ANGELS IN AMERICA (PART 1)
Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches, New Theatre; April 24-May 24, 2008; 24 April - 24 May 2008; Thur-Sat 8pm; Sun 5pm; $27/$22 conc/$17 School groups (1 teacher free per 10 students) ph: 1300 306 776 or www.mca-tix.com
In 1990, when Tony Kushner’s Angels in America made its debut in the US, it was touted as the most ambitious play of its time. Nothing has come along since then to knock it off that particular perch. Its breadth and sweep (close to seven hours if both parts are played in tandem) are wonderfully ambitious, while the subject matter – politics, gay sex, religion, AIDS, love death and hypocrisy – remain as gasp-worthy for polite society now as then. And its humour, compassion and anger are just as relevant and exciting.
This production, directed by Alex Galeazzi for New Theatre, is well up to the high standard demanded by Kushner’s rich and tricky script. And it’s not only a joy to behold, but puts to shame some much more expensive and better-resourced companies in this town. (I can say that because there’s been some dismally mediocre theatre on offer in Sydney so far this year.)
Angels – Part 1 is set in the mid-80s when Kaposi’s Sarcoma was the stigmata of unforgivable sin worn by young gay men, and western society was still able to condemn or ignore the phenomenon. There are interconnecting characters and the main storyline centres on Prior (Beejan Olfat), a New York WASP and AIDS sufferer whose boyfriend Louis (Angus King) is Jewish and as able to cope with that as with Prior’s illness and inevitable death.
Along the way Louis meets Joe (Tyran Parke) a smart young lawyer whose chronic Mormonism has taken him into unhappy marriage with Harper (Abigail Austin) in an attempt to deny his own homosexuality. Harper spends her days denying the futility of her life via handfuls of Valium and a hallucinatory life that’s connected to the pill-popping. It also allows the play to take flight into another dimension – fantasy – that works well in theatre when carried off with conviction and panache.
The fictitious Joe is befriended by the real life Roy M Cohn (Laurence Coy), the McCarthyite wheeler-dealer lawyer, friend of Nancy Reagan, unscrupulous operator and a man who was not homosexual but merely f**ked men and did not have AIDS but was actually suffering from liver cancer.
For his own nefarious ends, Cohn wants to embed the highflying Joe in a powerful job at the Justice Department in Washington DC (he probably also wants to bed him, but that’s another matter); and part of the drama is watching Joe wrestle with his own ambition, conscience, repressed sexual desires and his belief that he is a decent person.
Louis has similar conflicts: he can’t bear to watch Prior die and can’t bear to be around him; and then can’t bear the guilt when he abandons the sick man to hospital and loneliness. By way of contrast, there is Prior’s dizzy silly drag queen friend Belize (Ray Chong Nee). Belize’s main concerns in life are not having chipped nail polish, always having perfect eye shadow and – when it comes to the crunch – being the kind of friend we would all pray for.
Entwined with these central figures are an Angel (of course), an Eskimo (natch); two of Prior’s ancestral Priors (yep, he is the 34th in a long line of Wasps) as well as Joe’s mom, sundry passers by and Cohn’s spectral nemesis Ethel Rosenberg (Elaine Hudson), a woman he contrived to wrongly have executed by electric chair in 1953, as a Soviet spy (if Cohn hated anyone more than a homo it was a Communist).
The company of eight, including Jane Phegan in the roles of Emily and a Woman in the Bronx, take on all the roles in a freewheeling, finely realised production. It’s an ensemble effort with no weak links and that includes the set by Brigid Dighton, costumes by Alice Morgan, lighting by Michael John Schell, projected images by John Henry Martin and sound design/soundscape by Panos Couros. Voice and dialect coach Simon Stollery also ensures rock-solid American voices.
All in all, this production of Angels in America is a winner. Age has not wearied the play itself and this cast and creative team have done justice to it in performance and staging. Ingenuity and imagination are to the fore in the staging (the projected visuals are worth any number of tacky props) and all in all, it’s one of the best productions, independent or mainstream of the first half of 2008.
