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Thirty Years On, Millennium Approaches Still

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Endings are harder than beginnings, so you can understand, if not applaud, Arena Stage’s decision to re-mount only the first half of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s landmark “gay fantasia on national themes.” Set circa 1985-6 and first performed in San Francisco in 1991, this bifurcated seven-hour opus about AIDS and gay male life in Ronald Reagan’s America has only grown more haunting in the decades since Reagan’s seductive greed-good, government-bad ethos curdled into feral Trumpism.

The show’s last local appearance, a strong 2016 co-production between Round House Theatre and Olney Theatre Center, included Perestroika, its thornier and even longer second part. (Arena’s new gloss on part one, Millennium Approaches, runs the customary 3.5 hours, including one 15-minute intermission, though Kushner’s published script recommends two.) Arena hasn’t yet said when, or if, they’ll do Perestroika. That’s a pity, but not a reason to deprive yourself of Hungarian director János Szász’s stirring, panoramic take on Millennium for the in-the-round Fichandler Stage, wherein a nimble cast, balanced among D.C. regulars and out-of-towners, manage to make Kushner’s epic feel intimate.

One of the ways the show still seems magical is by conveying the enormity of the AIDS epidemic, and of the culture at its Reagan-era inflection point, with only eight actors. All occupy multiple roles, a “compromise” usually dictated by the economics of the theater, though one that director Mike Nichols chose to keep for his 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation of Angels.

Twenty years after that, designer Maruti Evans has covered the Fichandler stage with sand, into which the Angel (Billie Krishawn) traces patterns and symbols before the show formally begins. More sand falls periodically from overhead, hourglass-style, where an array of chandeliers are suspended in painter’s plastic. It’s all suggestive of impermanence and decay, an elegant visual metaphor for the ways AIDS is eating away at Prior Walter’s body even as he begins to experience ecclesiastical visions. Nick Westrate is our exposed and enraged Prior, while Michael Kevin Darnall is believably self-loathing as Louis Ironson, Prior’s misnamed partner. Louis abandons Prior, unable to witness his lover’s suffering, for a more tentative new relationship with the closeted Mormon court clerk Joe Pitt.

John Austin is a compelling Joe, but Deborah Ann Woll is even better as Harper, his spouse, who is dealing with both a Valium addiction and her husband’s sexual disinterest in her. In her drug-addled isolation, she conjures up an imaginary companion, Mr. Lies. Kushner suggested the character be costumed as a jazz musician, but costume designer Oana Botez has styled the superb Justin Weaks, who plays Mr. Lies and also the sympathetic nurse/drag queen Belize, more like Super Fly, wrapping Weaks’ slender frame in canary-yellow feathered topcoats and fluorescent green suits. Harper is a largely passive character until fairly late in Perestroika, but Woll makes us believe Harper has emotional resources we haven’t seen yet. (Another reason to yearn for this cast to finish the story: I want more of Weaks’ Belize, who’s more of a presence in Part Two than in Part One.)

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Written by enovate

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