It's OK if the Wires Show
On tuning in to Angels and thoroughly amazing magic
Angels in America by Tony Kushner is one of those plays that I read in college, while I was studying Theatre Performance at SUNY Geneseo, and then promptly forgot about it. Or, at least it’s one of those plays that think I read it. Perhaps it was actually one of those plays that I was supposed to have read.
Twenty years later, I find myself teaching first year students at Emerson College in the Department of Performing Arts, and when I got hired for the job, I look at the syllabus, and staring me in the face, in Times New Roman is Tony Kushner’s epic play. We meet again (or, er, for the first time?).
Coming in at a performance time of around six epic hours, the play is a giant in the American theatre. And for good reason. Written and premiering while the AIDS crisis ripped through the United States, at a time when the gay community endured so many horrific losses, and served as a scapegoat for the epidemic, Angels is still produced today. Tony Kushner has created something that will live on, always, in the minds and hearts of many of us who love and make theatre. And these days, those who love television; HBO produced a mini-series version of Angels in America several years back that you might enjoy (Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, two of my favorites, both make appearances).
One exercise I do with students every time I teach the play is to break them into small groups and design the end of Part I of Angels, a famous scene where the Angel literally crashes through Prior’s ceiling, bearing a message from Heaven for the reluctant prophet. We begin this activity by talking through common perceptions of angels: what they look like, what they wear, how we perceive their arrival, etc. After encouraging students to name their stereotypes and perceptions of angels, I send them off in groups to create their own vision for the Angel’s arrival in the play.
What do the lights look like? The set? What sounds do we hear? They can design the scene any way they like. I do this exercise every semester, and every time, it’s universally beloved by the students. I can barely pull them away from their scheming when it’s time to regroup as a class. The only thing they love more than creating their vision for this pivotal moment in the play is getting to share it aloud with the entire class. It’s earnestness and enthusiasm at its best.
I’m never surprised when the designs are shared with gusto, and I’ve rarely heard the same vision shared twice in the same class. During one such sharing session, I let one last student, whose hand was eagerly raised high, share their group’s vision with us all. They explained the lights they chose, the staging, the set, and then they began describing the costume.
“…so the Angel has these HUGE white wings, BIG feathery wings, and once she comes down from the ceiling, everything catches on fire!”
This had taken a turn I wasn’t expecting. I went for the ride. The student continued.
“…and these HUGE, beautiful white wings are now burned away, and afterwards, all you can see are the wire outlines of the wings. It’s not pretty anymore. The wires are all that’s left.”
I blinked, stunned. Sometimes someone says something that smacks you square in the soul, and oftentimes without having any idea that what they shared will stick with you for the rest of your life.
“The wires are all that’s left.” I repeated and smile, shaking my head. Something sparks in my brain.
“Hold on - I want to find something in the script.” I page through the Playwright’s Notes, and running my fingers over the text on the page, finally find what I seek. “I want to read you something that Tony Kushner wrote about how he wishes the play to be staged,” I say.
“The moments of magic – the appearance and disappearance of Mr. Lies and the ghosts, the Book hallucination, and the ending – are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion….” I pause here, partially for dramatic effect (what else would you expect from a theatre teacher?) and partially because I feel like this moment itself is magical somehow. I look up from the page and can’t help but smiling, my voice hushed, as if I have entered a church, “…which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.”
You could hear a pin drop in that room. It’s as if we are all afraid to breath, to break the moment. The magic.
The student who had, just moments before, said that they wanted the flames to burn away the white wings, leaving only the wires showing, looked at me as if I had just done magic myself.
“WHOA. I swear I didn’t know that he wrote that in the stage directions! We came up with that idea on our own.”
Unlike Tony Kushner, my stage directions for myself are to almost never let the wires show. When it comes to my life, I want a tight show, one that reveals almost none of the sweat, the terror, the sense of absolute groundlessness that has been taking up residence in my body, mind, and heart as of late.
