‘Angels in America’ soars with fresh spirit
For a show that just celebrated its 30th anniversary and is set very specifically in the Reagan years of the AIDS pandemic, “Angels in America” feels remarkably fresh in a Valencia College production.
You might be a bit apprehensive, imagining college students tackling Tony Kushner’s sprawling, complex Pulitzer-winning work, with its elevated language and almost mystical symbolism. I was.
But what these student performers occasionally lack in the assuredness of more mature actors, they make up for with a naturalness that lets the viewer experience the artifice of Kushner’s words with new eyes and ears. Their youthfulness is on their side: The characters in the play are all searching, dissatisfied with their situations but unsure what lies ahead, waiting as “Millennium Approaches” — the title of the first part of “Angels in America” and the segment on the Valencia stage this month.
Director Jeremy Seghers has guided his actors to find the beauty of Kushner’s text without declaiming it full of self-importance over what they are saying. Even in their flights of fantasy, somehow Prior, Harper, Louis and especially Joe seem more real than ever. And the sound, lighting and other effects carefully don’t overpower the cast.
In his epic play, Kushner crafted a heady reflection on love and justice — and particularly how American culture and politics of the 1980s affected — often distorted — those ideas.
New Yorkers Prior and Louis have been a couple for more than four years, but their relationship is tested when Prior contracts AIDS. Joe and Harper are a young married Mormon couple
from Salt Lake City who also are struggling in New York. She seeks refuge in a valium-filled fantasy world. Joe wrestles with his own particular inner demons.
Joe also works for Roy Cohn, a brash — or perhaps obnoxious is a better term — lawyer, who has his own demons to fight. Cohn is a real-life figure in this fantasia; he served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt of the 1950s.
At Valencia, Cohn is played by theater chair John DiDonna, and the age difference adds to the powerful dynamic between the abrasive lawyer and naïve Joe. DiDonna is in fine form, not sugarcoating Cohn’s off-putting demeanor but showing the twinkle that made him charismatic even to his detractors.
One other non-student is in the cast: Sarah Lockard, a veteran of local theaters, plays various roles, including a shrewd turn as an aged rabbi who opens the show with a meditation on life and loss. She also makes Joe’s mother memorable by eschewing even a hint of sentimentality.
Christopher Moux captures Louis’s angsty waffling and beautifully delivers in a long monologue late in the evening that sounds like the rambling only misguided youth could create. As a sassy drag queen-turned nurse, Marquise Hillman’s reactions to the torrent of words add the right comic sparkle to the scene.
Edwin Perez lets the audience see the critical glimpses of what Prior was like before his illness, while touchingly emphasizing his current vulnerability. In a variety of
roles, Luana Fugulin does good work balancing humor and seriousness.
Mary Grace Meyer’s take on Harper is less dreamy and more clear-eyed than often seen. This woman knows she is deluding herself — and she is OK with that. As viewed at a dress rehearsal, the interrupted conversations between her and Joe could be presented at a quicker pace, but that’s a minor point.
Swigging Pepto Bismol, Sean Perry makes the disintegration of naiveté and idealism in poor conflicted Joe compelling. In a sea of vulnerable characters, Joe’s vulnerability is particularly striking — and wrenching.
Indigo Leigh’s costumes are on point, and Jon Whiteley’s lighting works well with Gregory Loftus’s limbo-like set of steps, platforms, tables and chairs, appropriate for this ever-changing world, with his projections contributing touches of scene-setting reality.
Those projections also aid with a preshow that depicts the cast dancing at the fabled Studio 54. Juxtaposing this carefree, happier time — before the harshness of what’s to come — is just one of Segher’s clever staging ideas.
And while you might be questioning how a threehour-plus play needed a preshow, I can tell you in this refreshing production of a masterwork, the time just flew by.