Angels in America came to Broadway in 1993. This year, Hana Sharif, the new artistic director of the Rep, has chosen it to introduce herself to St. Louis. Tony Kushner’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play is one with with a strong emotional weight to it over the years. But how has it aged? Is its picture of life in the mid-Eighties during the deepest days of the AIDS crisis relevant to us today?
In a word, yes. But it’s not just the pictures of that life that resonate. The messages are timeless and universal. I admit I wasn’t sure when I walked into Millennium Approaches, the first of Angels’ two parts. I took care of one of the very early patients, before the syndrome had even been firmly identified, and I clearly remember standing at Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street in Greenwich Village the winter of ‘86, watching men go by, haggard, pale and weak, the layers on layers of winter wear rattling on their emaciated bodies. But the play is so strongly written that the throwback elements don’t feel dated. More importantly, this is a story that’s almost Shakespearean in its style and universality of themes. Multiple story lines, ghosts, metaphors...and if not quite the glorious language (and who knows how that will look a century hence), then in the midst of the drama and tragedy, a lot of very funny lines.
It’s a stunning production. The audiovisuals, Tim Mackabee’s scenic design, Xavier Pierce’s lighting design, Broken Chord’s music and sound design, Alex Basco Koch’s projection design, are beautifully harmonized to produce real audience immersion in this very solid work. Many thanks to director Tony Speciale for pulling all this together.
The story involves two couples, one gay men, the other a young Mormon couple who’ve moved to New York, the husband taking a job for Roy Cohn’s law office. Now, more than ever, we are interested in Roy Cohn, the man Donald Trump took as one of his role models, at least until it was revealed that he AIDS, whereupon Trump distanced himself. The question of the young Mormon attorney, who’s wrestling with his own questions of morality, being taken on (and in) by Cohn, is one of the focal points. (Cohn, by the way, is the subject of a documentary that’s just being released, reminding us about just how outrageously bad he was. Joseph McCarthy, any one?)
All the actors play multiple roles, but here in Millennium, the focus is on Barrrett Foa’s Prior Walter and his partner, Louis Ironson, Ben Cherry, and the married couple, Harper Pitt, played by Valeri Mudek and Joseph, her husband, the work of Jayson Speters, plus Peter Frechette’s Roy Cohn. They’re all excellent in different ways. Foa/Walter’s strong reaction to his diagnosis and the equally moving pain of Cherry’s Ironson, are compelling. The transplanted Utahns, Mudek and Speters, wrestling with their personal demons are perhaps less dramatic but slowly, increasingly, wrenching as things go on. Frechette, as Cohen, radiates malevolence, sometimes slyly, other times in full-volume rage.
We will see more of the others in Part Two, Perestroika, particularly Meredith Baxter’s mother to Joseph Pitt. Here in Part One, of particular note is David Ryan Smith, playing Belize, the nurse. He’s often played as something of a flouncing flibbertigibbet. Here, he’s still a drag queen, but a large, strong character, and the change benefits the show.
And a tip of the hat (or, more accurately if somewhat dated, of the cap) to whomever made the seemingly minor decision to have the bed rails raised on the hospital bed of the unconscious Prior. A small detail often overlooked, not only a necessary clinical action but it, advertently or not, gives another visual metaphor.
Family questions. Ethics. Loyalty. Strength. Universal themes. It’s a stunning production and the sort of show that people will end up saying, “I wish I could have seen that.” It will live a long time in the memories of the audience.
Part Two, Perestroika opens this coming Friday, September 13. There’s a discount for buying tickets to both at one time, if that’s of significance.
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
through October 6
The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves
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