Love and Anger by Peter F Cohen

Author:Peter F Cohen [Cohen, Peter F]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781560239307
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1998-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO: LOVE AND POLITICS

Chapter 3

Strange Bedfellows: Writing Love and Politics in Angels in America and The Normal Heart

Don’t come from anger, come from love.1

—Tim in Afterlife

One of the results of the recent attempt among theater scholars to distinguish between “first” and “second generation” AIDS plays has been that important similarities between texts relegated to opposing ends of this great divide have been rendered increasingly invisible.2 Two of the most celebrated AIDS plays written in the United States—Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993) and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985)—have rarely been viewed in terms of what they have in common, in large part because of the years that separated their writing.3 Nonetheless, both plays contain a remarkable number of similarities, ones which can be traced to the dual commitments of their respective authors: a personal commitment to political struggle, especially in relation to AIDS (both writers were AIDS activists), and an artistic commitment to reaching out to as wide and mainstream an audience as possible.4 Kramer and Kushner address this first commitment through an explicit treatment of AIDS politics in their plays: both Angels in America and The Normal Heart raise audience consciousness as to the complicity of government players in the spread of the epidemic, as well as to the political struggles that will be necessary if the epidemic is to end. Political struggle is not a particularly popular topic, however, and what has simultaneously allowed these plays to reach broad audiences is their organization around one or more love stories, a dominant theatrical convention that can render a story about homosexuals and AIDS palatable—even recognizable—to mainstream audiences.

These two plot lines—love and politics—make strange bedfellows, however.5 Whereas the love story in literature focuses on private relations, politics is generally about public struggle. Whereas a focus on love tends to privilege the individual and the couple, a focus on politics—and especially AIDS politics—generally privileges collective forms of action.6 Most important, in imaginative literature about AIDS at least, love and politics possess an opposing relation to the question of narrative closure. On the one hand, the love plot requires narrative closure: once the “lack” that drives the plot has been satisfied through the union of the lovers, complications are resolved, “happily ever after” is achieved, and the need for further narrative is over.7 Closure is important even in the case of a tragic love story—even if the love relationship ends unhappily, complications are resolved by the end of the text. In other words, once a protagonist has either succeeded or failed in finding love, a drama can end, for there is nothing else about this character’s story that the audience need know.

A plot having to do with political struggle around AIDS, on the other hand, must necessarily eschew narrative closure. Although the love plot in a drama might be resolvable (either tragically or comically) within the time frame the play affords, unless the play contains scenes that occur in the future, the struggle against AIDS cannot be. AIDS—and the fight

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