JANUARY 14, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 15

ENTERTAINMENT

Passion, humor and hope shine through in Part II of Angels

by Barry Daniels

The success on Broadway of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes represents a new maturity in the gay community and makes that community openly central to cultural life in America. The play is a profoundly political work and an affecting human document that manages to combine Brechtian dialectics and the poetic qualities of Tennessee Williams. It is a gay play which deals openly with sex and AIDS, guilt and betrayal, love and ideology. It is a committed and passionate work that delights in its own theatrical pyrotechnics.

Part I: Millennium Approaches opened last April to much acclaim and has earned Kushner the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play. Part II: Perestroika opened on November 23 after several delays and much rewriting. In it Kushner's master plan for the work becomes clear.

Perestroika begins with a speech by Prelapsarianov, the last living Bolshevik, standing in front of the blood red act curtain. He comments on "this sour little age" and argues the need for a theory that is linked to praxis. He raises the questions that are central to the play: "Will the past release us? Will we change in time?" The curtain rises on a scene in Louis' East Village apartment. We see the sexual awakening of conservative Republican, Mormon law clerk, Joe Pitt, in the arms of Louis, guiltridden over his abandonment of his AIDSstricken lover, Prior Walter. When Louis, who is the voice of positive radical politics in the play, learns that Roy Cohn is Joe's mentor and that Joe has written homophobic court decisions, the affair comes to a violent end. Harper, Joe's wife, has entered a valium induced fantasy world. Her Antarctica turns out to be Prospect Park, where she is found by police and returned to the care of Joe's mother, Hannah, who has sold her Salt Lake City home and come to Brooklyn after Joe's confession of his homosexuality. Witty and sarcastic, black nurse, Belize continues to help care for his friend Prior. He also must deal with the new patient on his floor, Roy Cohn, who is still haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, as he enters the final stages of full-blown AIDS. The Angel, whose crash landing in Prior's room and announcement that he would be a prophet ended Millennium Approaches, reveals her mission which is "to stop the virus of time,” to destroy mankind and achieve stasis. She blames God's creation, “man,” for his disappearance during the San Francisco earthquake in 1906-in Kushner's gay cosmology San Francisco equals heaven. She is a cosmic reactionary who wants to end all progress and change. She does battle with Prior who refuses to be her prophet. In the emergency council scene, set in a heaven

PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS

AIDS patient Roy Cohn (played by Ron Leibman) remains haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Kathleen Chalfant) in Perestroika, Part II of Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St., New York.

backed by the ruins of San Francisco and lit by flickering candles, Prior defends motion, change and his own battle for life, making his own prophesy that "this plague shall go away."

As in Part I, Kushner continues to provide the actors with dazzling set pieces. Louis' seduction of Joe is tender and very sexy. Joe Mantello as Louis, and David Marshall Grant as Joe are adept at catching the very poignant need of both men in this scene as well as their ambivalent responses to each other. The first hospital scene between Roy Cohn and Belize is a tour de force for Ron Liebman as Cohn. Jeffrey Wright's Belize, who serves as go between the various plot threads, artfully portrays the character's affection for Prior and his compassion for Cohn. He is calmly indignant while never losing his biting wit. The scene in which Prior and Harper's visions merge as they watch the Diorama at the Mormon Visitors Center is a brilliant mingling of the different realities in the play. There is a brutal scene between Hannah and Joe whose strength comes from the spare economy of its writing. The ideological positions of Belize and Louis are given a final brilliant airing. Belize compares the USA to Roy Cohn, "terminal, crazy and mean," while Louis pompously defends his vision of progress through a democracy created anew by a coalition of the dispossessed.

Again, Kushner uses humor to undercut both rhetoric and passion. His characters' ability to crack jokes at the most inappropriate moments helps make them somehow terribly human. Even Cohn at the moment of his painful death is allowed a final jibe. For the audience this laughter is healing. It saves the playwright from the danger of becoming pretentious when daring to write such an epic political drama.*

Almost all the characters in the play achieve insights into themselves which are beautifully realized in the performance. In addition to Wright, Mantello, Grant, and Liebman, whom I've already mentioned, I should commend Marcia Gay Harden, whose Harper makes a move out of her confusion and begins to find her own dignity, and Kathleen Chalfant, whose Hannah becomes a figure of compassion and hope. Ellen McLaughlin handles the stylized and difficult part of the Angel well. But the evening belongs to Stephen Spinella whose performance as Prior dominates the action. Bitter, angry, scared, with a comic whimsy and a flutter of hands, he achieves an amazing grace in the role. His personal victory and quiet dignity are the very heart of Perestroika.

Director George C. Wolfe must be partially credited for the compassionate understanding of the play's complex central characters. The staging is elegant as is the work

of the designers, Robin Wagner (sets), Jules Fisher (lights) and Toni-Leslie James (costumes). But this elegance is cool and seems to me to be at odds with the passionate and baroque writing. As with Millennium Approaches, Wolfe fails to realize the rhythmic potential of the text with its parallel and overlapping scenes. He seems uncommitted, or at least cautious, about the play's politics.

The epilogue to the seven hour drama takes place four years later. It is 1990, Perestroika has begun in Eastern Europe, and there is a sense of hope that is fundamental to Kushner's vision as well as to his politics. It is set in Central Park at the Bethesda Fountain with its bronze angel, named after the biblical fountain with healing water, which sprung up in the spot where the Angel Bethesda touched the earth. Hannah, Prior, Louts and Belize have let go of their anger, and, in a very real sense, have healed. It is significant that the couple, Joe and Harper Pitt are absent from this scene: they have their separate personal journeys to make before they can be part of the new world that is forming. The staging which places Louis and Belize together seems to physically indicate that their ideological opposition has been resolved as well. Although death is present, there is the hope that love and justice can bring about forgiveness and that a new and better world can be made as the millennium approaches.

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