Review: ANGELS IN AMERICA at Stray Cat Theatre

Guest contributor David Appleford’s review of stray Cat Theatre’s production of ANGELS IN AMERICA – MILLENNIUM APPROACHES and PERESTROIKA.

In 1991, ANGELS IN AMERICA announced itself as “a gay fantasia on national themes,” which sounded at once grandiose and mischievous, and then proceeded to be exactly that. It was a hallucination in two parts; the first called MILLENNIUM APPROACHES, the second PERESTOIKA, plays that tried to take the temperature of a nation in the Reagan years and discovered the fever was already systemic.

Performing now at Tempe Center for the Arts through May 16, Stray Cat Theatre takes on the formidable challenge of mounting both halves of Tony Kushner’s play, a work that resists modest ambition. The first half, MILLENNIUM APPROACHES, opened earlier this month; the second, PERESTROIKA, completed the epic this past weekend. In the coming week, the company will present the two plays in repertory, offering them back-to-back, yet Kushner’s vast, unruly fantasia was never meant to be consumed in fragments. Seen whole, its architecture is unmistakable. That Stray Cat Theatre has chosen to embrace that scale rather than dilute it is not merely ambitious, it’s fearless.

Set in 1985 and 1986, when AIDS was still spoken of in euphemisms and fear, the first part begins with a rabbi eulogizing a generation of immigrants who crossed oceans to build something sturdier than themselves. Before we meet the living, we are reminded of the dead; before the fantasia, the roots. From there, the play fans outward into Manhattan apartments, court offices, hospital rooms, and the chill corridors of political power.

Under director Ron May’s deft command of its many moving parts, the play’s emotional center rests with two couples, both unraveling. The unusually named Prior Walter (Marshall Glass), descendant of an old American line, discovers lesions on his body that signal AIDS. His lover, Louis Ironson (Nathan Spector) finds that his love falters in the face of Prior’s bodily decay. Spector makes Louis’s guilt operatic; he dissects his own cowardice in speeches that glitter with intellect and self-loathing. Glass, meanwhile, makes Prior grow luminous in suffering, visited by ancestors from centuries past who flutter in like emissaries from history itself.

Across town, Joe Pitt (Devon Mahon), a Mormon and a rising Republican legal mind, is locked in a marriage to Harper (Courtney Weir), whose Valium-softened loneliness gives her a kind of clairvoyance. Mahon makes Joe’s crisis one of identity: sexual, spiritual, political. Weir’s pitch-perfect Harper drifts through hallucinated travel brochures and Antarctic dreams, as if the only way to survive America is to leave it in the mind.

The hinge binding these stories is the despicable real-life character Roy Cohn (a ferociously effective Louis Farber), mentor to Joe and an avatar of ruthless power. When he learns he has AIDS and faces disbarment, he insists the disease is something that happens to other men, not him. In Kushner’s audacious stroke, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Nina Miller) arrives to observe his decline. It is both a theatrical joke and a moral reckoning: history personified, refusing to be buried.

And finally, there’s Belize (an entertainingly broad Michael Thompson), a former drag queen, once Prior’s lover and, in time, Roy Cohn’s nurse. The heated exchange between Spector’s Louis and Thompson’s Belize is among the most accomplished confrontations in the production.

MILLENNIUM APPROACHES closes with one of modern theater’s great coups: an angel (Megan Holcomb) crashes into Prior’s bedroom, wings unfurled, proclaiming him a prophet. It’s a moment poised between the absurd and the sublime, at once preposterous and genuinely thrilling. Here, however, whether due to budgetary limits or theater logistics, the arrival doesn’t quite deliver the shattering impact audiences might expect. Still, the staging finds a measure of ingenuity in the angel’s entrance into the Arts Center’s studio theater in a way that feels both creative and inventively realized.

If the first part burns with urgency, PERESTOIKA is stranger and more wayward, beginning with a speech in Moscow by the world’s oldest Bolshevik condemning progress itself. “The only way forward is to not move,” he declares, a parody of reactionary logic that echoes the American resistance to change. Yet the play argues against it. Progress, it insists, however painful, is preferable to paralysis.

The second half is more overtly metaphysical. Heaven, we learn, is in disarray. The angels are bureaucrats of stasis, furious that humanity’s migrations and inventions have driven God away. Prior is summoned to halt the ceaseless motion of history.

What makes ANGELS IN AMERICA endure is not only its political audacity but its theatricality. The ensemble takes on multiple roles, some more successfully than others. Eight actors play both mortals and spirits. Identities are porous: the nurse may also be an angel; a mother, a ghost. Gender bends. Authority dissolves. Dori Brown’s set design is anchored by a series of metallic filing cabinets, their purpose ambiguous, though they might suggest the machinery of Washington bureaucracy where lives, deaths, and the nation’s inconvenient histories are cataloged, then quietly filed away. The otherwise spare stage is given shape and pulse through Stacey Walston’s lighting, which shifts with crisp, moment-to-moment precision, while Pete Bish’s atmospheric sound design presses in from all sides, at times bombastic, even startling in its force.

ANGELS IN AMERICA is often described as being one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. Such canonization can fossilize a work, but here the opposite occurs. Stray Cat’s revival seems to rediscover the volatility in the text and the humor that snaps like electricity. At heart, this “gay fantasia” is a love letter to survival. “The great work begins,” the angel proclaims.  That great work is not prophecy but persistence; caring for the sick, confessing cowardice, and choosing to love again.

Seen whole, the work feels like standing inside the symphony of a storm. It is unruly, excessive, occasionally uneven. It is also exhilarating. For several blazing hours, director May has taken Kushner’s work and turned Tempe Center for the Arts into a place where history and hope argue in full view of a local valley audience. You leave the theater feeling not bludgeoned but enlarged, as if you were permitted to eavesdrop on the republic arguing with itself. In an era that preferred silence about AIDS, ANGELS IN AMERICA insists on complexity.

The play may feel softer now than it did during the nineties. Time, education, and hard-won awareness inevitably reshape our reactions. But in this exemplary Stray Cat Theatre production, its radiance remains undimmed.

ANGELS IN AMERICA runs through May 16th at:

The Tempe Center for the Arts -- https://www.tempecenterforthearts.com/ -- 833-ATC-SEAT -- 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ

Stray Cat Theatre -- https://straycattheatre.org/

Graphic credit to Stray Cat Theatre

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