APROPOS ANGELS
Timing is right for evocative play
As Roy Cohn in the epic play Angels in America, Brian Markinson plays a man who is, basically, evil incarnate — at least, according to mainstream liberal leanings.
So does the devil get all the best lines?
“I get some good lines,” the actor, who counts himself as a liberal, allows.
“It’s a strange experience to play this guy. This wonderful troupe of actors, they have more to do. I feel very isolated. He’s more ballast. There are some funny lines. And I have a fairly spectacular death, which is fun to play. But I think everyone gets their share of great language in this.”
Cohn was infamous for both his adversarial prosecutorial style and for his pursuit of illiberal causes such as Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s crusades against Communism. In the 1970s, the New York lawyer helped forge Donald Trump’s persona by attacking his client’s attackers (among other things, the
real estate mogul was on the legal ropes for racial discrimination in several of his New York properties).
Cohn is a central character in Angels in America, the Pulitzerand Tony Award-winning play by Tony Kushner about the AIDS crisis in the U.S. during the 1980s and its aftermath. The Arts Club ended the Stanley’s 2016-17 season with the first, critically acclaimed part; the second part begins the company’s new season.
Markinson, who began his career on the New York stage (and is probably best known for his role as Dr. Arnold Rosen in AMC’s Mad Men) has a history with Angels. He saw the play during its original 1993 Broadway run, with Ron Leibman in the part of Cohn; Leibman won a Tony for his work. Markinson also had a part in HBO’s miniseries, including a scene in which he played opposite Al Pacino. Pacino won an Emmy for his portrayal of Cohn.
Not only is Angels in America one of Markinson’s favourite plays, the actor says “it might be my favourite play.”
“It is of a time; it was forged in the fires of loss and grief and rage, by a very, very brilliant writer (Kushner). It is a broad canvas that he paints. He tries to make the experience of being a gay man in 1980s New York accessible to humanity. We all bear witness. So I think it is a great, great play, one of the greatest ever written. I just love it. I find it so moving.”
Markinson says the first part, Millennium Approaches, “was about the armageddon and holocaust that was the disease at that time.” Perestroika, the second part, “is more about the restructuring, and what happens after the Earth shifts. It’s a lot more hopeful, it’s a lot funnier. It fits very snugly into our time right now with what’s happening, not just south of the border but worldwide in terms of how things are shifting to the right. This really speaks to that.”
For the actor, playing Cohn is not so much about finding the humanity of the person as it is being true to the man’s core ideology.
“He was a horrible guy who denied his homosexuality, his Judaism, who destroyed lives during the Army-McCarthy hearings, he was the template for Trump, and his attorney for the better part of a decade-and-a-half,” Markinson says.
“His morality lay in a place that is abhorrent to anyone who is a humanist. But there was a consistency to his character. He lived the way he died; he believed what he believed. He was about winning at all costs. His philosophy of life was: ‘The world is a shitty place. People are basically shit. If you want to win at this game, you’ve got to behave by certain mores.’
“But yeah, I’ve got to take a shower every night.”