Once-prescient ‘Angels in America’ returns, at a time that seems right
When it opened at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre in June of 1991, Tony Kushner’s “Millennium Approaches” fired a mighty topical shot across the bow in fractious times. There was a controversial Republican in the White House (George H.W. Bush), there was agitation on the left for broad social change, and there was an ongoing AIDS crisis that many believed both Bush and especially his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had woefully neglected. Anger and anguish, humor and hard-earned hope about all that and more pulsed forth from the stage.
The play, the first panel in the two-part “Angels in America,” was simultaneously and instantly revealed as a great work of art. No one who was there for that world premiere, on a hot night in a converted auto body shop at 16th and Harrison streets, will forget the thrill of transformative revelation Kushner and an inspired cast brought to the damaged but resilient sinew of American life.
“Angels,” which has never really gone
away in the quarter century since the play — subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” — debuted, is back in a big way. A new production, directed by Tony Taccone, begins previews April 17 and opens officially on April 28 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” play in rotation at the Rep’s Roda Theatre through July 22. The schedule includes options to see both parts on the same day, in marathon fashion.
The Berkeley staging arrives just as “Angels” has scored a heralded success in New York, with the transfer of the British National Theatre’s star-studded production to Broadway. Featuring Andrew Garfield as the work’s afflicted but indomitable gay hero, Prior Walter, and Nathan Lane as a demonic Roy Cohn, the show marks the 25th anniversary of the 1993 Broadway premiere.
With major productions on both coasts, this essentially American work asserts its timeliness and centrality in our own turbulent times. In the specificity and imaginative projection of the world it portrays — the action of two plays takes place from 1985-90, in bedrooms and hospital rooms, a Mormon diorama, Heaven and many other locales — “Angels” retains the raw, bonedeep immediacy it first conveyed 27 years ago. Comparisons to Shakespeare’s great history plays are not amiss. The many honors, including two best play Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, confirmed what audiences have known from the start.
In its complex yet cogent narrative, characters that include Mormons and a rabbi, lovers and betrayers, the reallife figures of Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, and a long-winded and dogmatic Angel fluidly interact in overlapping story lines. A major part of the action is triggered when Prior Walter, who has AIDS, is abandoned by a lover unable to handle his partner’s disease. In a parallel development, a Mormon couple breaks up over the husband’s acknowledgment of his homosexuality. The two plot streams flow together through surreal visitations by ancestors and the Angel and very real encounters with Cohn, an empathic but tough-minded male nurse and a sternly loving mother, among others.
Speaking recently by cell phone from the streets of midtown Manhattan, as he made his way toward an “Angels” performance at the Neil Simon Theatre, Kushner addressed the “why now?” question. “My work always does best in times of crisis,” he said. “The part of the play that deals with the Reagan counterrevolution is speaking loud and clear once again.”
Kushner, who never minces so much as a syllable, didn’t take long getting around to Donald Trump — “that pathological narcissist in the White House. The president of the United States is an operative of Putin, and he’s a traitor and surrounded by traitors. I don’t use that word hyperbolically.”
The resonance of Kushner’s masterpiece in 2018 goes deeper than Reagan-Trump parallels. While things like the AIDS crisis that was pressing in 1991 may be less pronounced now in Western society, thanks to medical and social progress, other themes have taken on a fresh urgency. One of them is the fragility of a climate-changed environment, foreseen in a heartbreakingly gorgeous monologue in “Perestroika.” The character Harper, an addled but acute visionary fleeing a miserable marriage, is on a night flight to San Francisco when she pictures the ozone of the tropopause “ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.”
Then there’s the Angel’s slightly batty “Anti-Migratory Epistle,” as the playwright points out, which seems to anticipate the 21st century’s massive swirl of marooned migrants and refugees.
Taccone, who along with Oskar Eustis undertook the commissioning and birthing of “Angels” when they were the Eureka’s artistic directors back in the day, seconded Kushner’s views. “Harper’s ruminations about the state of the planet are specific and terrifyingly topical,” said Taccone. In one hallucination, Harper finds herself in a haunted Antarctica. “As you and I speak,” the director noted, “Antarctica is melting.”
