Plague, abandonment and Roy Cohn in Angels in America
You Are Good
Alex Steed
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2020
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Angels in America is about plague in the Reagan 80s but could it be possible that there are some daddy issues to dissect in a work about a people abandoned by God? Join Sarah, Alex and Emma as they talk Angels, Roy Cohn and Cohn protege young Donald Trump.
We watched the Mike Nichols adaptation of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play about AIDS and homosexuality in the 1980s. Big, big dad themes.
It follows the lives of two couples, one gay and one straight-ish.
Louis and Prior are our gay couple, and Louis leaves Prior after he is diagnosed with AIDS. And it follows the lives of Joe and Harper Pitt, and Joe’s mom Hannah. They are Mormons having relocated to New York for Joe’s career, and Joe, it turns out, is closeted. Joe works at the law office of Roy Cohn, the McCarthyist lawyer and power broker—also closeted—and we see Cohn struggle through his diagnosis and reconciling his own mortality.
Our conversation focuses primarily on Louis, who leaves Prior in the face of his diagnosis, and Cohn, who we wanted to talk about because Donald Trump was, for a brief period anyway, a Cohn protege and really it seems like as character, morality and philosophy go, he made quite an impact on a young Trump. We will also mention Belize, a gay man who is friends with Louis and Prior, and comes to find himself in the often awkward position of being Roy Cohn’s nurse. He is played deliciously by Jeffrey Wright.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very quickly, we have a Patreon that you are more than welcome to support and cool stuff |
| 0:10.2 | happens and you can listen to other things that are not this primary podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | And if you can't or don't want to, that's also the bees' knees. |
| 0:18.1 | And you are the bees' knees. |
| 0:19.6 | And you are our real dad, if you want to be. |
| 0:22.6 | We talked about Angels in America, and that's what we're going to have this show about. |
| 0:27.0 | Whoa, wow, that was weird. Yeah, I'm really excited about this one. No, we're going to have |
| 0:30.8 | the show about it. I love it. None of the verbs that we use to describe things really make sense |
| 0:37.2 | when you think about them. It's just there's ones that we use a lot so that we use to describe things really make sense when you think about them. |
| 0:38.3 | It's because there's ones that we use a lot so that we don't think about how they don't make sense anymore. |
| 0:44.0 | We just settled on not thinking about them anymore. |
| 0:46.7 | Who is on this show with us? |
| 0:48.4 | We had Emma Copley Eisenberg on this show with us. |
| 0:52.2 | She is the author of the Third Rainbow Girl, and she is a friend of mine of several years. And I felt like she was the right person to take us on this journey. I agree. I think it was she was a glorious person to go on this journey with. So Angels America, as anyone who has seen it, knows is long. And we are a show that just looks at dads. So there's a |
| 1:18.5 | strong chance that your favorite part of Angels in America might not have gotten covered in our |
| 1:24.3 | conversation. Unless your favorite part is the parts with Roy Cohn. |
| 1:30.5 | Yeah, if Roy Cone's your favorite part of Angels in America, this show is for you. We covered this |
| 1:37.2 | because we wanted to do something that was Trump adjacent and not have to deal with Trump head-on. |
| 1:45.6 | And we covered it also because Angels in America is amazing. |
| 1:47.8 | And there's a really incredible connection between Roycone and Donald Trump. |
| 1:53.6 | So this is the lens through which we looked at that connection. |
| 1:57.2 | Yeah. |
... |
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