Formal #5: Imaginary Friends and Travel Agents

Big Bird has Snuffleupagus. D.W. has Naydeen (kids show Arthur). Harper has Mr. Lies. In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, we meet Harper, a sweet, innocent, Valium-addicted agoraphobic Mormon. She is married to Joe, a closet homosexual, also Mormon. She knows this and yet has not been able to face the reality. The struggle within their marriage lies not in Harper’s mental illness, and not in their complicated Mormonism, but in Joe’s sexuality.

Mr. Lies, her imaginary friend, is a travel agent. According to the description of his character, he resembles a jazz musician; African-American, suave, cool, deep resounding voice. He wears a large lapel badge emblazoned with “IOTA” (The International Order of Travel Agents). He is, in fact, the ultimate travel agent. Harper needs escape, frequently. She spends her days at home, popping pills, obsessing about knife-wielding men under her bed and the ever-looming ozone layer. All of her day-to-day problems seem to be symbolic of a much larger reality that she is unable to wrap her head around. Mr. Lies serves as her escape hatch.

Act 2, Scene 9 is a climax in the play. Harper and Joe and Louis and Prior are hashing out their respective relationships in split scenes. Joe is on the path to accepting his homosexuality and must convey this to Harper, while convincing himself further in the process. He is faced with the passionate wanting of another man. Harper is in denial, and yet she is not. The reader is never really sure how much she has accepted and how much she is simply putting off to avoid change. What she wants and what she knows blend together to create a chaotic mindset. During this hash session, the realization surfaces that Joe is the man under the bed with the knives. Joe is her biggest fear. Harper needs to escape, immediately. She cries out in desperation to Mr. Lies who appears ready to whisk her away, far away. In the film, Mr. Lies appears from out of the refrigerator in a frozen-over kitchen, complete with parka and ice pick. Harper follows him into the fridge, away from her life.

Mr. Lies has taken her to Antarctica. Harper wants to build a dream city, plant trees, have a relationship with an Eskimo, have a baby. Mr. Lies explains that there are no trees in Antarctica. No Eskimos either. And we all know that Harper was faking her pregnancy. “This is a retreat,” says Mr. Lies, “a vacuum. Its virtue is that it lacks everything; deep freeze for feelings. You can be numb and safe here, that’s what you came for. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” (p102) And then an Eskimo walks towards her. And then she feels the baby kick. Ah, to be delusional with an imaginary friend who can whisk us far away from life's difficulties at a moment’s notice. Or, at the very least, have a really good travel agent. Does it get better than that?

Formal #4: Gay in the Deep South

In the fourth grade, young Dorothy Allison had a class project to do. She was to gather information to form a Family Tree. This was a completely foreign concept to the family elders, all raised in the Deep South of South Carolina. She begins by asking her mother and grandmother if she can see the family Bible, only to be told that they don’t own one. “We don’t have a family Bible?” young Dorothy asks. “Child,” her grandmother replies, “Some days we don’t even have a family!” The humor that Allison is able to convey to the reader while describing her horrid upbringing is refreshing and amazing. Painful and mean, but never bitter. It is amazing to read what the young Allison endured and to see the final product in her 40’s emerge assured and confident of who she is and where she is going. Dorothy Allison is full of piss and vinegar. She’s got a lot to say and she’s certainly not afraid to say it. This is the attitude that literally jumps off the pages of her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.
Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admits, she would never have begun to publish her stories if she hadn't gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again. (http://www.dorothyallison.net/) The caption under her photograph on her website says: “Understand me. What I am here for is to tell you stories you may not want to hear. What I am here for is to rescue my dead. And to scare the hell out of you now and then. I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.” Allison is a storyteller, as is Tony Kushner.
It is interesting to note that Two Things I Know For Sure and Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, both deal with the prominent topic of homosexuality. Allison gives us the details of some of her early relationships in which she explores her sexuality in the context of her upbringing, education and the time in which she is discovering herself (1970’s). Free love abounds and free expression of the sexual self is widespread and somewhat accepted in the looser 70’s. Angels, however, deals with the onslaught of HIV/AIDS in the homosexual community in the early 1980’s and the stigma that this creates in society. In the early years of the epidemic, ignorance and fear resulted in widespread discrimination against AIDS patients, in the early days mostly gay males, fueled by the sensationalistic manner in which the media reported it. Kushner, himself a gay Jew who grew up in the Deep South, chose to tell his story in the form of a play, a 'Gay Fantasia on National Themes', where Allison chose to tell her story in memoir form.
The phrase “a gay Jew who grew up in the Deep South” makes me wish Kushner would write a memoir.