November 16–23, 1995

critical mass|theater

Angels In America

Part One: Millennium Approaches, Part Two: Perestroika, reviewed at Zellerbach Theatre (at the Annenberg Center), moved to Merriam Theatre through Nov. 19. Call 732-5446 for info.

A young, unhappy, freaked-out Mormon wife who's been swallowing Valium in "wee fistfuls" asks the central question: "Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions..."

Tony Kushner, playwright of this most talked-about, celebrated two-part epic, has collected some of the most interesting bits and pieces our century has to offer and has reassembled them into a huge seven-hour theatrical vision of gay life in America.

What's supposed to happen at this point in a review is that I'm supposed to provide enough of a plot summary to give you an idea of what the play's about without giving away any surprises. Good luck. These two long plays are thick with plot and stuffed with full-developed characters: eight main characters in both halves, plus 13 minor characters in Part One, 16 in Part Two — the actors play multiple roles, sometimes unrecognizably, sometimes obviously, always meaningfully.

The main characters reach through both plays: Roy Cohn (Jonathan Hadary is terrific in this role of the man we love to hate), the homophobic homosexual rabidly commie-hating lawyer who sent Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair (her ghost turns up at significant moments); Joe Pitt (Rick Holmes), a young married Mormon, Republican lawyer who discovers he is gay; Hannah Pitt (Pamela Burrell), his stern mother who discovers she can be less stern; Harper (Kate Goehring), his pill-popping wife who has visions of Antarctica; Belize (Reg Flowers), an ex-drag queen who is a nurse (he reappears as Mr. Lies, Harper's imaginary travel agent); Prior Walter (Robert Sella), a young gay man with AIDS to whom the Angel appears, and Louis Ironson (Peter Birkenhead), an incurably talkative political theorizer, who is Prior's lover and who abandons him.

The acting is consistently, thoroughly good — and becomes even better if you read your program and discover how many various roles these eight actors take (for example, Carolyn Swift, who plays the Angel, also plays Prior's nurse at the hospital, a real estate agent in Salt Lake City and a crazy woman in the South Bronx). This is not realistic theater (there are split scenes, where two sets of characters are on stage at once, the actors push and pull the furniture on and off stage, the Angel's wires are perfectly visible) — it's very theatrical theater.

Part One, called Millennium Approaches, begins with the funeral of an unseen character, a Jewish grandmother who is "the last of the Mohicans," representing the death of immigrant strength in America and the importance of the past. This is a play about love and loss, about AIDS, about politics, about religion, about history, about racism, mortality, guilt, betrayal, abandonment, and about compassion. Not enough? Okay. It's also about theater, about making words leap and spectacle dazzle (wait until you see the Angel appear). Even More?? It's not only thought-provoking, it's funny.

Part Two, which I find the more absorbing, is called Perestroika (if you remember from the end of the last decade, just before the dismantling of the Soviet Union, there was much talk of both glasnost [the thawing] and perestroika [the restructuring]). This play continues the stories begun in the first part, developing love affairs, rearranging loyalties, watching unlikely people become friends, lovers, confidants and enemies. Lovers aren't the only ones abandoned: God has disappeared from heaven and has abandoned mankind (a paternity suit if there ever was one, as Roy Cohn points out). The angels appear in force in their deteriorating, reactionary Reaganite heaven, and people are dying right and left (I speak politically as well as literally) until, finally, life — the deep human desire — is affirmed.

Although this national touring production, directed by Michael Mayer, uses a pared-down version of the script and a toned-down version of the spectacular Broadway production, its running time is no shorter because it's performed far more slowly and less subtly. This shows up in the humor (every funny line is punched, and there is the pause for the laugh) and the serious aspects seem to have grown a bit solemn and preachy. Interesting and engrossing but far from breathtaking and brilliant, this Angels in America is, frankly, a bit of a disappointment.

— Toby Zinman