "meat" or "food."
By casting the ideation of desertion against a vivid environmental apocalypse, be it disease, in Angels In America, heat, in Weldon Rising, or the complete trashing of society, in Marisol, it is shown at the core of our relationship with the natural world. Habituations to desertion, as a social, interpersonal, and personal strategy, are replicated in our naive and tragic environmental policy, which is similarly based on a culturally induced delusion that we can desert problems. Angels links the politicization of place driving environmental abuse (constructions of place promoting abuse and neglect of the landscape) with the politicization that led the Reagan administration to ignore AIDS (constructions of place that marginalize the gay community). Harper Pitt explicitly connects the ravages of environmental abuse with the ravages of AIDS when she cites the hole in the ozone layer, tracing it to "things collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way,"25 the same physical circumstances (systems of defense giving way) that describe the AIDS virus. When the Angel asserts, midway through Perestroika, "STOP MOVING,"26 she inscribes rootlessness and motion as culpable in the epic crisis.
Chaudhuri writes that "the trashing of America (and the world) with its calamitous effects on the future, is the overarching truth -- quite literally -- of Jose Rivera's recent angel play Marisol . . . an underlying and dystopic ecological condition pervading the world of the play."27 In Marisol, ideations of desertion, such as the containment of some social problems and the "permanent deniability" of others, have yielded a number of specific environmental effects: apples and coffee are extinct, garbage lines the streets, Ohio is on fire, cockroaches have infested living spaces, nutrients have disappeared from the food supply, and the Angel remarks, "the infected Earth is running a temperature."28 Rivera, like Kushner, uses environmental apocalypse to show a world eluding our control, where the debts of the past are due.
Through her disfigurement of Natty, Nagy makes a larger environmentalist statement that is articulated by all three playwrights: the ways characters deny the natural world (compartments and desertion) parallels the ways in which they deny their own bodies. The masking of the body and the masking of place mark the same desire for escape. In Natty's burned flesh and the heat of Weldon Rising -- as well as in the hole in the ozone layer and the AIDS crisis in Angels, and in the tag-named, nutrient starved homeless in Marisol -- the corporeal suffering of the body mirrors the corporeal suffering of the planet.
While other artists try to make sense of the approaching millennial
shift, waiting for religion to bring the world a savior or the Y2K computer
bug to bring the world to an end, Kushner, Rivera, and Nagy have chosen to root
their dramas in environmental catastrophe. Each playwright uses configurations
of place to tell a story: the home accommodates patriarchal, heterosexist illusions
of identity; the office inscribes illusions of success and progress that revolve
around upward mobility and capitalist excess; the street is a place of terror
and exposure, where the disfigured homeless force confrontation with debts of
the past. America is a land of rootlessness and motion, marching forward under
the false illusion that there is still somewhere left to march. Our relationship
with these places -- constructed on the presumption of their forsakability --
mirrors our relationship with wilderness and undeveloped place. These critiques
of desertion through configurations of place create models for staging an environmentalist
position, refocusing the postmodern stage on crucial political issues. As Prior
shrinks before the impotent Angel, Marisol ascends foolishly to heaven, and
Natty dances away with the ghost of Jimmy, the audience is left to ponder what
went wrong, devising new solutions and envisioning a better future as we move
into the 21st century.
Notes
1. Chaudhuri, Una. 1995. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 251.
2. Rivera, Jose. 1997. Marisol and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 44.
3. Rivera, 48-49.
4. Rivera, 33.
5. Nagy, Phyllis. 1996. Weldon Rising and Disappeared. London: Methuen Modern Plays, 27.
6. Kushner, Tony. 1992. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 105.
7. Kushner, 105.
8. Kushner, 46.
9. Kushner, 72.
10. Kushner, 81-83.
11. Kushner, 101.
12. Kushner, 18.
13. Chaudhuri argues in Staging Place, The Geography of Modern Drama, that "The America constructed by the rabbi is a nonplace, a meaningless surface overwritten by other, more potent places." (252) She writes that "The rabbi...takes these familiar oppositions as his theme: Old World versus new, journeying versus staying, and home versus America," (252) supporting the idea that Kushner sets rootlessness as his point of attack for Angels in America.
14. Kushner, 10.
15. Nagy, 5.
16. Nagy, 31.
17. Rivera, 7-8.
18. Rivera, 25.
19. Kushner, 112.
20. Kushner, 72.
21. Rivera, 17.
22. Kushner, 118.
23. Rivera, 16.
24. Kushner, 31.
25. Kushner, 17.
26. Kushner, Tony. 1993. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 52.
27. Chaudhuri, Una. 1994. "'There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake': Toward an Ecological Theater." Theatre, 25, no. 1, 22.
28. Rivera, 15.
Works Cited
Chaudhuri, Una. 1994. "'There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake': Toward an Ecological Theater." Theatre 25: 23-31.
Chaudhuri, Una. 1995. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Kushner, Tony. 1992. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc.
Kushner, Tony. 1993. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc.
Nagy, Phyllis. 1996. Weldon Rising and Disappeared. London: Methuen Modern Plays.
Rivera, Jose. 1997. Marisol and Other Plays. New York: Theatre
Communications Group Inc.