So instead, she slips into the darkness, both literally and metaphorically. For Harper, as was famously the case with Blanche, the truth is too difficult to face.
Although Joe does not end his own life (reflecting, I think, some social change in America over the last forty years - the gay man musn’t necessarily be punished), Harper’s accusations do effectively end their admittedly superficial marriage.
“It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.” I can practically hear the strains of music drifting through Blanche’s mind, stopped suddenly by a gunshot. Her words are biting, laced with religious condemnation. Near the end of Millennium Approaches‘ first act, Harper finally confronts Joe about his sexuality. And also like Blanche and her desire for “magic,” Harper prefers “pretend-happy” to the ugly truth. Like Blanche, Harper has genuinely fallen in love with a man whose homosexuality, admitted or not, has ruined both their relationship and her sanity. In Harper, for instance, Kushner paints for us a portrait of what Blanche DuBois may have looked like while she still struggled for life at Belle Reeve. That his play so often references A Streetcar Named Desire specifically is of a bit more interest. Kushner, a gay playwright whose work addresses issues of family, love, acceptance, and destruction, is obviously indebted to his predecessor. That Millennium Approaches references Tennessee Williams should not be a surprise. “I took the bus that I was told to take and I got off - well it was the very last stop, so I had to get off.” - Hannah In this first part of Angels in America, Tony Kushner offers a modern deconstruction of the American family drama, along with political/social commentary (and humor!), united perfectly in a crosshatch of formal realism and fantasy. I refuse to open it until I finish this journal. I’m tempted to revise it or pull it down altogether, but I’ve decided to keep it up here as an artifact of sorts.Ī copy of Perestroika is sitting within my reach. Note: These are my initial thoughts on Millennium Approaches, written as a journal assignment in the fall of 1998.
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