As for the late Cohn, a vituperative figure in the play and a brawling, bellicose lawyer in real life, Taccone warmed to the fact that he was a favorite associate of Trump’s. (Earlier this year, in a fit of pique about Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russia investigation, Trump fumed, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”)
For Taccone, “the larger point is that Roy Cohn (in the play) and Donald Trump are both trying to have their world view dominate our view of reality. That’s with us now in a way none of us could have anticipated. The play is more relevant today than it was when it opened.”
Kushner has an eerie instinct for this sort of thing. In his drama “Homebody/Kabul,” which was written in the late 1990s and premiered in 2002, Kushner seemed to anticipate events about the West’s involvement in war-ravaged Afghanistan and terrorist attacks before they took place. A plot point in “Caroline, or Change,” the playwright’s 2003 musical with a score by Jeanine Tesori, turns on a vandalized Confederate statue in Kushner’s hometown of Lake Charles, La., where the story is set.
Kushner laughed off the idea that he has any kind of prophetic touch. “If I did, I might have gotten rich in the stock market. My one attempt at that was an unqualified disaster. I do take it as a good sign for myself politically,” he went on, “that if I’m worrying about something, there’s a good chance it will turn out to be worth worrying about.”
Widely and frequently produced over the years, “Angels” lends itself to a broad range of directorial approaches. George C. Wolfe’s ’93 Broadway staging was sleekly potent. A 1994 production mounted by the American Conservatory Theater at the Marines Memorial Theatre and directed by Mark Wing-Davey had a roughhewn expressionist quality. Performed in Dutch on a bare stage, experimental director Ivo van Hove’s 2008 version won plaudits for its stark intensity. A 2003 HBO miniseries, helmed by Mike Nichols, opened up the play and featured star turns by Al Pacino and Meryl Streep while honoring the spirit and substance of the original.
Taccone, who co-directed a tempestuous 1992 Los Angeles production with Eustis, is relishing another crack at “this truly great play,” while admitting to “a few trepidations” and “a caterwaul of emotions.” A key point of his esteem for Kushner’s script is “the way he distributes care and empathy for all the characters. Usually plays are weighted one way or the other. Emotionally, ‘Angels’ keeps going to deeper places.” In one of Taccone’s choice and fascinating pieces of casting, Stephen Spinella, the actor who created a memorably sympathetic Prior at the Eureka (and won dual Tony Awards for the part on Broadway), will play the vituperative Roy Cohn role in Berkeley.
The return of Kushner’s masterwork to the region where it was born carries a particular charge. Much of the play was written in Northern California, including a mighty burst of 700 pages the playwright produced in 10 days of confinement at a Russian River cabin. As recently as 2010, when “Angels” was in a Signature Theatre run in New York, Kushner was rewriting a speech for Prior in his favored Café Flore in the Castro neighborhood. The revisions continue to this day, with new material going into both the Broadway and Berkeley productions.
When they meet in Heaven, in Act Five of “Perestroika,” Prior tells a skeptical Harper that “the real San Francisco, on Earth, is unspeakably beautiful.” On her way there later on, in that ravishing night flight monologue, Harper envisions the souls of the dead rising from the earth below. “And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a great web, a great net of souls ...”
The “painful progress” she imagines in that moment is a poetic enactment of “Angels in America’s” own soul — “longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”
Kushner, who was dreaming ahead for both his characters and his country as the millennium approached, created something that was both deeply rooted in its time and timeless. As “Angels” concludes, in the exquisitely becalmed final scene of “Perestroika,” the characters discuss Mikhail Gorbachev and the then-recent toppling of the Berlin Wall, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They also talk about their lives, their hopes and their determination to carry on.
Kushner, now 61, sounded humbled when he reflected on “the openness with which I allowed myself at age 33 to speak about my faith in human beings and our abilities to change ourselves and the world we inhabit. That’s the force of community and love, which is one of the lovely, valuable things that theater can do.”
Former arts and culture critic Steven Winn reviewed the original and Broadway productions of “Angels in America” for The San Francisco Chronicle.