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APPLICATION
PRIOR WALTER THRESHOLD OF REVELATION | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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THE CHARACTER
Character Name: Prior Walter
Series: Angels in America (play)
Canon Point: In the 2nd play, Perestroika, after attending a drag queen's funeral with Belize.
Character Age: 30
Background: Very briefly: the play is set in 1986. Prior Walter is an openly gay man living in New York. His HIV has recently transitioned to full blown AIDS. Prior comes from money (he is the 32nd of his name - 34th if you count the bastards) and for the last 4.5 years has largely been supporting his boyfriend, Louis.
As his disease progresses and becomes ugly, Louis leaves him. Abandoned and hopped up on medication, Prior begins receiving angelic visitations. The Angel who visits him is the Principality of America and she tells him he is a prophet. Visions begin to steal his eyesight and the prophecy he's been left to spread (the Angels, also abandoned, want humanity to stop moving and changing, so that God may return to them) is not one he agrees with.
He is currently trying not to die, wondering if he's going insane, being cared for by his best friend, Belize, ignored by his ex lover, and encountering a strange Mormon lady both inside and out of his visions.
Personality:
Prior is an out gay man living at a time when the Pride movement was still nascent, equal rights and equal marriage felt lightyears away, and casual homophobia was rife. Further to this, he's a very effeminate man and he doesn't pass as straight (when asked if he's a 'typical homosexual' he replies 'Darling, I'm sterotypical'). And he's living with AIDS at a time when AIDS was something people only died from - described as a 'gay plague', men with AIDS were initially taken to hospital by paramedics in hazmat suits. It was a terrifying diagnosis.
Surviving all this has meant that Prior has wells of inner strength even he is sometimes unaware of. When the Angel breaks through to gift him with prophecy, he confirms this to himself: “no, no fear, find the anger, find the… anger, my blood is clean, my brain is fine, I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong.”
Although he's from a wealthy background, Prior indicates that his mother has both been largely absent and is regularly 'out of it' - one assumes on alcohol or prescription drugs. He doesn't mention his father, but his family never check on him during his illness, and it's stated that he's largely alone.
Even more alone when Louis leaves him.
Louis is kind of a heel. He's semi-out, but won't introduce Prior to his family despite how long they've been together. Prior is afraid to tell Louis when his disease begins to progress because he's frightened Louis will leave him - and he's right. In the times when things are worst: when he's bleeding and terrified, Louis can't cope and leaves him.
Prior is left lonely and afraid, bitter at being abandoned but still in love with Louis - feeling that there must be something wrong with him, as other men with his disease are cared for by their lovers. "I don't give a fuck. I want Louis. I want my fucking boyfriend, where the fuck is he? I'm dying, I'm dying, where's Louis?"
Prior is tenderhearted and desperately vulnerable, despite his defenses against in (including using acerbic humour and dressing in drag to combat 'emotional emergencies'). He deals with the usual questions of a dying man: "Why me? Why poor, poor me?" and yet he doesn't close his heart or give up on hope. Over the course of the play he befriends the valium addicted, anxious wife of the man Louis has left him for, and the strict Mormon mother of the same.
He shows care for Louis even when Louis is blaming him for how hard it is to cope with his illness. But, he won't take any bullshit. When Louis finally asks to come back to him, Prior tells him they can be friends (and they are) but they can never be together, ever again.
He's also battling with the possibility that the AIDS treatment has caused dementia. After all, he's not even religious and he's being visited by angels. There are two options, here:
BELIZE It's not… visited, Prior. By who? It is from you, what else is it?
PRIOR: Something else.
BELIZE: That's crazy.
PRIOR: Then I'm crazy.
BELIZE: No, you're…
PRIOR: Then it was an angel.
BELIZE: It was not an...
PRIOR: Then I'm crazy. The whole world is, why not me?
However, while the play offers opportunity for the Angel to be a delusion, from Prior's lived experience it is certainly real. This means he ends up wrestling it to receive a blessing, and visiting heaven to turn down the prophecy he's been given, and tell the Angels that what they are asking is wrong. Humanity can't cease to move. Progress will always happen. The world only spins forward.
The Angels offer to bless him with death. Painless, easy, gentle. A blessing.
It's not what Prior asks for. He asks for more life. Despite all he's going through, despite being alone, and suffering, he rejects the Angel's prophecy of cessation and stillness, rejects their blessing of death, and asks for more life.
But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life."
Prior Walter is a man willing to live past hope. And he does - in the epilogue 5 years later, Prior is still living, still sick, now wearing glasses and walking with a cane, but happy and alive.
At the end, he becomes the Prophet he was intended to be, addressing the audience and the universe to say that no longer will people die silent and ashamed, they will go on - the world only spins forward.
Where there's life, there's hope.
Powers/Abilities:
Threshold of Revelation: As a prophet, or maybe just as a dying man, Prior exhibits the ability to know things about someone that they may not even know themselves. For example, he knows a woman's husband is gay without having met him - this is something she's never admitted to herself and only appreciates is true after Prior tells her. He can pick up information about people, but it's not mind reading per se, he can't pick up on what people are thinking. It's a new ability and as likely to happen randomly as on command.
He is also shown to be able to hear a conversation between two people who are across the city at the time. This is only liable to happen if he's closely connected to and intensely focused on at least one of the people involved.
Prior may occasionally show up in people's dreams, or they may get into his - this is not something he has control over.
Included in the Prophet package comes angelic visitations that may be dreams or hallucinations and may not be. He has increased sensitivity to ghostly and divine presences. He has an occasional sense of what may be to come: this might be experienced as a sense of dread or impending doom, or as a vision, but would not be specific on the event itself, just a feeling about the nature of it.
NOTE: Prior's abilities tie in to him being terminally ill, and I really can't take this away from him and still be able to play him. At the end of the play even the host of heaven can't take away his disease - though they can allow him more life, even while he suffers. Therefore I would like Prior's AIDS to be incurable by any medicine available and for him to remain actively ill (to greater and lesser extents) - but for the disease to be rendered negative in terms of viral load, meaning it's entirely untransmittable. He would not be contagious in any way. I have an opt out post for anyone not wanting to engage with Prior despite this.
Inventory: Record player. Cher's gypsies, tramps and thieves on vinyl. A copy of The Wizard of Oz motion picture soundtrack.