Episode 39: Harper's Monologue from Angels in America

For the second time on Close Talking, Connor and Jack consider an excerpt from a play. In a wide-ranging discussion of Harper's Monologue from Tony Kushner's eight hour masterwork "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," they discuss modes of writing, lyricism, echoes within the sprawling play, and how the work draws out, smashes together, and interrogates seemingly disconnected aspects of American history.

Angels in America Oral History Long Read. Mary Louise Parker's take on Harper's Monologue.

Harper’s Monologue from Angels in America
By: Tony Kushner

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It’s been years since I was on a plane! When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we’ll have reached 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 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 is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we have left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.