Angels, Reagan and AIDS in America

[Q]

Angels, Reagan and AIDS in America

Published: November 16, 2003


Tonight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of "The Reagans" on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols's film version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration's long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980's. If "Angels" reaches an audience typical for HBO hits, it could detonate a debate bloody enough to make the fight over "The Reagans" look like an exhibition bout.

That's not such a big if. "Angels" is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan's "Streetcar Named Desire" more than a half-century ago. It's been produced not only with stars but at four times the budget of "The Reagans." People are going to talk about it, and, as they do, HBO will replay it relentlessly to rake in more and more of the country. Threats of a boycott against a channel soon to unveil a new season of "The Sopranos" will go nowhere.

"Angels" is only minutes old when Mr. Pacino appears as a real-life crony of the Reagans — Roy Cohn, in his post-McCarthy-era incarnation as a still-powerful Republican fixer, closely tied to the Ed Meese justice department. A photo on his office wall shows him arm in arm with both the president and his vice president. Cohn is also a closeted gay man dying of AIDS. When he takes a sexual partner to the White House, he gloats, "President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand." Eventually Cohn will threaten to reveal "adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund" unless the White House secures him a private stash of AZT, then the most promising AIDS drug and still unavailable to all but a few. Cohn gets his pills while thousands of other dying Americans are placed on hold.

How much of this really happened and how much is fantasy? Mr. Kushner is not making a historical documentary, or practicing journalism, any more than those behind "The Reagans" were. Whatever his script's fictions, it accurately conveys the rancid hypocrisy among powerful closeted gay Republicans in Washington as AIDS spiraled. And though "Angels" takes note of the falling of the Berlin Wall, it doesn't feel that it owes a president any sanctuary from free speech. "If he didn't have people like me to demonize," says one angry non-Republican gay character, Reagan would have ended up the "upper-right-hand square on `The Hollywood Squares.' " The Reagans are "not really a family," goes another riff. "There aren't any connections there, no love."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/arts/16RICH.html

[Q]

1. Looks like at least part of the truth about Reagan...

...will come out no matter how much the RWingers whine.

[RichM]

2. Good. I thoroughly hope "Angels" will be a highly talked-about smash hit.

[Q]

3. It could be...

...since HBO isn't in the trash bin where they shoved 'The Reagans".

[11 Bravo]

4. I can't wait.

Heads will be exploding all over freeperville.

[ScotTissue]

5. Serious drama will impact the culture war how?

Pardon me if I chuckle a little bit at the idea of serious drama or any kind of high art making a real big splash in the Red States. It will be huge in Frank Rich's living room--of that I have no doubt. A watershed event, in fact.

[Plaid Adder]

6. EXcellent!

I saw Angels in America (both parts) when it was running on Broadway. It packs a lot more wallop than some stupid made for TV movie, although for those who are not used to sympathizing with gay male characters it will of course not be as easy to digest. However, what with Queer Eye and Queer as Folk I bet this play has a much wider potential audience now than it did when it first premiered.

For those who haven't seen it, the play includes:

* A highly entertaining yet scathing portrayal of Roy Cohn, former McCarthy henchman, who contines his career as a right-wing hypocritical evildoer even as he is dying of AIDS

* A married Mormon lawyer who clerks for a right-wing Reagan appointee and is mentored by Roy Cohn, who ends up becoming one of the play's more complex but ultimately least sympathetic characters

* The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who appears from time to time to haunt Roy Cohn

* I don't know whether they'll keep these characters, but each half of the play is introduced by a monologue delivered, in the first case, by a rabbi who rants about America as "this melting pot where nothing melted," and in the second case, the last living Bolshevik, who rants about the disappearance of political commitment, yelling, "show me your new idea, and I will be there at the barricades"

* And, of course, an angel who regularly appears to the play's main character, Prior Walter, and whose lines include "Heaven is a place much like San Francisco."

I liked the first part (Millennium Approaches) a lot better than the second part (Perestroika) but at least the second half includes a great rant by Louis about the damage that the Mormon closet case (who has been his lover for the past month or so) has done to the world by clerking for his right-wing judge, who as he rightly points out is a "vegetable" who could never write his own opinions and therefore relies entirely on Mr. Mormon Closet Case to do it for him.

I don't have cable, but I hope you all who do will watch. It's a great play.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[Q]

7. Kick for the late morning...

...posters.