The themes of this year’s New Student Experience were inspired by the freshman summer reading of Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Part One: Millennium Approaches—a play set in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. Thanks to a collaborative effort between First Year Programs and the Department of Theatre and Communication Arts, the provoking story came alive on the Whittier College stage.
Directed by Professor of Theatre and Communication Arts Jennifer Holmes, the cast included students Matthew Aranda, Leandro Fefer, Stella Gordon, Gunner Joachim, Jocelyn Lopez, Christian Mohn, and Lauren Vau, and theatre professor Gil Gonzalez.
Angels in America is a play that infuses the spiritual with the everyday, the political with the emotional. It follows the lives of two couples wrestling with issues of sexuality, identity, and intimacy. A pill-popping Mormon wife struggles with connecting to a husband who’s questioning his sexuality, and a gay couple faces the tragedy of AIDS.
While the couples lead completely different lives, the imagination and compassion of this play crosses political and religious boundaries and leads to human connection and empathy. Characters meet in Valium hallucinations, dream sequences, or a vacant Central Park during a cold New York winter—all seeking opportunities to be heard and make sense of their struggles.
The play offers a voice to a tragic time in American history that often gets overlooked. It opens up the societal and political issues surrounding the AIDS crisis.
“It is important for students to be aware of the 1980s AIDS epidemic so that they can learn from how people in the United States (politicians, scientists, gay activists, the average person) responded to the appearance of new and deadly disease for which we knew little about, and how it can inform how they, the students, might react to similar situations today,” shares biology professor Devin Iimoto.
The characters in Angels in America don’t know how to react to the deadly disease. Relationships come undone; hospitals are avoided; the reality of AIDS is denied and labeled as “the disease of homosexuals.” Prior Walter, the central character, spends his final days in physical and emotional agony. And still, the beautiful voice of an angel proclaims the final words of the play: “The Great Work begins.”
Although Kushner’s play was written twenty years ago, the content and spirit of the story is very much alive in today’s world, and the “The Great Work” of understanding the AIDS crisis is still in momentum.
“The larger, general issues are the same today as they were in the 1980s in terms of politicians using a health crisis for political gain and of people having irrational fears and responses to a new disease. However, specifically with regards to AIDS, students can also see the progress that we’ve made on the disease today,” Iimoto explains.
Along with the fantastic and moving success of Angels in America, the First Year Programs made possible other opportunities to educate the Whittier College campus about the 1980’s health crisis. A film series was held, screening the documentaries How to Survive a Plague, We Are Here, and Silverlake Life—all films in which seek to educate a newer generation of the historical impact of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS Memorial Quilts were on display in the Wardman Library, commemorating the lives of those lost to a battle with AIDS.
-By Hallie Gayle '15
