The Call to Change by Laura T

    

  Nothing last forever. Our lives and the world that we live in are constantly changing; we never stay the same -- and neither does the world we live in. No matter how much society will not try to prevent change, it cannot be stopped. This idea of change and how it affects people is one of the prominent themes in Tony Kushner’s Angels In America. Through this play, Kushner portrays change as being inevitable. Instead of living in an ideal past, society needs to adapt to the ever-changing present.
    At the end of Millennium Approaches, we meet the Angel who believes that change is destructive and should be avoided at all cost. In order to spread this message, the Angel calls upon Prior to help prevent humanity from migration, in which the Angel calls this, “The Great Work.” In the eyes of the Angel, change has brought “suffering to humanity” and wants humans to stop moving around the world (Vox). Furthermore, the Angel blames migratory and progress for creating chaos in Heaven that prompted God to leave. In Act 2 of Perestroika, the Angel screams “YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM [God] AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING” (Kushner, 172). In hopes of bringing God back, the Angel chooses Prior as the prophet to deliver this message. However, Prior is hesitant with this task and states, “we can’t just stop. We’re not rocks. Progress, migration, motion is … modernity” (Kushner, 275). By the end of Act 5, Scene 5 of Perestroika, Prior successfully refuses to accept this role during his trip to Heaven.  
   At first, the Angel’s message was shared and exemplify by characters such as Prior himself and Harper; they believe that staying in a familiar place provides safety and happiness. For example, Prior “wanted the world to stop changing, to go back to the time before he had AIDS” (Vox). However, towards the end of the play, we see Harper and Prior discover that stasis has caused them to feel miserable and trapped. At the end of Act 3, Scene 3 of Perestroika, Harper and the Mormon mother shared an unforgettable dialogue in which Harper asks, “in your experience of the world. How do people change?” The Mormon mother responds with, “God splits the skin a jagged thumbnail from the throat to the belly...he grabs hold of your bloody tubes…he pulls and pulls till all of your innards are yanked out in pain! And he stuffs them back, dirty…It’s up to you to do the stitching” (Kushner, 200). Although change can be intense and at times -- painful -- it cannot be avoided. We must learn to endure it, learn to rearranged, and learn to restitched ourselves. By the end of Perestroika, Prior and Harper transformed tremendously as Harper was on her way to San Francisco and Prior was able to come to terms with his illness.
  This idea of stasis and not adapting to change has caused thousands of gay men to lose their lives due to the lack of action by the Reagan administration during the AIDS epidemic. One of the functions that Angels In America served is “politically, it stood for a reactionary culture that did not want to accept gay people, that wanted them to die of a horrific plague” (Vox). When Angels In America opened, the AIDS epidemic had “killed more than 100,000 Americans, mostly gay men” (The Washington Post). As the audience of the play, Kushner calls on us to remember that hope is possible and that we must keep fighting for change. Angels in America “remains a timely meditation on change: how it happens personally, publicly, and politically, it’s obstacles, its costs, and rewards” (Popmatters). Even-though Prior was called to prevent humanity from progressing, his resistant towards this task is the lesson that the audience should take away from this play.
  Moreover, through Angels In America, Kushner reminds us that our democracy and our politics must resist reactive impulses and embrace the changes that frighten some people. At the end of the day, migration, progress, and change are all apart of what makes us human. We must stop idealizing a 1950s past,  and strive to grow politically and culturally. As the play ends, it is rather symbolic and powerful that Prior gets the last and final word, “we won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come” (Kushner, 290). Angels In America is a “reminder that change for the better is possible and that hope, can be a powerful political force” (The Washington Post). As Bob Dylan once said “times are changing” and we must learn to roll with the punches because the truth of the matter is -- change is inevitable and we must embrace it.