Angelic Declaration of Independence?

Two nights, three hours each, watching the HBO version of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.  This is my second viewing and this time I also read the script for the stage version as well as some scholarly articles.

I watched with students who were born about the time the play was first staged.  For them, there is no pre-AIDs experience, just as there is no pre-9/11 America, as one of them pointed out to me a year ago.  Watching with them intensified my awareness of the passage of time, not so much in relation to the play's concerns about time, history, change, and stasis, but more in relation to how one's location and perspective affects one's identification of what the play is about.  Of course it is a play 'about' AIDS; of course it is a play that portrays a moment in American history; but from this chronological distance, the under laying themes seem to come to the surface and the events of the late 1980s become the vehicle for exploring enduring concerns.

All of that was to prepare to comment on Prior's final speech.  Last night that speech seemed to echo the Declaration of Independence.

"This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away.  We won't die secret deaths anymore.  The world only spins forward.  We will be citizens.  The time has come. . . . The Great Work Begins."


From this distance the disease can not be reduced to AIDS, although that is the actual referent, and many more people are included in the "we" than the gay men afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s.   Post 9/11, for example, the disease might be construed as xenophobia, fear and hatred, an infection that spreads and threatens our ideals and our life together.  Thus the declaration, "We will be citizens," rings a note rather like the Declaration of Independence, a commitment to taking responsibility for the work of becoming what we prize.