Angels in America

I'm still pretty sick, so after running some absolutely necessary errands this morning, one of which was returning late videos, I was able to pick up the second Angels in America DVD and spent most of the afternoon watching that.  I don't even know what to say.  I am speechless.  It is such an intimately painful and universally powerful piece of work that my responses are flying off in all different directions.  Maybe I will be able to write about it some other time.  For now, though, just a recap of a scene that spoke right to me.  (As it happens, I have the screenplay on my kitchen table.  I purchased it after the the Catholic priest who was my professor last December (and, as it happens, now as well) raved about it.  We don't have HBO, so I read the play long before I saw it this week.)

In this scene, Harper, the young and slightly off-balance Mormon wife trapped in New York and on the verge of leaving the gay Republican lawyer husband and Roy Cohn protege' who has just about abandoned her, seeks strength from the wax figure of a Mormon woman pioneer lodged in a display at the Mormon Center .  Harper has been finding temporary refuge there with her mother-in-law, who has come from Salt Lake to the foreign shores of New York City to deal with the dislocation created by her son's coming-out announcement and who winds up as one of the heroes of the play.  (Now: if that cast of characters and scenario doesn't send you out to your video store tonight, I don't know what will.)

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Harper:     In your experience of the world, then, how do people change?  

Mormon Mother:     Well, it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.                

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his  grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain!  We can't even talk about that.  And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn.  It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper:     And then get up.  And walk around.  

 Mormon Mother:    Just mangled guts pretending.  

 Harper:    That's how people change.