‘Angels in America’ triumphs in revival at Berkeley Rep.
Masterwork’s revival reminds us why its affirming spirit has such impact
It takes a while to lift off. You might not even see the overall design at first, the storied magic as scene after workaday scene plops out, landing with an “OK, but so what?”
But be patient. This script will soar. Berkeley Rep’s “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” whose two mammoth parts opened in a theatergoing marathon on Saturday, April 28, gathers momentum by accumulation. Directed by Tony Taccone, who was artistic director of San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company when it
commissioned the play in 1987, it takes flight only after its mighty wings have stretched to enclose all of Reagan-era America and a shattered cosmos above in a life-giving, life-choosing embrace.
In a way that American drama has not since equaled, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning script combines a joyful imagination, linguistic wizardry, mischievous theatricality, vertiginous intellect, daring yet self-aware politics and all-encompassing heart. At the premieres of the two parts in the early ’90s, the show was a balm for an America riven by AIDS, the rise of Reaganism in the previous decade, culture wars, rootlessness and hate in its myriad guises — homophobia, racism, classism.
While AIDS is no longer the death sentence it is for Prior Walter (Randy Harrison) and Roy Cohn (Stephen Spinella) — yes, that Roy Cohn, of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the McCarthy hearings, the one who mentored Donald Trump, who loathed communism as few humans can know loathing, but lived as a closeted gay the whole time — the other sicknesses in “Angels” have only metastasized. And in our era of identity politics, one of the play’s fears resonates anew — that the intermingling of different groups means loss of community and home, especially in a place like the United States, an invented nation, a place made out of words. What’s to become of Jews when they give their children goyish names, as the Rabbi (Carmen Roman, molten with feeling) laments in the opening scene? Does intermingling only bring diseases, like AIDS? Will all identities — as gays, as blacks, as Mormons, as Jews — melt away?
But if the play’s afflictions are ours, so must be its hope. Yes, Harper (Bethany Jillard), a Valium-addicted agoraphobic Mormon, and Prior, a former drag queen reckoning with his AIDS diagnosis, can meet on an equal playing field and truly see each other as no others can and tell each other’s futures. Yes, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Roman) can whisper to Louis (Benjamin T. Ismail), a selfrighteous secular Jew, the Hebrew words of a prayer he’s forgotten so together they can bless the man they regard as “the polestar of human evil.” Yes, Harper can escape her closeted gay husband, Joe (Danny Binstock), through a portal to an Antarctica where there are timber and Eskimos, thanks to the smooth-talking help of Mr. Lies (Caldwell Tidicue), of the International Order of Travel Agents — IOTA. And yes, a pestilence-ravaged, emaciated Prior, abandoned by Louis, his squeamish lover, can have his ceiling crack in two as an Angel (Francesca Faridany) bursts through, endowing him with a terrible, incomprehensible prophecy.
Yes, it’s all possible. It happens in drug-fueled hallucinations and fever dreams, in visitations from the beyond that no one but the visited can see. (And onstage, it’s all real and present and magical in a way that no filmed version, even one as excellent as Mike Nichols’ miniseries for HBO, can ever recreate.) But the important thing is it can happen. We can commune with people with whom we seem to share nothing. We can forgive. Sick and despised, we can nonetheless be warriors for life. Acknowledging what it costs us to move in the world and change it and always desire more than what we have, we can still choose to be alive.
The first scenes in “Part One: Millennium Approaches” don’t always foretell the way the play will expand the universe and draw infinite new connections among the dimensions within it. Heated exchanges between Harper and Joe, between Louis and Prior, are too tidily circumscribed within realism, each its own efficiently run enclave. You long for a God’s-eye view that would tie together this world’s disparate beads.
But by the time “Part Two: Perestroika” begins more than 3½ hours later, Kushner and Taccone have laid an elaborate latticework of kindling. The spark ignites in Jennifer Schriever’s lighting design, which makes sherbet orange and indigo radiate seemingly from the Angel herself, joining Faridany’s mellifluous voice, which charges every tone with a phalanx of heavenly grace notes.
Spinella, who played Prior in the premiere of “Angels” and won two Tonys for that role, takes multitasking to a new level in the leviathan lawyer and fixer that is Roy Cohn. Wheedling countless shady deals simultaneously on at least as many telephone lines, he doesn’t see each conversation as separate; it’s all one coursing stream that he dances across, its invincible captain. Until, of course, he isn’t invincible, and
he battles his disease as if drowning every second but wrestling Poseidon the whole way down.
Ismail’s Louis is as squirmy as a worm, then puckish as a sprite in his flirtations with Joe. When the two finally get close to each other and stay there, they so deeply quaff of each other just by smell that you almost don’t need to see them touch. Tidicue (who’s better known as Bob the Drag Queen) as Mr. Lies and as the nurse Belize doesn’t have a veteran stage actor’s clarity when it comes to driving a monologue toward diamond-sharp points, but his presence and timing are so delectable you always look to his reactions first in a group. If Binstock over-relies on a pout as Joe, he also makes especially clear how much the character wants to figure out how to be “good,” how under the facade of
this broken man, there is only bottomless panic.
Harrison’s Prior comes alive when he becomes a prophet, when all his queenly sass and worldly, sardonic sangfroid don’t work and aren’t the point anymore. There’s more in him now than the fear of the beyond, the despair and fury at abandonment by Louis. He’s acquired a quiet but implacable grace, standing up to the Angel and her prophecy. It’s a grace that doesn’t need to insist on itself. He has seen the divine, and he chooses instead to be human and mortal and alive for now, with all its “intestinal” filth, its fathomless cruelty. But he has chosen, and so we must as well.