MATTHEW WILSON SMITH ANGELS IN AMERICA A ProgressiveApocalypse I. APOCALYPSE DESCENDING Outside of Chekhov, I can think of no playwright whose characters philosophize so much about history as Tony Kushner’s do; Kushner’s characters are forever musing upon, arguing about, engaging with history. But while in Chekhov’s plays such philos- ophizing talk is generally just that- talk, mere talk- in Kushner’s it is urgent, of the essence. Which is to say that, for Kushner, talking about history functions not as a screen behind which the real but unstated (largely private, domestic) drama takes place, but rather is the “real drama,” in surface and subtext. When Kushner’s characters won- der, as they often do, whether the world is coming to an end, whether humanity has ceased to progress, whether a new age is just around the corner, we may psychologize their questions, but we may not psychologize them away. To do so would be to reduce them to mere interiorities, and thereby strip them of the political concerns that, as Kushner writes in the preface to A Bright Room CalledDay, “are true passions for these people, not pretexts for private feelings.”l At the risk of oversimplification: in Kushner’s plays the political is the historical is the drama itsel6 we witness, in these plays, individ- uals and groups thrown into the midst of history, arguing the direction of the tide even as it pulls them under or along. There are many visions of history in Angels in America, but none is so memorable, so shocking, as the apocalyptic. Harper tells us that “the world’s coming to an end,” and warns of an imminent “Judgment Day”; the Angels refer to “the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days,” prophesy a catastrophe in which “millions” will die, and speak of “Apocalypse Descending”; Prior and Hannah look forward to the return of the waters of Bethesda fountain, “when the Millennium comes. . . . Not the year two thousand, but the Capital M Millenniuml’2 Indeed, the whole play may be said to unfold like a landscape of ruins, of ‘‘beautifid systems dying, old fixed orders flying apart” (22). Sarah