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A Vision of Angels In America at Arena Stage

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An angel with white feathered wings and a long black coat (Billie Krishawn) walks barefoot in a slow spiral, raking the sand that surrounds a dark pit while a voice lists names of those who died in the AIDS pandemic. Chandeliers wrapped in thick, translucent protective plastic hang from above. This opening movement is not in the published script of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, but having seen the work of director János Szász when he was in residence at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, I know him to never be content to present a classic, even a modern classic by a living playwright, as others have before.

While the word “sand” does  appear early in the dialogue, through Maruti Evans’ set design, Szász has elevated sand into a visual and tactile motif: Props are buried or rediscovered; legs of furniture start to sink soon after they are placed by the stage crew. Metaphors come to mind: Sands of time; sand slipping through one’s fingers; kicking sand. 

Angels hinges on the dissolution of two relationships: that of Louis Ironson (Michael Kevin Darnall) a Jewish intellectual and his boyfriend Prior Walter (Nick Westrate), the 37th in his lineage to bare the name since the first Prior Walter fought alongside William the Conqueror, who has recently been diagnosed with AIDS; and that of a Mormon couple living in Brooklyn, Joe Pitt (John Austin), a law clerk at the US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit in New York, and his wife Harper (Deborah Ann Woll) who self-medicates her agoraphobia and anxiety with copious amounts of Valium. The couples’ paths cross when Louis, who works as a word processor for the court, picks up that Joe is in the closet, and when Prior’s dreams crossover with Harper’s hallucinations.

Missing from the printed program is the play’s subtitle: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Kushner rooted his stories of gay male life during the AIDS crisis in Reagan-era politics: Joe is a protége of attorney and political fixer Roy Cohn (Edward Gero gives a wonderfully bombastic scenery-chewing performance), who is angling to get Joe an appointment at the Justice Department to serve as his inside man. Cohn, as it would come to be widely known after his death, was also closeted and what he claimed to be “liver cancer” to friends, colleagues,and the general public was actually AIDS. Sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt including the panel remembering Cohn as “Bully Coward Victim” (which I had seen in my student days) is currently on display in Arena Stage’s lobby.

Other characters are drawn in, with Justin Weaks playing both Belize, the former drag queen, Prior’s prior boyfriend and nurse on the AIDS ward who has had quite enough of Louis’ navel-gazing, and Harper’s imaginary friend Mr. Lies  of the International Order of Travel Agents who moves like a Bob Fosse trickster, and Susan Rome playing Joe’s mother, Hannah, and an earlier victim of Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg. Darnell carries much of the dramatic weight as the play’s most conflicted character, Louis, made up to resemble a young Kushner, whether in his self-loathing as he first considers fleeing Prior’s AIDS diagnosis, or when his intellectualization of the problems of American democracy blind him to Belize’s lived experience as a gay Black man. 

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Written by enovate

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