Now we come to "on National Themes. This epic piece of theater uses its gay characters and fantastic style to explore big issues that affect everyone in the country. Check out " Themes " to find out more about those. Now for the final section of the title. It's "Part One" because this seriously long and amazing play is such a whopper that it had to be divided into two parts. But what about "Millennium Approaches"? A millennium, very simply, is a period of a thousand years.
The current millennium started in and won't end until the end of the year Historically, people tend to get all freaked out when the millennium arrives, thinking that the world is going to end. As you may remember, the ramp-up to the last turn of the millennium was no different.
Back in the s and 90s, there was a lot of theorizing that some massive disaster was going to happen at the end of the millennium. During the first part of the Reagan Administration, when a good deal of the play is set, America was still deep in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The threat of nuclear war was real. The approaching turn of millennium only added to the growing paranoia. This part of the title actually comes from a line spoken by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.
Roy yells at Ethel that he has " forced [his] way into history" 3. Even though he knows his death is coming, he will be remembered. Ethel just kind of laughs at him and says, "History is about to crack wide open. Millennium Approaches" 3. It seems like this line could be referencing the mounting paranoia that led up to the turn of the millennium, the fear that some great nuclear holocaust would wipe out humankind.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Tony Kushner. Previous Next. What's Up With the Title? Quite the contrary: those differences serve as a kind of glue that welds them together. They are diverse yet mutually dependent.
From the first scene of the play, the opposition between stasis and change is Kushner's favorite theme. In a world filled with despair, the desire to halt change—to preserve the past and ignore or suppress the future—is a natural reaction. This anti-migratory impulse is voiced by Rabbi Chemelwitz, Emily the nurse and Sister Ella Chapter, and most spectacularly by the Angels, who order Prior to make humanity stop its ceaseless motion. The Angel chooses Prior as her prophet because of the ancient, rooted history of his family and because as Belize detects he secretly shares their reaction.
But as events make abundantly clear, that desire is literally reactionary—destructive, and at odds with the progressive values of the play. Migration, which brought Prior's family to America as well as Belize's slave ancestors and Louis's immigrant ones, and which carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah, is an inevitable and inerasable human drive.
More broadly speaking, Kushner implies that our democracy and our national politics must resist this reactive impulse. Rather than seeking a haven in an idealized s past, America needs to embrace even those changes that frighten some people—especially the growth of a politically active and culturally accepted gay and lesbian minority.
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