Angels in America

“Accept as rightfully yours the happiness that comes your way.”

“I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.

It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and...

Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning.”

"Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be."

Angels in America is a work that has had so much written about it, I’m almost sure that what I write here has already been written, elsewhere, and better. There is much to say: about sexuality, politics, race, class, religion, America, everything.

I want to write, today, about Joe. Because Joe is the key to the play, he’s the cautionary tale, he is, I’d argue, the true villain. It’s easy to hate Roy Cohn, who by the time we meet him has long since made every bargain and excised every piece of humanity he once had. Roy, when we meet him, is a husk whose soul is every bit as used and diseased as his body. Roy learns (or doesn’t, maybe we just learn for him) that his social position does not transcend the material reality of his body, but is determined by it. Joe hasn’t had to learn this yet.

Joe doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He does not want to live in dissipation. He is not a sadist, really. He only wants to be happy. He wants to be free. He wants to grasp the happiness that comes his way, and to not let go of it. He wants to do his job well, receive praise and success for it, and earn his way to a good life. He wants to have sex with someone who excites him. He wants to be thought of as a good man. Who doesn’t want all of that?

We all want all of that. We want what Kushner calls the “heartless terror” of true freedom, the freedom from any obligation. It’s a human desire, but what Joe doesn’t realize is that it is a child’s desire. To love and be loved means to have obligations. To invite someone into your life means to incur a debt to them. To participate in society means to accept your obligation to society. And that means, sometimes, being unhappy.

Joe has bought fully into the American dream. He believes that he can be happy, with no obligations, and that he deserves this, and that if he doesn’t have this happiness it’s because he has been somehow cheated. It is not wrong to leave a relationship with a very sick or vulnerable person if doing so will make you happy. It is not wrong to write legal decisions justifying the monstrous treatment of the vulnerable, if doing so will advance your career. It is not wrong to help someone like Roy Cohn if doing so will help you professionally. The only obligation Joe feels to anyone is to himself. If he stays with Harper, it is because he feels he is better off married. If he returns to her it is because he has no one else to go to. He doesn’t want to hurt her, but he doesn’t think about her when he’s happy with Louis.

Joe is the villain, and his villainy is our villainy. This is a play about obligations - our obligations to each other. To be a human is to be in a society, and to be part of a society means having a duty to others, which may be accepted or not. Joe, like Roy Cohn, never learns this. His end, when it comes, years down the line, will probably be just like Roy’s: bitter, sick, mean, and alone.