How we cite our quotes: (Act.Scene.Line)
Quote #10
Prior: God. [...] He isn't coming back. (5.4.46-47)
If you stacked up all the literature written about the nature of God, it would probably be high enough to poke a hole in the ozone layer. Basically, everybody is wondering why an all-powerful God would let bad things happen. Is He just a jerk? Is He testing us? Has God given us free will so that we can live and learn on our own? Does He simply not exist? Is God not necessarily a conscious being, but instead a web of energy that connects everything in the universe? Angels in America goes with the God-as-deadbeat-dad theory: he made the world, and then he deserted it for... God knows what.
Quote #11
Harper: "When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don't get it, they just want him. Want him" (1.2.8).
Harper is still reeling from Joe abandoning her in Millennium Approaches. In this poignant bit of dialogue she talks about how her body still wants him even though her mind knows he's gone.
Quote #12
Harper: "Bastard. You fell out of love with me."
Joe (Meaning it): "That isn't true, Harper."
Harper (Breaking): "THEN COME BACK!" (1.2.23-25).
Harper is in total misery over the fact the Joe left her. In this scene, he's not actually there in reality. As we discuss in "Versions of Reality," this is either Harper imagining her husband or one of Kushner's reality-bending moments where a character's consciousness can be somewhere outside his actual body. Either way it shows the total trauma that Joe's abandonment of Harper has caused.