I wanted to share one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America with you. Bryan mentioned it in lecture on Wednesday. It’s the beginning of Part II: Perestroika, Act Four: John Brown’s Body, Scene 6.
It features Prior Walter, one of the play’s protagonists, who is dying of AIDS, his nurse-practitioner Emily, and Hannah, who is . . . well, you’ll see.
Night. Prior, Emily (Prior’s nurse-practitioner) and Hannah in an examination room in St. Vincent’s emergency room. Emily is listening to his breathing, while Hannah sits in a nearby chair.
EMILY: You’ve lost eight pounds. Eight pounds! I know people who would kill to be in the shape you were in, you were recovering, and you threw it away.
PRIOR: This isn’t about WEIGHT, it’s about LUNGS, UM . . . PNEUMONIA.
EMILY: We don’t know yet.
PRIOR: THE FUCK WE DON’T ASSHOLE YOU MAY NOT BUT I CAN’T BREATHE.
HANNAH: You’d breathe better if you didn’t holler like that.
PRIOR (Looks at Hannah, then): This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother.
(Little pause.)
EMILY: Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.
The scene is an example of the play’s humor, but it also reinforces an important idea that runs throughout the play: the idea of cosmopolitanism.
New York emerges in Kushner’s play as a cosmopolitan space of transformation. It’s all about learning to embrace difference and change. Bryan cited one of my favorite concepts these days, what the philosopher Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination,” in opposition to the idea of cultural purity. Bryan suggested that in a play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the idea of contamination as an inevitable and perhaps even necessary part of cultural change has an even greater force than it might if considered in the abstract.
Here’s what Appiah says about contamination in an article from the New York Times (“The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006), which was adapted from his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006):
Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into contamination; change is more a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don’t say that we can’t change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it’s rarely because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done – or what we plan to do – are typically made up after the event, rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we cannot become accustomed to doing things differently.
Angels in America is all about learning to do things differently, and the play understands the transformative power of conversation. The play, after all, ends with a conversation — or rather two. The first conversation the conversation among four friends who have come together against all odds: Prior, the AIDS survivor; Louis, his ex-lover; Hannah, his ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother; and Belize, a gay African American male nurse who serves as the moral compass of the play. The second conversation is between Prior and us, the audience: it’s the one that ends with the blessing that Bryan cited in a previous post.
And I think it’s important the Prior uses the word “citizens” in the moments before he utters that blessing: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”
What Prior is evoking is the idea of the world-citizen, a fundamental concept for cosmopolitan theory. It’s the idea that each of us has a fundamental obligation to humanity as a whole. The time has come, Prior is telling us, to step up and be cosmopolitan, to be citizens of the world, to take responsibility for the way in which the world spins forward. That, in my reading, is what the play’s final line — “The Great Work Begins.” — ultimately signifies.
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