This is a spoiler alert for anyone who has not seen Part 1: Millennium Approaches. Don't read! But we don't want you to leave this blog empty handed. So here's something I thought was funny.
Previously on Angels in America…
In the last moments of Part 1: Millennium Approaches, Prior Walter, a gay man who has been diagnosed with AIDS, was sleeping fitfully when an Angel crashed through the ceiling of his bedroom. The Angel greeted him as a prophet, announcing “The Great Work begins.”
It wasn’t the first strange thing that had happened to Prior since his diagnosis. Two of his ancestors had visited him in the middle of the night, claiming they were heralds. A flaming book appeared to him while he was at the AIDS clinic, and he heard his perfectly ordinary Italian-American nurse suddenly begin speaking a Hebrew prayer. His cat ran away, his lover left, and the only bright spot left in his life was his old friend Belize. Belize is a nurse, and visited Prior at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he also works, promising that he will be there for Prior, no matter what.
When Prior’s health began to decline, his lover Louis couldn’t handle the pressure and left him, moving out of the apartment they had shared for four and a half years. Louis works in the Brooklyn Appellate Court as a word processor, where he met Joe Pitt, a law clerk. He and Joe have been having a low-key flirtation, and at the end of Millennium Approaches, Louis and Joe leave Central Park together, presumably to go to Louis’s apartment.
Joe Pitt is a conservative Mormon Republican lawyer who has wrestled with his sexuality for his whole life. He is dissatisfied with his job clerking for Justice Wilson, but feels compelled to stay in Brooklyn because of his mentally unstable wife, Harper. Joe admits to Harper that he has never had sexual feelings for her, and he comes out to his mother, Hannah, during a very difficult phone call to her home in Salt Lake City.
Joe’s mentor is the notoriously powerful Roy Cohn. Roy very much wants Joe to move to Washington D.C. to take a position in the Justice Department, where he can be Roy’s man on the inside, helping Roy combat a committee that wants to disbar him.
Roy is also fighting, more privately, an AIDS diagnosis. When we last see him, he and Joe have a fight that turns physical when Joe refuses to go to Washington, and Roy confesses that he engaged in unethical behavior to make sure convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg got the death penalty. After Joe leaves, Roy collapses in pain, and Ethel herself appears, telling him ”The shit’s about to hit the fan, Roy. Millennium approaches.” Ethel calls 911 for Roy, and an ambulance is dispatched to take him to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Harper Pitt is married to Joe. She is agoraphobic and stays in their Brooklyn apartment all day, taking Valium and talking to imaginary people. One of these people is Mr. Lies, a travel agent who tempts her with a vacation to Antarctica. During one Valium-induced hallucination, she and Prior meet, bewilderingly. Harper intuits that Prior is very sick, and Prior has a similar intuition that her “husband’s a homo.” After Joe comes out to her, she calls to Mr. Lies in anguish, who offers to take her away. They vanish together.
Hannah Pitt is Joe’s mother. After Joe calls her, drunk, in the middle of the night and comes out to her, Hannah immediately sells her house and flies to New York. Joe fails to meet her at the airport, so she sets out on her own, accidentally ending up in the Bronx before getting directions from a homeless woman to the Mormon Visitors’ Center.
Millennium Approaches ends in turmoil, all of its characters on the brink of some cataclysmic change. The action of Angels in America: Perestroika picks up immediately after Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.
Now, stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of…
Angels in America.
