Books
Like “Angels in America” itself, this oral history of Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour theatrical masterwork contains multitudes. Isaac Butler and Dan Kois use interviews with close to 250 people, conducted in 2016-17, to assemble “The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America.” In addition to the playwright, actors, directors, designers, producers, scholars and Barney Frank weigh in. Other source material, a running timeline and archival photographs buttress a sweeping and richly detailed account of a play that unquestionably and in multiple ways reconfigured our collective cultural landscape.
The book, which labors at times under its own surfeit of material, is especially and movingly good at capturing the ongoing reverberance and currency of “An-
gels.” It also conveys, on a granular level, the determination, heartbreak and competitive fire that go into making great theater.
Published to mark the 25th anniversary of the play’s 1993 Broadway premiere, “The World Only Spins Forward” both celebrates and illuminates a great work as it returns to prominent stages this spring. The National Theatre’s acclaimed 2017 version has traveled from England to New York for a Broadway run, while the Berkeley Repertory Theatre readies its new production for an April unveiling.
The story begins before Kushner embarked on the play, which would come to bear the subtitle “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” and go on to win, among many other honors, the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award (for Part One: “Millennium Approaches”) and a second Tony for Part Two: “Perestroika.” An opening chapter supplies a brief backdrop of the gay liberation movement and AIDS in the Reagan and Bush years. Then, after a little more backstory about the playwright’s pre-“Angels” work in New York and elsewhere, the scene shifts to San Francisco.
It was here, in the late 1980s, that then-Eureka Theatre directors Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone commissioned “Angels” for the company. A very long and protracted writing process ensued, including a feverish stint in a spiderriddled cabin on the Russian River during which Kushner spilled out 700 pages of “Perestroika” in 10 days. Much of it was subsequently scrapped or revised. While it’s certainly unprovable, “Angels” may be the most extensively rewritten major American play ever. In a recurring motif, Kushner repeatedly handed the actors and directors new or substantially revised speeches, often at the last minute. His penchant for delivering voluminous and sometimes ferocious “notes” on performances is also well documented.
For reasons that would ultimately lead to painful (but not permanent) rifts among the playwright, Eustis and Taccone, “Millennium Approaches” first reached the stage in a workshop production at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. But it was here on 16th Street, on a memorable June night in 1991, that the play received its official world premiere. Shadowed by the death of Sigrid Wurschmidt (the original Angel), a barebones production and some bitter wrangling over future rights, the premiere was a mind- and heart-expanding triumph. Of director David Esbjornson’s Eureka production, which employed a kind of shower curtain for the many scene changes and some startling special effects, Kushner remarks here: “To this day no one has ever done better with the magic.”
“Angels” went on to conquer Broadway and London, tour, play in regional theaters, reincarnate as an HBO miniseries and an opera, and generate its share of controversy, including a planned production shutdown by Catholic University. Butler and Kois, who began this project as a cover story for Slate, pile on more testimony about all this, and more than they can usefully deploy. Exclamatory asides from relatively minor figures (“Carolyn Swift is a force of nature,” says one member of the national touring company about another) come off as stray distractions. Other subjects, like the mechanics of angel wings or various student productions, might have been productively truncated.
But when the authors succeed in orchestrating the voices, as they often do, the book takes on a choral authority. “Interlude” chapters about each of the major characters are full of insightful and intimate glimpses of acting’s alchemy. Here’s the counterintuitive key Ellen McLaughlin used in playing her transfixingly strange Angel: “The lack of human psychology is what makes her so fun.” F. Murray Abraham found his way into playing the Roy Cohn character on an airplane, when his seatmate said of the real-life virulently closeted lawyer, “He was a son of a bitch, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”
Kushner, who is invariably the smartest, brightest voice in the room, offers one sparkling, openhearted observation after another. Watching a Cohn scene in Dutch director Ivan von Hove’s radically spare production, Kushner realized, “It really was a play about watching a body die.” “Angels” has never become a static milestone in his life.
Eustis, who now runs the Public Theater in New York, believed from the start that “Angels in America” was a play with great things at stake that transcended the ostensible subjects of its time. In a scene late in “Perestroika,” Eustis hears the big questions being posed: “Will we choose selfishness and fear and greed, or solidarity and inclusion and love? It is either the end of the world or the beginning.”