EDITH KURZWEIL
341
A
Visit
to the Theater
In their time, the shock value of the premiere of
Alban Berg's
Lulu
was to prostitution, and Jack Gelber's
The Connection
was to psychedelic experience, what the first of two parts of Robert
Kushner's
Angels in America
has been to AIDS. But it is difficult to com–
pare the three works on a number of other dimensions: Berg's new music
and Gelber's realism were the essential shockers for the bourgeoisie;
prostitution and drugs never became a cause, and as a rule had been kept
more or less in the closet, while they now are familiar issues to all
members of society. In fact, Berg focused on prostitution rather than
syphilis, Gelber on addiction rather than its consequences, whereas
Kushner, whose bourgeois audience is beyond shocking about homosex–
uality as such, has zeroed in on the consequences, that is on AIDS, for
shock value. And while in Berg's time, though already less so in Gelber's,
audiences did not yet expect the messages to be so explicitly spelled out,
Kushner, wishing to reach a large audience (on a limited budget), felt he
had to make his pitch more directly. To that end, he wrote a most amus–
ing, though occasionally offensive, script about today's plague - a parallel
he brings in, for instance, by having the dying man's ancestor appear in
his
dreams, who informs him of his own end due to "fornication" rather
than "sodomy." Of course, I'm not talking here about the quality of the
play, or how well it works, but only about its cultural location.
To make fun while a man is dying of AIDS at center stage, and who
is
not pontificating or whining but emoting and hallucinating while on a
hospital bed and receiving transfusions and drugs, and facing death as
"Everyman" might face it everywhere, is quite a theatrical accomplish–
ment. To do so while also managing to instruct a straight public about the
dilemmas encountered by the different "types" of homosexuals, their
constant or changing tastes in love, their hates and prejudices - which
mayor may not be rooted in their sexuality per se, but in their early
habits, and their humanity - is an extraordinary feat.
On the night after the opening, about seventy-five percent of the
audience was gay. Clearly, this fact in itself must have accounted for the
frequent and resounding applause, for the ebullient laughter at in-jokes, at
the absurdities and
double entendres
that inevitably accompany the meetings
among declared and in-the-closet gays, their assumed postures toward
each other, to straights, and to themselves. That the play itself vindicates
the lifestyle, and that no mainstream critic will dare give a bad review for
fear of appearing homophobic, assures its commercial success. However,
even though the play is imbued with a leftist sensibility, and at times
makes sure to bring this home most of all via the fictionalization of
Senator McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn, who has a direct line to the
