Theatre in Review: Angels in America, Parts I and II (Neil Simon Theatre)

	Amanda Lawrence. Photo: Helen Maybanks.

When you attend a Tony Kushner play, you must expect revelations. I happened to see Angels in America on Holy Thursday and Good Friday -- and, partly thanks to Marianne Elliott's staging, a magnificent thing of sound and fury -- I had a startling thought. This is the third production I've seen of Tony Kushner's two-part epic -- the theatrical equivalent of a teeming, furiously detailed Diego Rivera mural -- and it never occurred to me before that, at its heart, it contains a crucifixion and a resurrection.

The crucifixion is that of Prior Walter, the latest in a line, going back to the Norman invasion, of men bearing this august WASP name. A former drag queen -- although he can still produce a gown and turban in moments of extreme stress -- he has contracted AIDS. It is 1985; nobody understands anything about the disease, except that it constitutes a death sentence. Angels was hardly the first play to face these ugly facts, but, in my experience, no other playwright to date has captured the disease's appalling reality, especially at that moment in history -- to be not yet thirty with a body shutting down and no plausible treatment in sight. (AZT, a major plot point in the play, was several lengths short of a panacea.)

As Prior discovers, in addition to night sweats, purple lesions, and bodily wasting -- not to mention the ever-present threat of lethal pneumonia -- one of AIDS's most awful side effects was the abandonment of those who suffered from it. Louis, Prior's lover of four-and-a-half years -- a neurotic, self-flaying, theory-ridden intellectual -- quickly discovers he cannot live in proximity to a companion who is covered with Kaposi's sarcoma, who falls in the night, and who shits blood. Terrified and unable to cope, he waits until Prior is in the hospital to flee. It's an act of betrayal that will have terrible repercussions for Louis, setting him on his own Calvary road.

Kushner gives Prior a savage confrontation with Louis: "There are thousands of gay men in New York City with AIDS and nearly every one of them is being taken care of by a friend or by a lover who has stuck by them...Everyone got that, except me. I got you. Why? What's wrong with me?" Here, Kushner touches on something central to the play's main argument: that, for many -- possibly most -- Americans, the AIDS epidemic existed outside their view -- indeed, didn't really matter -- because it was a plague of the disenfranchised, striking at a time when most gay men were forced to choose between the dubious comforts of the closet and a more honest, but marginalized, existence.

This choice is explicated, scaldingly, by Roy Cohn, the demonic real-life figure who haunts both parts of Angels in America, and who, for decades, pulled off a hidden-in-plain-sight act that gained him entrée to the corridors of power while quietly pursuing the pleasures of sex with young men. Cohn, upon receiving a diagnosis of AIDS from his doctor, insists -- using his own uniquely twisted logic -- that he cannot have the disease because he is not a homosexual: "Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot pass a pissant bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows." He adds, "Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man...who fucks around with guys." In Kushner's rendering, he is both an amoral monster and an extreme example of the mutilations of the soul caused by a life lived in the shadows.

Of course, the truth will catch up with Roy, in the most horrific way, as the epidemic tears apart the fabric of denial and avoidance that constitutes his life and the lives of so many others. There is a lot of fear in Angels in America -- fear of signs and portents, fear of unimaginable physical suffering, and, above all, fear of death at a shockingly young age. Underneath it all is the sheer terror of being erased, because one had never even been seen, never really mattered. In those early, terrible plague years, young men were deserted on their deathbeds, or were reclaimed, at the last possible moment, by families who issued carefully worded obituaries and refused to recognize the lovers who provided end-of-life care, even barring them from funerals. As Prior, emerging from a friend's memorial service, says, "That ludicrous spectacle in there, just a parody of the funeral of someone who really counted. We don't; faggots -- we're just a bad dream the real world is having, and the real world's waking up."

Out of this dark material, Kushner weaves an extraordinary magic-realist tapestry, entwining fictional characters with historical figures in a web of betrayals, revelations, and quasi-religious visions. The dead walk the earth and angels crash through ceilings, offering false prophecies; heaven is in decay, deserted by God and tended by a covey of fearful bureaucrats. The characters invade each other's dreams and nightmares, experiencing flashes of insight that cannot be explained in the light of day -- all this in a play that also scrutinizes the feel-good nostrums peddled by the Reagan Administration, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the mythology of Mormonism, the one truly American religion, with its gospel of reinvention.

Marianne Elliott, who doesn't so much stage plays as create universes for them, orchestrates these political-social-spiritual, life-or-death doings with possibly even more brio than she brought to War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. She, her scenic designer, Ian MacNeil, and her lighting designer, Paule Constable, have in Part I (Millennium Approaches) come up with a world that is, literally, falling apart, consisting as it does of a series of ripped-out, neon-tinged interiors jostling against each other on raked turntables. Part II (Perestroika) unfolds in an empty space in which scenery is delivered by a team of "Angel Shadows," Bunraku-like figures who scamper through the darkness. In both parts, Constable's lighting carves the actors out of the blackness with a stunning economy of means, often using only a handful of strongly articulated beams. This approach lends a film noir patina to a play that, in every production I've seen, seems to unfold at night.

