The American Apocalypse
...unapologetically weaves a through-line of stark apocalyptic imagery into its eighties Reaganite tapestry of failed ideological narratives and corrupt American realpolitik. There are cainite markings, divine plagues, holes in the ozone-layer, a demonic Roy Cohn; lest we forget the descending angel and naught-prophetic Prior, for whom the impending Armageddon is strictly personal. The forbearer of all this doom and gloom is, of course, the angel who, in all her clamor and scripted biblical wish-wash, too stands terrified before an end - in a dreary, godless San Francisco rife with dour spirits and tacky nostalgia - but an end nonetheless. God has ‘wandered off’ and left his progeny – angels and humans alike – in the balance. With all the fire and brimstone a famished nineteen eighties heaven can muster the instrumental angel descends, in the opening of Perestroika, to deliver its message: “Forsake the Open Road: Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow: If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress: Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic.” (178)
One of the main dialectics of Kushner’s play is that opposing progress and its thematic antithesis, apocalypse, but it’s not until the first act of Perestroika this dichotomy transcends Louis’ scatterbrained political wrangling about progressivism in the Reagan era, and is imbued with literal eschatological meaning at the appearance of the angel. The end of times is not figurative nor symbolic, but in the spirit of American millennialism a very literal purge of the perceived ‘perverted’ and ‘subversive’ elements that so thoroughly populate Kushner’s Angels. The interrogation of progress, the catalyst of impending doom, roughly takes up four of the play’s five Acts scouting the heavens for collapse, but the fifth and the epilogue relapses into a hurried defense of progress, in spite of the...
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