Angels in America

I saw Angels in America at the video store and since I had a vague recollection of having heard postitive things about it, I decided to get it. I have just finished watching it and I think it is the best thing I have seen this year. It is epic and operatic and intimate and witty and heart-breaking and inspiring and a million things more. Jeffrey Wright is fabulous and Mary Louise Parker is quietly brilliant. And because you might not realize it otherwise, the old rabbi at the beginning, that is Meryl Streep.

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It’s been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we’ll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so. – Harper Pitt, Angels in America by Tony Kushner