Part 2: Act 4, Scene 8 Summary

Joe arrives at Louis's apartment. Louis is reading from the legal records of all the case decisions that Joe wrote on behalf of his boss. Louis picks a case where Joe prevented a company from paying damages to children harmed by industrial waste, and a case in which he blocked the appeal of a gay ex-serviceman, who was being cheated out of his army pension. Joe becomes desperate. Louis asks him if he slept with Roy Cohn. He insults Joe, who punches him, and this develops into repeated punches. Louis asks Joe whether he figured out that Roy was gay and had AIDS. Eventually Louis falls to the ground. He seems to believe that he deserves to suffer.

Part 2: Act 4, Scene 8 Analysis

The clash of ideologies becomes physical in this scene. It is as if the peaceful coexistence of...