ISSUES: MILLENIUM APPROACHES

Gary Williams, University of Idaho

***Note the epigraph, from Stanley Kunitz's poem "The Testing-Tree." Can you explain its connection to the play's action?

Why does the play begin with the rabbi's speech about eastern European immigrants? In particular, what is meant by "every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. . . . In you that journey is" (10-11)?

What attitude does Roy express toward Joe's Mormonism ("Delectable. Absolutely. Only in America," p. 15)?

***Harper refers to "beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart" (16). What systems in particular? This is the moment of the play, as Millenium approaches. What's the significance of the millenium?

Louis and Prior are introduced in Scene Four. What characteristics does each exhibit? (References to Sheba are to a popular play by William Inge and film from 1952, Come Back Little Sheba, starring Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster.  Plot summary.)

What does Joe like about Reagan's policies (26)? How is his enthusiasm related to other aspects of his personality?

In Act 1, scene 7, why do Prior and Harper appear in one another's dreams? What do they have in common?

Harper says, p. 32, "So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth." Does the play's action bear out the truth of what she says?

Prior receives the first sign of his "chosen" status on 34-35. Is his reaction what you'd expect?

***How do you feel about Joe's response to Harper's questions in Act 1, scene 8--particularly about his feeling that he's "a very good man who has worked very hard to become good" (40)? Connect this with his memory, p. 49, of reading the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. What view does the play appear to take on the question of how someone is or isn't homosexual?

How does the Louis-Prior conversation connect with the Joe-Harper conversation in Scene Eight?

What is Roy's point, p. 45, about names and the pecking order? He says, top 46, that this is not "sophistry," not "hypocrisy," but "reality." Do you agree?

Roy's response to Joe's ambivalence about the Washington job is: "You do what you need to do, Joe. What you need. You. Let her life go where it wants to go. You'll both be better for that" (54). How do you feel about this advice? What stance does the play seem to take on this attitude?

Roy's attitude toward his "fathers," p. 56: what's your reaction?

***More Roy-attitude, p. 58: "Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. . . . Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone. . . . Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way." This position resembles the so-called "pioneer spirit" that drove the exploration and settling of the American continent. What's your reaction?

Prior, like Harper, begins to hear voices, the foreshadowings of the angel (60). He tells Belize that these make him "hard." Why does Kushner connect spiritual and sexual sensations?

Louis, p. 71, begins to entertain some of the sentiments Roy has voiced earlier (54): "No connections. No responsibilities. All of us . . . falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to our selves and . . . what we owe to love." And on the following page, too, in the words of the national anthem: "Land of the free. Home of the brave. Call me irresponsible."

***Joe, too, pp. 72-73: "To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning." This thought echoes Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's "What Is An American": "He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced. . . . The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles . . . "

***This train of thought leads Louis to say, p. 73, "Sometimes, even if it scares you to death, you have to be willing to break the law"--another time-honored American principle, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to Martin Luther King, Jr. (Actually, the principle is much older than that, going back in Western culture at least to Antigone.) How are we meant to respond to this idea in the play? Do you think it's sometimes necessary to break the civil compact? What justifies law-breaking?

Note that Louis seems to embrace this principle with a degree of self-loathing, when he says (74), "Maybe we are free. To do whatever. Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind."

Joe's mother Hannah: what are her major character traits in her first couple of appearances (74-76 and 81-83)? Is she admirable? A sympathetic character? Has she faults?

At Act 3's beginning, two earlier members of Prior's family appear as heralds of the angel. They seem to have been picked because, like the current Prior, they were victims of incomprehensible disease. What other purposes, if any, do they serve?

Louis, p. 92, says about current-day America: "there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political." How accurate an analysis is this, in your opinion? Does the play suggest otherwise?

What is Belize's attitude toward Louis during their argument, Act 3, scene 2?

The "great book" Prior sees on p. 99 is an image of the Apocalypse, described in the biblical Book of Revelation--yet another sign of his own fast-approaching revelation.

Belize, p. 100, describes "the hard law of love," an alternative to the ethic of freedom dear to Roy, Joe, and increasingly Louis. And he foresees the descent of "softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace"--four small but important words.

Why does Harper end up in an Antarctica-fantasy (Act 3, scene 3)?

Roy describes his interaction with Ethel Rosenberg, pp. 108-09--a woman he helped convict of treason for giving U.S. atomic secrets to the Russians. (The Rosenbergs' innocence or guilt is still a matter of debate; many feel they were framed because the government needed to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the "red menace" of Communism.) Ethel and her husband Julius provided an occasion for Roy, as a young attorney working for Joe McCarthy, to learn the lesson of making the law instead of being subject to it (see his speech, 108). "You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective?"

Ethel, too, is a forerunner of the angel when she says to Roy, "History is about to crack wide open" (112). Consider this prophecy in light of Perestroika.

The angel arrives just as Joe and Louis take the step toward which they've been moving since their meeting. Why does Kushner connect these two events?