Elliott has also assembled a stunning ensemble anchored by two marquee names. Andrew Garfield plays Prior at a dauntingly high pitch of terror mingled with fury -- which is entirely suitable for a character who is gravely ill, cast off by his lover, and convinced that he has been anointed a prophet. (The actor has a great hysterical laugh, which gets quite a workout as he is buffeted by supernatural forces.) But he also gives the character surprising reserves of tenderness as well as a knack for scathingly honest observations. ("It's like the idea of crying when you do it," he says, dismissing the tears of the operatically penitent Louis.) And he has a wicked way with a wisecrack when the situation calls for it. Pausing during a fraught hospital visit, he announces, by way of introduction, to his nurse practitioner that he has been accompanied by "my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother," each word applied with Descartian precision to heighten the absurdity of his situation.

There's a death rattle implicit in the hilarity of Nathan Lane's Roy Cohn, a sense that a man who has spent his life whistling past a graveyard has finally met his match, but who, nevertheless, is determined to go down swinging. The actor simply dazzles, whether Roy is conducting fraught conversations on several phone lines at once ("I wish I was an octopus, a fucking octopus. Eight loving arms and all those suckers. Know what I mean?") or trading insults with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who returns from the grave to observe, with no small satisfaction, his final agony. When an innocent young colleague says, appalled, "You borrowed money from a client?", Lane's deadpan response ("I'm deeply ashamed"), disowning the words even as he says them, calls down an enormous laugh. But he reveals a surprising vulnerability in the way Roy showers attention on Joe Pitt, the Mormon law clerk he wants to convert into his latest "Royboy." (In such arrangements, he provides young men with patronage and entrée in Washington, and they surreptitiously keep him out of legal trouble.) Even when he is clearly manipulating Joe, who, he knows, suffered from his father's disapproval, his stratagems contain something that might, in a less scabrous soul, plausibly be mistaken for love. And there's something Lear-like when he howls "You broke my heart!" at Joe, who ultimately declines to do his bidding. Lane also charts Roy's physical decline in pitiless detail. He seems to shrink, growing paler from scene to scene. In a hospital bed, trying to still the trembling of his left hand, you can practically see the life slipping out of him. He rouses what little energy he has left for one more denunciation, then falls into a seizure, his body throwing itself into a frenzy against the mattress. If I have ever seen a more harrowing death scene, I don't remember it.

The rest of the ensemble is on the same level. James McArdle's Louis is a study in moral and psychological paralysis, hating himself for doing wrong yet unable to do anything about it; instead, he corners himself in a torrent of arguments and counter-arguments, throwing himself into an affair with Joe, who represents in his politics and self-deception everything he detests. Behind his all-American good looks -- "He's the Marlboro man," gasps Prior, upon glimpsing him -- Lee Pace's Joe is a turbulent figure whose life collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions when he falls in love with Louis. As Harper, Joe's bewildered, drug-addicted wife, Denise Gough has a wounded-sparrow quality that informs her Valium-fueled fantasies of escape. She hardens convincingly in her later scenes, delivering some stabbing truths to her mixed-up spouse, and she handles the script's penultimate speech -- a fantastic vision of souls rising from the earth to heal the ozone layer -- with loving care.

Susan Brown finds plenty of gravelly amusement and a rocklike integrity in Hannah, Joe's widowed mother, who, stunned when her son comes out to her (via telephone), flies to New York to take him in hand, and instead gets caught up in Prior's struggles for clarity and survival. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett throws shade with devastating precision as Belize, who is Prior's best friend, Joe's antagonist, and Roy's nurse, and is unwilling to take crap from any of them. ("I'm gonna report you," threatens Roy. "There's a nursing shortage; I'm in a union; I'm real scared," Belize replies, using cool understatement to defang Roy's bullying ways.) Amanda Lawrence pulls off a physical and acting feat as the Angel, here imagined as a threatening, almost monstrous, creature hoisted by the Angel Shadows, who also manipulate her rather tattered wings, designed by Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes. (Amazingly, everyone does double and triple duty, filling the large gallery of supporting characters, with equal fluency.)

And the contributions keep on coming. Each of Nicky Gillibrand's costumes is an incisive character study. Adrian Sutton's music, which often sounds like Aaron Copland greeting the apocalypse, underlines the play's breadth of vision. Ian Dickinson provides fine audio reinforcement along with a barrage of effects, including traffic, cocktail piano, flapping wings, and the eerie exhalation of breath that announces another visitation from the angel, who goads Prior to assume a prophetic role.

Appropriately, the resurrection also belongs to Prior, who visits heaven and returns, disappointed by an existence so static that even God has taken a powder. He returns -- not cured, but, in some crucial way, strengthened -- to live in a world where change is the only certainty. There's a terrible paradox here: The ghastly tragedy of AIDS -- with its twin evils of hypocrisy and reckless neglect -- nevertheless destroyed the culture of the closet. Gay men had to fight publicly for their survival, and were, at last, recognized for who they were. A truer form of citizenship was attained, albeit at an unacceptably high cost. But history has its own logic; as Prior says, "The world only spins forward." (There's a reason Isaac Butler and Dan Kois chose this line for the title of their recently published, and magisterial, oral history of Angels in America; it cuts to the very heart of Kushner's vision.) From the false Hollywood dawn of Ronald Reagan's morning in America to the vulgar, grasping me-firstism of the Trump era, Angels in America has lost nothing of its incantatory power; indeed, it may be more important than ever. The great work continues. -- David Barbour