Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition by Tony Kushner Page A

entrance with lots of heralds, and—
    PRIOR 1: The messenger come. Prepare the way. The infinite descent, a breath in air—
    PRIOR 2: They chose us, I suspect, because of the mortal affinities. In a family as long-descended as the Walters there are bound to be a few carried off by plague.
    PRIOR 1: The spotty monster.
    PRIOR 2: Black Jack. Came from a water pump, half the city of London, can you imagine? His came from fleas. Yours, I understand, is the lamentable consequence of venery—
    PRIOR 1: Fleas on rats, but who knew that?
    PRIOR : Am I going to die?
    PRIOR 2: We aren’t allowed to discuss—
    PRIOR 1: When you do, you don’t get ancestors to help you through it. You may be surrounded by children but you die alone.
    PRIOR : I’m afraid.
    PRIOR 1 (Grim) : You should be. There aren’t even torches, and the path’s rocky, dark and steep.
    PRIOR 2: Don’t alarm him. There’s good news before there’s bad.
          We two come to strew rose petal and palm leaf before the triumphal procession. Prophet. Seer. Revelator. It’s a great honor for the family.
    PRIOR 1: He hasn’t got a family.
    PRIOR 2: I meant for the Walters, for the family in the larger sense.
    PRIOR (Singing) :
          All I want is a room somewhere,
          Far away from the cold night air—
    PRIOR 2 (Putting a hand on Prior ’ s forehead) : Calm, calm, this is no brain fever . . .
    (Prior keeps his eyes closed. The lights begin to change. Distant Glorious Music.)
    PRIOR 1 (Low chant) : Adonai, Adonai,
          Olam ha-yichud,
          Zefirot, Zazahot,
          Ha-adam, ha-gadol
          Daughter of Light,
          Daughter of Splendors,
          Fluor! Phosphor!
          Lumen! Candle!
    PRIOR 2 (Simultaneously, louder than Prior 1) : Even now,
          From the mirror-bright halls of Heaven,
          Across the cold and lifeless infinity of space,
          The Messenger comes
          Trailing orbs of light,
          Fabulous, incipient,
          Oh Prophet,
          To you!
    PRIOR 1 AND PRIOR 2: Prepare, prepare,
          The Infinite Descent,
          A breath, a feather,
          Glory to—
    (They vanish.)
    Scene 2
    The next day. Split scene: Prior in an exam room in an outpatient clinic at the hospital; he’s seated on a stool, hooked up to a pentamidine IV drip. Louis and Belize facing one another at a table in a coffee shop. Louis, responding to something Belize has said, is pursuing an idea as he always does, by thinking aloud .
    LOUIS : Why has democracy succeeded in America? Of course by succeeded I mean comparatively, not literally, not in the present, but what makes for the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up? Why does the power that was once so carefully preserved at the top of the pyramid by the original framers of the Constitution seem drawn inexorably downward and outward in spite of the best effort of the Right tostop this? I mean it’s the really hard thing about being Left in this country, the American Left can’t help but trip over all these petrified little fetishes: freedom, that’s the worst; you know, Jeane Kirkpatrick for God’s sake will go on and on about freedom and so what does that mean, the word “freedom,” when she talks about it, or human rights; you have Bush talking about human rights, and so what are these people talking about, they might as well be talking about the mating habits of Venusians, these people don’t begin to know what, ontologically, freedom is or human rights, like they see these bourgeois property-based Rights-of-Man-type rights but that’s not enfranchisement, not democracy, not what’s implicit, what’s potential within the idea, not the idea with blood in it. That’s just liberalism, the worst kind of liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance, and what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit