Angels in America/Themes

Of course there are many themes to be found in *Angels in America*, but original director Jack Tamburri has expressed two primary themes as a chosen focus for this production.

### Resilience

> I’d say one theme I’m thinking about a lot is resilience. The ability to transform in the face of disaster, to become something new in order to survive, is something that connects the characters (and Roy’s specific refusal to change is what marks him for a disastrous end).
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> — Jack Tamburri

### The Political is Personal

> Another theme that means a lot to me right now is: the political is personal. Politics gets treated like an abstract contest, or philosophical debate, but political events have powerful impacts on real people’s lives. And one of the things this play proposes is, could the opposite be true? Could living bravely and making hard personal decisions that favor justice actually have widespread political impacts?
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> — Jack Tamburri

A popular phrase in many different movements, "the personal is political" is a phrase that originated in an essay by feminist activist Carol Hanisch. The text is available on her website.

The title of Act 3 feels particularly important here: **Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning**" is a reference to *The Principle of Hope*, a 1954 book by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The full text is available here. Bloch writes about consciousness as the ability to see a better world beyond our current one, at least in my simplified understanding. His book is among other things about teaching people how to dream of better worlds than the current status quo. In his introduction, Bloch writes:

> A central task in this part is the discovery and unmistakable notation of the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’. That is: a relatively still Unconscious disposed towards its other side, forwards rather than backwards. Towards the side of something new that is dawning up, that has never been conscious before, not, for example, something forgotten, something rememberable that has been, something that has sunk into the subconscious in repressed or archaic fashion.
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#### Where Do They Meet?

The most obvious intersection of the personal and political in the play is **Roy Cohn**. Cohn treats the two as almost entirely disconnected. His private life is kept secret to protect his public life. His public life is actively harmful and damaging to many who share his private life. In a very literal sense, this contradiction is destroying him inside on a cellular level. He believes he is unlike other gay men through his proximity to power but ultimately he cannot escape the fate of others denied help by the Reagan administration. The antithesis to Roy is **Ethel Rosenberg**, who followed her political convictions to the grave.

A lot of this theme is also explored through **Louis**, a man overflowing with strong political and philosophical opinions but lacking in convictions. Act 3 Scene 2 sees him go on multiple esoteric rants to Belize about everything wrong with the world. He talks like someone who believes he could fix everything globally, but in reality he abandons his responsibility with even the smallest units of community: being good to his friends and his lover when it gets difficult. We all know people like this, who endlessly castigate others for their perceived lack of morals while treating the real people in their personal life like garbage. Louis and Belize quote from a fictional novel, "**Real love isn't ambivalent**." Louis is grappling with an explosion of his world-view, that he views himself as one of the good guys for his abstract ideas and opinions but this is meaningless without the will to translate it into direct action. How can you think of yourself as a good person if you cannot even be good to the people in your life? How can you believe you are contributing to positive change in the world if you cannot manage it on the smallest level, individual kindness?