Kushner's Angels in America Clip 3

Kushner's Angels in America Clip 4

Stasis versus Change

From the first scene of the play, the opposition between stasis and change is Kushner's favorite theme. In a world filled with despair, the desire to halt change—to preserve the past and ignore or suppress the future—is a natural reaction. This anti-migratory impulse is voiced by Rabbi Chemelwitz, Emily the nurse and Sister Ella Chapter, and most spectacularly by the Angels, who order Prior to make humanity stop its ceaseless motion. The Angel chooses Prior as her prophet because of the ancient, rooted history of his family and because (as Belize detects) he secretly shares their reaction. But as events make abundantly clear, that desire is literally reactionary—destructive, and at odds with the progressive values of the play. Migration, which brought Prior's family to America as well as Belize's slave ancestors and Louis's immigrant ones, and which carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah, is an inevitable and inerasable human drive. More broadly speaking, Kushner implies that our democracy and our national politics must resist this reactive impulse. Rather than seeking a haven in an idealized 1950s past, America needs to embrace even those changes that frighten some people—especially the growth of a politically active and culturally accepted gay and lesbian minority. (Source)