Angels Rises to New Heights

The first 3 hour installment of Tony Kushner's six hour epic, "Angels in America", "Millennium Approaches", by the Hypocrites Theatre Company and currently running at The Bailiwick Theatre in Chicago, directed by Sean Graney, is a song from beginning to end.Set in New York City in the mid-1980s.

Act One of "Millennium Approaches" introduces us to the central characters. Louis Ironson is a slight neurotic, homosexual Jew who lives with his lover, Prior Walter. We find out that Prior has developed AIDS and Louis is unable to deal with the situation. In the meantime, Republican, and Mormon law clerk, Joe Pitt, is struggling with a mentally challenged wife, and his own closeted homosexuality. This first installment, speaks of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the booming wave of Reaganism in the eighties, when not only was there no understanding of how the disease was contracted, but also that it meant a certain and agonizing end.

 

 Graney's set is perfectly sparse. With a limited budget, he is able to transform the evening into a magical event. Crude wooden coffins are major set pieces in each scene and play the role of everything from tables in restaurants, to phone booths and even toilets. They keep reminding the audience that death is ever present especially in those who were diagnosed with AIDS in the early eighties.

The acting is some of the best I have seen in Chicago in twenty years. Kurt Ehrmann as the tenacious high powered lawyer, Roy Cohn, who refuses to give in to anything least of all his doctor's diagnosis of AIDS, is tender and tough and thoroughly mesmerizing. Scott Bradley as Prior Walter, is a flamboyant, self-deprecating man dying from AIDS, never misses a step. You can't keep your eyes off him. His performance is raw and perfect.

The production was incredibly painful to watch at times and the audience visible shifted in their seats and looked away in scenes, yet within seconds were laughing or visibly sobbing.

 
Graney manages to distill a complicated script and a subject matter that without proper direction would be maudlin, into a potion that is magic.

 
Angels in America runs at the Bailiwick Theatre through April 30, 2006. For scheduling and tickets, visit www.bailiwicktheatre.org.

 

 

 

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