Nathan Lane
Photo: Brinkhoff & Mogenburg
New York is the recipient of the stunning
and superb revival of the two-part masterpiece “Angels in America” from London
where Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play actually began a quarter
century ago and a year before it took Broadway by storm in 1993. Repeating
their roles in this glorious new National Theater production are Nathan Lane as
Roy Cohen and Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter. The king-size play is being
presented as a unit with its two lengthy parts presented in consecutive
evenings or with a matinee and evening option. “Millennium Approaches” is the
first part of this massive work subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”
The best news is that “Angels...” has landed with its wings
intact. It is a seven-hour, epic-scaled play that uses the AIDS epidemic as a
defining metaphor for the eroding of our country’s moral, spiritual and ethical
postures during the 1980’s. There is, at the end of the first three and one-half
hours (including two intermissions) a feeling that a remarkably stirring and
unconventional theatrical experience is passionately and purposefully
unfolding. Whether or not you have seen the play as produced in 2003 as a
mini-series by HBO, the excellent Off Broadway revival in 2010 or even perhaps even
the opera, the original play, however slightly
tweaked over the years by Kushner, remains a must-see dramatic event.
It is a huge, impressive endeavor upon which Kushner has
implanted much that is skilled and much that is soulful. Tarnished only
slightly by a somewhat archetypal embrace of characters and situations, it
vehemently condemns the collectively biased course that our nation took during
the Reagan-Bush era. How the play translates and illuminates its message in
today’s polarized political landscape is all too terrifyingly clear.
Episodic, but not fragmented, “Angels...” revolves around
the fatefully integrated lives of five principal characters. Each in his or her
own way is either discomforted, disenfranchised or disillusioned. The
characters include a gay couple, one of whom is dying of AIDS, a repressed
homosexual Mormon Republican lawyer, his hallucinating agoraphobic wife, and
Roy Cohen, the opportunistic closeted homosexual lawyer. All plummet through
the plays’ social, political and psychological mayhem as well as expediently through
set designer Ian MacNeil’s impressive neon framed mobile settings.
Both parts of “Angels in America” have a wildly unconventional,
part-real-part-fantasy, part-farce - structure that not only stretches
previously prescribed dramatic boundaries, but also gives its characters room
to coexist in unorthodox counterpoint to each other.
Marianne Elliott’s splendid direction unleashes an
exhilarating freedom of expressiveness in each interlocking scene, as well as
within each of the extraordinary actors, many of whom double, triple and quadruple
their roles. In this regard, Denise Gough, Susan Brown, and Amanda Lawrence stand
out for their multiple excursions.
Given Kushner’s penchant for broad and brash humor, many of
the roles are vitally charged with large doses of vitriol, vinegar and
especially in the case of Cohen, a distinctly vituperative sleaziness. Lane is to
put it mildly, spectacularly brilliant as Cohen, the abrasive, abusive
McCarthyite who attempts to further the career of his protégé Joseph Pitt (Lee
Pace) a guilt-ridden Mormon and a Justice Department lawyer. Pitt’s personal
problems are not only standing in his way up the political ladder, they are
seen infecting the behavior of his neglected, valium-addicted wife Harper. Harper
is given a memorable state of poignant disorientation by Gough.
But at the heart of the play lies the painful, imploding
relationship of Louis (James McArdle), a Jewish clerk and Prior (Garfield) his
dying WASP cross-dressing lover. Although we see the tortured-by-his-desertion
Louis wearing his conscience on his sleeve it is the ravaged cloak of impending
death worn on the frail shoulders of the heart-breaking Prior, that prepares us
for the emotionally explosive finale of Part I, the arrival through a
shattering ozone layer of the winged messenger Angel (Amanda Lawrence). “Isn’t
this a little too Stephen Spielberg?” asks the frightened Prior, who has already
had visitations from deceased relatives.
“Perestroika” (Part II) concludes with a fantastical and
prophetic pilgrimage: one taken by the heart, produced by the mind, and guided
by the soul of Prior Walter, the play’s protagonist. Never preachy, almost always
funnier than you would expect, the play’s message of a new dawn basks in the
light of earthly reality.
The shifting relationships of the characters we first met in
Part I continue to shock, astound, baffle and amuse us. But now these left and
right wingers, the straights and the gays are on the verge of resolving their
dilemmas. Except for the epilogue, the action unfolds in New York City in 1986
and follows Prior’s newly prescribed destiny as an unlikely, if noticeably
unwilling, prophet of his age.
Dying but spiritually evolving, Prior is driven by a desire
to live. He challenges the directives of the descended Angel who has just
appointed him a prophet. Allowed a distinct temperament, Lawrence portrays the
winged messenger with a playfully feisty attitude. Ascending in a dizzying
dream to heaven - a scene that wryly recalls Dorothy’s trip to Oz - Prior takes
his case before an entire council of angels. It is thrilling to watch this
amazing cast explore the depths and desires of their unforgettable characters. And
Elliott’s upward and onward direction is no less dynamic in its course
than is Kushner’s astounding text.
“Perestroika” doesn’t depend on restraint. It relies on the
wisdom of wit and comic intrusions. When it comes to laughs, it shames many recent
so-called comedies. A bold sexual coupling might begin on an erotic note, but
ends humorously in a crescendo of harmonic discord. Given a rafter-shaking resonance
by Lane, Cohen’s virulent tirades, even at the moment of his death, defines his
self-immortalizing gall.
Some characters who seemed fragmented in Part I become more
important in Part II. The former drag queen Belize (a terrific Nathan Stewart-Jarrett)
is Cohn’s no-nonsense nurse and Joe Pitt’s mother (Susan Brown) a devout Mormon
finds an unexpected resurgence of her real self and of her faith as she
unwittingly becomes an inspiration to Prior. Inspired is the only word to describe
this wondrously theatrical double-header that reveals the scarred core of this
world and a sacred corner of the next.
