Heaven on Earth

But Angels is not a newscast. It is art, and it achieves something more difficult than balance: empathy. Gay and straight, radical and reactionary, sinning and sinned against, its characters make surprising connections. And it grants all of them — even, in his way, Cohn — complexity and dignity. When Prior meets Hannah, he says he can only imagine what she, a Mormon from Utah, must think of him. She answers, hard and acrid as a salt flat, "No, you can't imagine the things in my head."

Angels asks a lot of big questions: What is the law — literal, moral and spiritual? What unites a country with no common ancient history? But perhaps the most timely is, In a mongrel, divided country, how can you stand your ground and yet make peace? When Cohn dies (oh, it's not a spoilerlook it up in the encyclopedia), Belize says, "Maybe a queen can forgive a vanquished foe. It isn't easy. It doesn't count if it's easy. It's the hardest thing, forgiveness. Maybe that's where love and justice finally meet."

Now Belize also says, "I hate America," so we're not exactly joining hands and singing Kumbayah here. But Angels is nonetheless a deeply American play (and movie and TV show) because it captures how Americans — be it in the 1600s, in the 1980s or today — perpetually believe themselves to be on the cusp of great change, even apocalypse. This is true now for obvious reasons. As Kushner notes, "Today, you can say we're approaching the end of things without sounding like a nut ... Those towers collapsing — it looked like something from a tarot deck." But even before 9/11, millennialism was in the American DNA, sowed by religious settlers awaiting Armageddon; it is embodied today by the many citizens who expect the Second Coming in their lifetimes, as well as by secular idealists and doomsayers who believe that America is not just on the verge of transformation but duty bound to create it.

This spirit has driven the best and the worst in American history, and so it does in Angels. The resonant words of the angel to Prior Walter — "The great work begins!" — could just as well replace "In God We Trust" on the dollar bill. The accomplishment of this dazzling, poetic and hopeful Angels in America is that it shows us how brave and reckless that American sentiment is, how fearsome and splendid.