I crave applause at the conclusion. I desperately need the audience to wander away from the theatre absolutely astounded at the magic they just witnessed, completely stunned (and stumped) as to how I actually pulled it off. The more I can ensure that the mechanisms of the magic are well hidden, the more I am sure I am safe - from judgement, from suffering, from being overtaken by someone else whose magic might just illuminate something more majestic than mine ever could and put me out of business.
In my mind, if people get a glimpse behind the curtain, they will spy the sore spot, sure to be disappointed. Having seen the whole thing burned away, they will walk away, certain that I falsely call myself a magician.
I need to keep the magic going. My life depends on it. Or so I have always believed.
But what if, as Tony Kushner suggests, the magic is in the wires revealing themselves?
What if the wires can show and we can be experienced as “thoroughly amazing” nonetheless?
What could we set on fire? What could we consent to let be burned away?
What if we could rely on what was left after the flames cool, and what if what was left was more than enough?
Angels continues to make moments of magic for me.
One Thursday afternoon this past March, when I was stumbling my way through an incredibly personal and painful fog of grief, I walked into my classroom. My students, who had no notion of how deep sadness ran through the canyons of my heart, were their usual selves as they arrived: laughing over inside jokes, gossiping about the latest cast list that had been announced for the next production, and generally full of good cheer, having just come back from spring break.
Standing in front of their fresh, innocent faces, unaware of how need of mending I was, I did my best to stitch myself together for their sake, and brought out my copy of Angels in America. I was going to do what I could to get through the discussion questions I had chosen for them in advance. In the brief stretches of time when they worked in small groups, in between large class discussions, I gasped for air - metaphorically, at least. Navigating these waves of grief felt akin to keeping a ship with a gash in its side afloat, and in stormy seas, no less. I was being pummeled, emotionally. It was all I could do to make it to the next moment without caving in.
Towards the end of the class, I brought the class back together for a final discussion on Angels. The last question I had asked them to put together in their groups was around the nature of love, specifically how it shows itself in the play between Prior and his ex-partner Louis.
“What does it mean to love someone?”
If you’ve never asked a group of 18 college aged students this question, I highly recommend it. The discussion went from sleepy to spirited, with students speaking over one another, eager to define love for themselves.
One of the quieter students in my class raised her hand. I called on her, and repeated the question. “What is love?”
“I mean….” She paused, her brow furrowing. Then she spoke almost nonchalantly. “Love - love is what makes life worth living.”
I felt tears prickle my eyes and let them be there. I swallowed and nodded. Here they were, the wires, showing themselves. My wings withered, the prettiness - the pretense- of them caught, burned away by this truth tossed out on a Thursday afternoon in March. Underneath all the costumes I had put on, all that was left: real, raw, smoldering crimson in the way only truth can.
What more could I add to what she said? I swallowed again, nodding. I let the tears shine in my eyes. “Yeah. Yeah.”
Walking through Boston Common twenty minutes later to catch the train at Boylston, I kept repeating her words over and over to myself, like a prayer.
“Love is what makes life worth living.”
As another student said about Angels, “It’s not a play about hope. It feels hopeless at the end. But - well, actually…maybe that’s what makes it hopeful, you know? When you decide to keep going in the face of little or no hope - that’s kind of hopeful, I guess. Yeah.”
Yeah. it is.
Friends, I am wishing you all the next small steps in the world, in the face of what may feel so hopeless.
May you let the wires of your heart show. May they act as a radio that picks up on the staticky pain you feel, ushering it from your lips and transmuting it into electricity, sending it across the airwaves for safe passage, where it might eventually end up speaking to someone else’s heart and powering the next small step they take. In this way, we walk forward together.
As it all unfolds, I will be right here waiting for your broadcast, my own wires showing, copper and cobbled together, snarled but sturdy, all at once sending out, seeking and soaking in the currents of love that makes life worth living.