From: aku@leland.Stanford.EDU (Andrew Chia-Tso Ku)
Subject: ANGELS IN AMERICA
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 20:49:36 GMT

ANGELS IN AMERICA
Part I: Millenium Approaches
Part II: Perestroika

by Tony Kushner
directed by Oskar Eustis with Anthony Taccone

at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles until November 29
presented in association with the New York Shakespeare Festival

This past weekend, I drove to LA to catch a preview of Tony Kushner's
ANGELS IN AMERICA.  I missed ANGELS during its world premiere last
year at San Francisco's Eureka Theatre (I procrastinated until the
final week, by which time the show was sold out), so I was determined
to see this production, which travels to off-Broadway in February and
is by far the most highly anticipated play in New York this season.

In short, I think that ANGELS is an extraordinary work, certainly one
of the most exhilarating theatrical events I've witnessed.  I have no
doubt that when the play (only Kushner's second; he's still in his
30's) opens in NY, it will catapult him into the ranks of America's
leading playwrights.  Yes, it's THAT good.

The play runs a total of 7 hours, including intermissions, and is
presented in two parts.  On weekends, both parts are presented in a
"marathon" same day format: a matinee (Millenium Approaches) and an
evening performance (Perestroika).  As you might expect from its
running time, the play is huge and unwieldy, but the work virtually
overflows with feverish ideas and images, and Kushner's expansive
vision fully justifies the broad canvas he has employed.  So far, I've
resisted any mention of AIDS - which is a vital part of the play - so
that I could first give some indication of the breadth of the play and
dispell any notion that this is at all any sort of disease-of-the-week
treatment.  The play is a wildly ambitious work - its subtitle is "A
Gay Fantasia on National Themes" - that tries nothing short of
exploring the moral and physical devastation (embodied by AIDS)
wrought on society by Reagan-era greed and selfishness.  The play is
fiercely political (there were plenty of cheers and hisses from the
audience during the performance), but also hilarious and entertaining,
and the time passed amazingly quickly.

The play is far from flawless, but for a work that includes
numerous dreams and hallucinations, combines fact with fiction, the
public with the private, and features among its characters ghosts,
angels, and Ethel Rosenberg, a surprising amount of it works.

The play features 10 actors in a total of about 25 roles.  The story
begins in 1986, when Louis's HIV-positive lover Prior first shows
signs of AIDS-related illnesses.  Louis, who is gay and Jewish can't
bear watching his lover slowly dying (he takes the appearance of each
new K-S lesion harder than his lover does), eventually abandons him in
a hospital.  In a parallel storyline, Joe, a lawyer, Mormon and
repressed homosexual is being groomed by Roy Cohn, the rabid
McCarthy-era lawyer, as Cohn's possible successor.  Cohn, perhaps the
pivotal character of the play, is a notorious anti-gay closet case,
and the play charts his AIDS-related physical decline.  Joe's
Valium-popping wife, Harper, suffers from paranoid delusions and
yearns to visit the Antarctic to view the hole in the ozone layer.
During most of Millenium Approaches the two parallel story lines are
played out in alternate, overlapping scenes.  Rather than cutting up
the rhythm of the play, I thought it actually served to build up my
interest, which culminated in the startling juxtaposition of Joe and
Louis simultaneously breaking up with their respective partners.  The
four characters circle each other on the bare stage, their voices and
gazes crossing paths.  As Millenium Approaches closes, Joe and Louis
begin a tentative relationship while Louis's dying lover is visited
upon by an angel in an apolocalyptic vision.

Part II: Perestroika gets off to a shaky start, first with a
near-inpenetrable prologue set at the Kremlin (Kushner apparently has
cut out the scenes set the Russia that were in earlier drafts of the
play; he probably should have cut out this prologue as well), and then
with 15 minutes of low comedy between Prior and the angel (as if
Kushner was sheepishly trying to debunk the extravagance of the final
tableau of Part I).  Although MTF's brouchure says that Part I can be
enjoyed alone, after seeing Part II, I find that notion inconceivable.
Part I basically establishes a locus of characters who deepen
emotionally and mature in the second part, and Part I ends rather
abruptly and unsatisfyingly.  In Part II, characters' lives become
inextricably entangled as Louis is horrified to learn of Joe's secret
association with Cohn, Louis's dying ex-lover Prior meets both Joe's
abandoned wife and mother, and a gay black nurse and friend of Prior's
is lured into tending to the increasing vitriolic Cohn (the
unlikeliness of some of the alliances is pointed up when one character
is introduced as "my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother".)  Kushner is
largely successful at tying together the play's recurring themes of
morality, religion, sex, dignity, and politics.  This certainly isn't
the sort kitchen sink drama that Robert Brustein railed against
lately.

The acting is all top notch, beginning with Ron Leibman in an
exhausting, razor-sharp performance as Cohn.  Joe Mantello, as the
overly self-aware Louis, is equally fine; he does justice to his 10
minute comic tirade about racism and democracy in America.
Cynthia Mace, who is saddled with the woozy verbal imagery that
Kushner occasionally lets slip in, but she remains quite appealing.

John Conklin's set is spare to a fault: the playing area is a huge,
bare, approximately 25' square blond wood thrust stage.  At the rear
is a white courthouse facade, with three doors spaced equally apart
and two vertical fissures running down the length of the facade.  At
the end of Part I, and repeatedly in Part II, one of the fissures
splits apart to suggest an ethereal space beyond.  A faded American
flag is located to the side.  What few props and furniture are needed
are wheeled in by the actors from the wings.

Given the realities of arts funding and the play's uncommercial length
and subject matter, I have strong doubts that this work will receive
as many productions as it deserves, so I urge people to seek out this
bicoastal production (in LA until the end of November, in NY from
February to March/93).  The Eureka Theatre, which commisioned the
play, is trying to scrape up the $500,000 to mount the play in San
Francisco, but with the company near defunct, I'm not holding my
breath.  As a final note, I should add that despite the play's
language and subject matter, the audience - with a significant showing
by the blue-rinse crowd - was uncommonly attentive and I didn't see a
single walkout during the performance I attended.  In addition, there
were only about 5% empty seats for the evening performance of Part II
(Part I was sold out), a fine testament to the excellence of the
production.

Andrew
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