Angels in America

SYNOPSIS

When Prior admits to his partner Louis that he has developed Aids, his partner leaves him. In hospital, it is the transvestite Belize who looks after Prior who is increasingly losing his connection with reality. Prior has visions in which he is visited by an angel who addresses him as a prophet and wishes to assign him a ‚great task‘ in which he will save the world, as God has long departed from heaven and the angels. Harper and her husband, the Mormon lawyer Joe, have become estranged. Joe has discovered his homosexuality but conceals this fact from his wife. He does however confi de in his mother who as a particularly devout Mormon cannot accept these circumstances and travels to New York to bring him back onto the right track. Joe searches for anonymous sexual contacts in Central Park and meets Louis with whom he will later share an apartment. In the meantime, Harper has taken refuge in Valium trips during which she has created the imaginary travel agent Mr Lies who transports her to distant ideal worlds; she also meets Prior during her trips. Joe works for the attorney Roy Cohn, the only historical figure in this drama. Roy has an intense hatred of gays, but sleeps with men. When he is told by his doctor that he has contracted Aids, he completely denies being gay and insists that he is suffering from cancer of the liver. His Aids-related death is accompanied by an angel of vengeance: the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg whom he caused to be executed by electric chair in 1953 on a false charge of espionage. Prior’s angelic revelations come to a climax with a meeting with the angels who wish to convince him to continue his ‚great task‘. Prior refuses: he only wishes to be blessed by the angels and gain more time. He then lays down the book of the prophets as a symbolic gesture and returns to Earth. Five years later, he, Louis, Beliza and Hannah meet up again at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park in New York.

COMMENTARY

On the search for material for a commission by the Théâtre du Châtelet, Eötvös read the two-part drama Angels in America dating from 1991/92. This monumental stage drama paints a more vivid image of the apocalyptic anxiety of a nation faced with an Aids epidemic, political and ecological threats and social upheavals towards the end of the 1980s than any other work of its time. The play’s author Tony Kusher was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work. Eötvös was fascinated at how Kusher clothed his political message in a plot in which reality and hallucination are fused in an indissoluble continuum. Mari Mezei condensed both parts of the play into an almost three hour-long libretto focusing on the individual fates of the protagonists rather than on the political aspects of the original text. Eötvös’s music integrates elements originating from jazz, rock and musicals. He creates iridescent soundscapes in combination with everyday sounds and specific quotations such as Jewish melismas in the initial funeral scene. These in turn bring forth a wide variety of linguistic forms ranging from free recitation to operatic coloratura singing by the angels.