Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches at Theatre Rhinoceros

In the first part of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel.

Between its 1993 Broadway premiere and its 2017 National Theatre revival, Angels’ mythical status has expanded, onstage and off. But to director and actor John Fisher, this play is best experienced when presented up close, with its human heartbreaks and joys mere feet from the audience. “[Theatre Rhinoceros] is ‘IMAX’ theatre - it’s immediate, it’s right there, you could touch the actors. It’s always been staged as an epic, as opposed to a lived experience. And I don’t believe it was written as an epic, it was written as a ‘fantasia’ - and fantasy is immersive, not witnessed.”