HBO

December 5, 2003 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

"Angels' finally makes it to film

Tony Kushner's epic AIDS drama to air on HBO in December

Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) turns away from Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) as a chill settles over the bedroom in HBO's production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

by Kaizaad Kotwal

At the end of the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the Angel appears before her AIDS-ravaged prophet Prior and proclaims, "The great work begins!" Little did Kushner know that he was being prescient about the difficulties in turning his fantastic play into a film.

But soon, the most important AIDS play ever written is finally coming to a screen near you, albeit a small screen and via cable at that.

Tony Kushner's two-part epic drama Angels in America has been referred to by several critics and scholars as one of the most important plays of the last century. Yet the film has had a tumultuous genesis, suffering from the on-again off-again syndrome of so many thoughtful and intelligent Hollywood projects.

Many directors, numerous actors, and various studios have been attached to the project. At one point Robert Altman was set to direct, at another the original Broadway cast was set to do the film.

But Angels is a heavy project, in more ways that one, to transfer from stage to screen. Its immense success on Broadway was somewhat of a surprise. Dramas are not favorites of the Great White Way, where most audiences are comprised of tourists looking for light, frothy fare, or deal-makers with business accounts who are not looking to score multi-millon dollar bonuses over the manicdepressive musings of Hamlet's to be or not to be.

And yet a play about AIDS, death, gays, Mormons, Jews, anti-Reaganism, drag queens, race, anti-McCarthyism, Valium-addicted housewives married to closet homosexuals and dead Soviet spies was a blockbuster.

Not only was a serious drama embraced by a wide demographic, but audiences were often seeing both parts back to back in one evening or on one weekend. Eventually, both parts of Angels had a successful national tour, spreading its message and vision of hope and salvation from Milwaukee to Memphis and from Oklahoma to Oregon.

That Kushner has written a tour de force is

undeniable. This critic, for one, is grateful and glad that both parts are finally seeing the light of cinematic realization due to the bravery of HBO. It is in the capable hands of director Mike Nichols and an A-list cast to die for including Merryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson and Mary Louise Parker. They are joined by Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson and James Cromwell, with featured performances by Michael Gambon and Simon Callow.

Kushner has adapted his own Tony-and Pulitzer Prize-winning play as a two-part, six-hour movie.

Mike Nichols is a perfect fit for Kushner's deep writing coupled with dark humor and existential angst. Nichols directed his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by gay scribe Edward Albee, in 1966. Nichols is also familiar with gay territory having produced a successful remake of La Cage Aux Folles.

Al Pacino has the enviable joy of playing the scenery-chewing Roy Cohn in the film of Angels. That he has agreed to work on the small screen is a testament to the allure of the role and to Kushner's writing. Cohn, himself gay and Jewish, virulently hated gays and Jews. He was Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy's right hand man in the 1950s, and later a behind-the scenes power broker. He denied he was gay until he died of AIDS in the 1980s.

Meryl Streep, a two-time Academy Award winner and a recipient of 13 Oscar nominations, plays Hanna Pitt, the Mormon mother of closeted Joe Pitt. Streep is familiar with gay films herself, most recently The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's novel, where she plays the ex-lover of a gay man dying of AIDS.

Streep gets to flex her acting muscles here not simply as a mother who learns, albeit difficultly, to come to terms with her son's sexuality and dissolving marriage, but also in another role as Ethel Rosenberg, a woman convicted of spying by Cohn. In Kushner's play, Rosenberg haunts Cohn, reminding him that what goes around, comes around.

Another actress who fills multiple roles in Angels is Emma Thompson, who is the Angel in the play but also has two other roles.

Mary-Louise Parker is Harper Pitt, the wife of Joe Pitt, a woman riddled with guilt,

unrequited love and a Valium addiction that would make Judy Garland seem clean and sober by comparison.

Kushner's raison d'être in writing the part of Harper is to show that in repressing and oppressing gays, innocent women get dragged along too. Harper has hallucinations in the play and makes up "friends to talk to," including a travel agent aptly named Mr. Lies.

Jeffrey Wright is the only one from the original Broadway cast in the film. He plays Mr. Lies and Belize, a colorful and sassy exex-drag queen and nurse. Belize allows Kushner to raise issues about how race, class and gender intersect with sexuality in the complex fabric known as America.

The young and handsome Justin Kirk, who won the Obie Award for Terrence McNally's queer Love! Valour! Compassion! and starred in the film version, portrays the AIDS-afflicted Prior Walter. Prior is the prophet of Kushner's play and of the new millennium, and he takes the audience along on a moving and earth-shattering odyssey in a plague-filled age searching for its own salvation, for its own redemption.

It's good to see that while supporters of Ronald Reagan managed to squelch CBS's biopic on him, Kushner's film, a searing indictment of the Reagan administration's homophobia and AIDS-bashing, will see the light of day.

It is fitting this year, shortly after World AIDS Day, that this epic rumination on AIDS will find a global audience via cable. Kushner leaves audiences questioning what we are willing to do to end the plague, and more importantly, are we willing to resuscitate the angels within us---those better parts of ourselves that are dying under the heavy burdens of disease, homophobia, fundamentalism, and hate.

Sadly, Kushner's proclamation, “The great work begins," seems like a stuck record, because each new day, the work gets heavier and the efforts have yet to begin in earnest. The new millennium is upon us. The great work still remains undone.

Part 1, Millennium Approaches, debuts Sunday, December 7 at 8 pm, followed one week later by Part 2, Perestroika. Both chapters will be replayed on HBO and its sister network HBO2 over the weeks following their debuts.