Kushner’s drama still on point
MASTERPIECE: Epic play about AIDS in ’80s couldn’t have been staged at a better time
It doesn’t take a love guru, a Hallmark card writer or even Burt Bacharach to understand that what the world needs now is indeed love, sweet love.
These days, growing nativism and manufactured fear have caused levels of empathy to shrink and the gaps between people to widen. That stark and dark reality makes now the perfect time for a remount of Tony Kushner’s epic and humanistic play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
A weighty outing about companionship, loss and responsibility, the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning work is presented in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The former hits the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage March 23. Perestroika will then open the Arts Club’s 2017-2018 season on Sept. 7.
“The cast is beautiful. Every one of them is knocking it out of the park,” said director Kim Collier. “Collectively, it’s an extraordinary ensemble and it’s going to be a real special thing for audiences to come see these actors at work.”
And see them work in what is easily one of the great masterpieces of 20th-century theatre.
Set in the 1980s in New York during the rise of the AIDS crisis and Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Angels in America is a complex discussion of what it was like to be gay in an America that was led by a president who wouldn’t even say the word AIDS.
“One of the great gifts of this show is it supplies a place for those who can’t speak,” said Collier. “It gives us a collected catharsis of mourning over loss, whether it is loss of lover to AIDS or loss of lover or parent in life. It engages our hearts and I think it allows us to become more empathetic and compassionate beings. “The piece is so deeply human.” The play is broken up into two parts due to its length. Each chapter, if you will, comes in at around three hours. There are a couple of short intermissions that allow for leg-stretching and thought-exchanging. And, boy, there’s a lot of thinking to be done here.
“Any great play has five or six great ideas and this one has about 20,” said Damien Atkins, who plays Prior, a man afflicted with AIDS. “Visà-vis AIDS, people talk about how different the AIDS crisis is and, of course, it is different, but it’s not over. AIDS has become a bit of a prism through which we can see whom society doesn’t care enough about because it is expensive to treat AIDS and because it can be sexually transmitted, and it can be transmitted through things like drug-use and blood. So it may not be attacking the same group of gay men it did in the ’80s, but millions of people are still dying because they can’t afford the antiretrovirals.”
That idea of economic standing dictating the distribution of life-saving drugs is delivered loud and clear in this play through the character of Roy Cohn. A real-life power-broker, political bagman and former Donald Trump lawyer (Google this man), Cohn’s dark tentacles extend from McCarthyism to Reaganomics.
While Cohn’s dirty dealings and dark deceptions would make J. Edgar Hoover shiver, in Kushner’s hands he’s an engrossing, funny, riveting character of equal parts bile and charisma. A closeted gay man, Cohn contracts HIV, then full-blown AIDS. As he did in real life, he insists it’s liver cancer that is killing him.
“The Roy Cohn story let’s us question how power is preserved and who power serves,” said Collier. “We watch Roy Cohn negate parts of himself — particularly being a homosexual — to maintain that power. There is a lot of anger in that man and in what he does.”
There is also a lot of charm. Charm that Kushner wields in the direction of the audience, taunting us to go ahead and like this guy.
“That is what Kushner is trying to say to us, even someone as reprehensible as Roy Cohn is a human being, and we have to ask ourselves where can I find the compassion and forgiveness for a person like that,” said Atkins.
For the Arts Club production, the role of Cohn belongs to Brian Markinson. Markinson, a graduate of the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts whose credits include Mad Men, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Romeo Section and Da Vinci’s Inquest, was in New York when AIDS took hold. He lost classmates, teachers and friends to the disease and his wife, Nancy, helped care for people with AIDS. He saw Roy Leibman in his Tony-Award winning turn as Cohn when the play was first mounted in 1993.
“It’s an epic piece of writing, arguably my favourite play. It is possibly one of the top-five pieces of dramatic literature written in the 20th century,” said Markinson, who has lived and worked in Vancouver for two decades. “I am very honoured to be a part of it. I saw it on Broadway. I have had a relationship with it for years.”
Markinson would show up in Mike Nichols’ amazing HBO-TV miniseries as Martin Heller, a Reagan administration PR flak and odious Cohn operative, opposite Al Pacino’s Cohn.
Three decades later, the play’s heart is still beating strong pumping out the much needed messages of compassion and empathy. We are in this thing together people.
“The deeper layer of the play and the deeper questioning is how are we going to be as a society? Are we going to pursue individualism where everybody just takes care of themselves or are we going to pursue a kind of collectivism where we take care of each other,” said Atkins, who has played Prior previously in a production in Toronto. “For me, I think that is the larger question of the play and that battle has only gotten more intense these days.”
Those “these-days” feelings are hard to ignore.
“Suddenly the play became utterly political again and utterly necessary,” said Collier. “As a result, I changed my set design in the 11th hour. And very consciously I wanted to put it into the political realm.
“It feels a little bit like the Court of Appeals. It feels a little bit like Washington. It feels a little bit like the monuments of empire,” added Collier. “I guess I am talking about it as the battleground for the soul.”