Theater Review: Angels in America--pageant or theater?

Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Written by Tony Kushner

Directed by Marianne Elliott

Starring Andrew Garfield, James McArdle, and Nathan Lane, and Beth Malone

Neil Simon Theater, Manhattan

April 1 and 8, 2018

The ovations (both after the show and after individual scenes) for this strong British National Theatre revival of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America reminded me of what I saw for Hamilton, but this time for a very long (7 hour) two-part play on a grim topic: the AIDS epidemic of the 1980-90s. The play has legendary status, stimulating an unusual sense of audience anticipation. On prior viewings (in San Francisco in the 1990s and the excellent 2003 HBO miniseries starring Justin Kirk and a volcanic Al Pacino as Roy Cohn) I was often dazzled but thought the play lacked taut construction. How would it now play in an era where AIDS is a manageable chronic illness, rather than the apocalyptic horror that animated the play in the 1990s? Pretty well, it turns out, due to a uniformly excellent cast featuring excellent portrayals by Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane. Webster defines “fantasia” as a musical composition with a free form and an often-improvisatory style; by that definition Angels in America is indeed a linked collection of often flashy scenes, rather than a well-unified epic play like O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra. While not Kushner’s (b. 1956) first play, it remains his only successful one, and feels like many young novelist’s and playwrights’ first works, filled with ideas and biographical angst, but not always well integrated. 

The play is driven by plot, not characters, and features three interlinked gay male characters. The most prominent is Prior, a young NY man now in a committed relationship after years of multiple sex partners. He develops AIDS, progresses in grueling medical detail through its ravages (this is the pre-treatment era), and in the end stabilizes with the new drug AZT, gotten through illicit/divine means. Andrew Garfield, a brilliant young British actor (see his moving war movie Hacksaw Ridge, not to mention Spiderman) plays Prior (above right) with humor, warmth, and variety, truly transforming himself into the queen/prophet with a heart of gold. The other two male leads are two sides of a gay coin: Roy Cohn (played by Nathan Lane), a closeted maleficent attorney who defended Joe McCarthy and dies after being disbarred, and Joe Pitt, a young closeted Mormon lawyer who comes out, leaves his wife, and is reborn as a gay man. Lane played Cohn with more subtlety but less evil relentlessness than did Al Pacino in the HBO version.  While this should have made him more interesting, the character itself is not quite written well enough to warrant such subtlety, so Pacino’s over the top version was better in the end. 

The play plays out its stories with short, TV-like chronological organization, playing rather like a lavish dramatic smorgasbord, rather than a tautly constructed play; I think it worked better on HBO than live.  There are few extended scenes and too many filler conversations about dogs, cats, NY apartments, etc. that would likely have been edited out in a film. The characters are memorable without being eloquent or deep. Depth feels dialed in formulaically by the playwright, i.e. the philosophic diatribes by the neurotic, overly analytic Louis (a convincing James McArdle) or the messianic pronouncements of the Angel. This ends up feeling gimmicky, rather like sea creatures or gods appearing in baroque opera to quickly resolve plot dilemmas. The flashiness means the characters sometimes seem to come from a Greek drama, tools of some unseen force but insignificant on their own. Perhaps that is what AIDS felt like to some in the 1980s, but now it robs the characters of depth and humanity. Actor Garfield does the best here, making me care about Prior’s fate, but his character does not evolve satisfyingly. Joe’s estranged wife was nicely played by Susan Gough; her many fantasy scenes induced by Valium add to the dreamlike nature of the play. As Joe Pitt, TV/film actor Lee Pace (The Hobbit, Pushing Daisies) was physically right, earnest but a bit too bland—I never quite got emotionally engaged by his coming out transformation. 

Kushner writes anger better than love, tenderness, or reflection, so his best scenes are like the end of Act 2, where two parallel couples simultaneously reach angry climaxes to their conflicts; director Elliott’s choice to intertwine these arguments temporally and physically created a powerfully, surreal quartet of anger that felt like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only with the two couples in different buildings somehow joined together in conflict. The mirroring duo-confrontations in Act 6 should have resolved these disputes satisfyingly to end the play, but did not. The seven-hour play has many subplots, not always well justified, e.g. the Mormon mother who arrives from Utah to save her fallen son Joe, then acts as a Mary figure comforting the sick Prior. Director Marianne Elliott has created other flashy productions (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) and as in these, keeps things moving with a breathless pace, again showing how well she can integrate technology into a play. However, this play is not written with the level of characterization or dramatic arc as are these other shows, thus leaving it as more of an empty tech spectacle.

The angel who haunts Prior with visions of millennial doom and saddle him with prophet status was a wonderful construction: a central figure with subsidiary extras nearby flapping wonderfully organic wings. 

Other than these wonderfully creepy angels, I generally disliked the stage design, which in Acts 1-3 often consisting of rotating small rooms framed by multicolored linear fluorescent fixtures, conveying neither gritty reality nor fantasy. The setting opened up better in the latter part of the play, as sets emerged from below, above and sides, much more fantastic, appropriate to the action moving to the polar regions and heaven. The fluorescent lights never really popped though.

In the end, I was left a little empty, as I was with earlier stage and TV productions of Angels in America. Even taken on its own terms as an extended fantasia, the play succeeds only as a diverting buffet sampling gay life in the late 1980s, but never really resonating with honest human drama. Gay male polysexuality, the elephant always in the room, is treated remarkably chastely and minimally in both plot and lack of onstage physicality, and feels strangely missing from the play. Sex is mentioned in one speech as gay America’s pioneer effort to blaze new ground (rather like the Mormons going to Utah), but this analogy now seems over-romanticized and false. The gay male hypersexuality of the 1970s and 80s was a hedonistic phase in which sex for many men was freed of the “practical” brakes that religion, pregnancy, and marriage had previously placed on it. I know that some see this as a golden era of self-expression and sexual innovation, but even then, I saw it as socially-encouraged prolonged male adolescence, perhaps fun but not at all grown up. That this play can last over seven hours and never really deal with this makes it an ultimately dishonest chronicle of the era, “fantasia” or not.