Angels in America

"I say fuck the truth, but usually the truth fucks you" said Prior Walter. The hallucinations experienced with Harper were clearly defense mechanisms to keep out the truth they so desperately wanted out of. The irony is that the truth saturated even the most bizarre hallucination. You can live in the lie but the truth will always be looking at you. I think the most brutally honest character in "Angels in America" is definitely Harper. Her "undersexed and pill-popping" lifestyle is something she doesn't deny. She does deny, however, that her husband Joe is a "homo". But she does so sparingly and only for a moment during the hallucinatory extravaganza with Prior Walter - a manifested subconscious emotional connection both so desperately seek. I think she maybe the only one denied the truth from someone else, while others are in denial of themselves. Conversely, however, we do see in her hemmed statements and accusations that she feels she should never have married Joe. So perhaps her denial has been so easy to accept because it is coupled with Joe's denial. Their happiness is fake and she thinks that should at least count for something.
The beginning of the play begins with the Rabbi saying that such great voyages no longer exist in this world, referring to the journey of the deceased Grandmother. It was such a great, original form of foreshadow. It is clear that what we are seeing instead are several journeys of self-realization, acceptance and undeniable truth. The struggles with truth are universal. "Angels in America" focuses on AIDS during 1985 and is able to delicately thread such a devastating theme of disease and hopelessness into something wholly inspirational.
Roy Cohn is, in my opinon, the most symbolic of homosexual sentiment in maybe the last 30 years of politics regarding LGBT legislation. His tirade is the most poignant and explicit in terms of how homosexuality is viewed. He says that who he sleeps with and sexual taste are merely labels, a "pecking order" in the food chain. What sticks, in his delusional world, is the clout he has. He says homosexuals don't have clout. No one will pick up the phone when a homosexual calls and no one knows them. Instead he is Roy Cohn, right hand man to Reagan and is therefore exonerated from his homosexuality. That is what the political stance of Reagan was during his administration. He ignored the AIDS epidemic, allowed it to be called the gay disease and refused to acknowledge its threat to the "normal", heterosexual sector of America. Roy was a reflection of Reagan's political stance, deeply imbedded with religion and ignorance (not that the two or synonymous).
Despite the religious overtones of angels in the title, religion has very little to do with the story itself. It's as though religion is used as a vehicle for denial. I suppose it is a little bit different in actuality as religion is sometimes the deadly blow to self-expression, but I feel like Joe uses religion as a curtain rather than a conviction. He even married Harper who hates the "Utah talk" he was spouting. Prior thinks his religion is homosexuality while Martin's Judaism was approached briefly when he was speaking to the Rabbi about leaving Prior (who was deathly sick). I think the purpose of the religions in the play were to show that cross culturally homosexuality existed. Socio-politically it existed. Even across genders it existed. The point in everything was that the truth is always relevant, always present and always better if embraced.