At one point, the founding Rowen pretends to rip open the belly of his own son with a knife before the eyes of Cherokee Indians to con them into believing in the absolute impartiality of the white man's rules. Differently, Tony Kushner's seduction by the real thing is a histrionic melange of pastiche and circumstance. Since his first two plays in the trilogy, Angels in America, have been weighed down to bedrock under mountains of commentary, everyone knows that his villain, Roy Cohn, struts around glorying in his hunting and executing of the communist Ethel Rosenberg. So much for history as the cement of realism. The connection Kushner wants between communism and homosexuality, or McCarthyite bigotry and homophobia, eludes his grandiose script.
Film does it better.
The debasement of realism into literalism matters most in the plays' absence of language, that old tool of poetry. There's hokey dialect in The Kentucky Cycle spoken aloud by essentially analphabetic people. No line in either play echoes, inspires, moves, jolts, or lifts one to wonder and delight. Once upon a time, dialogue conveyed more than talk, but language long ago stopped resonating. Now it's noise in a system of communication based on girlish shrieks, grunts, or abuse signifying nothing, even when marvelously delivered by professionals like Stacy Keach.