“Angels in America”: The Sparknotes Study Guide.
(I bought the DVD yesterday, so the play is on my mind.)
The Tin Man
“Angels in America”: The Sparknotes Study Guide.
(I bought the DVD yesterday, so the play is on my mind.)
I saw Angels in America here in L.A. — the original production before George C. Wolfe took over. (He apparently slicked it up a bit with the Angels’ flying outfits) Joe Mantello was quite teriffic in it as was Stephen Spinella. And Ron Leoibman was a great Roy Cohn.
I saw the whole thing in one day. Perfect because Part 1 was the matinee, then we all went out to dinner and came back for Part 2.
This is a very hard play to discuss with people who don’t know the history and weren’t losing loved ones to the epidemic.
But as Gore Vidal has said on more than one occasion “We live in the United States of Amnesia.”
At the time it premiered the notion that a man with “full-blown AIDS” including dementia would keep on living was a utopian conceit. It’s almost as if Kushner predicted the new treatments that are extending life for the HIV+.
But this in turn evokes the fact that somewhere over the last ten years a kind of invisible dividing line appeared. On one side would be those who would be “saved” atleast provisionally, byt the protease inhibitor “cocktail.”
On the other side, those who wouldn’t.
The dead.
I’m alive and well. 57 years-old and HIV-
(careful in spite of myself apparently.)
But almost all my thoughts are of the dead. I live with the dead.
Interesting mention of the dividing line.
I’ve often thought when seeing/reading stuff about vacine trials that when we do develop a fully working vacine how even more horrifying a dividing line shall soon exist between those already with HIV and those protected against it. Real divisions will take hold in our community.
I think that future division, along with the omnipresent saliva tests, will present a real socially-divisive dividing line to the gay community.
rob@egoz.org