Masterly Production of a Flawed Masterpiece

Angels in America
by Tony Kushner
Presented by Soulpepper Theatre
Directed by Albert Schultz

This week, as part of the huge World Pride festivities in Toronto, Soulpepper Theatre has remounted their multi-award-winning production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.  To call this production a theatrical experience of a lifetime is a gross understatement.

Angels in America is a very unusual kind of play.  It’s a single play, a 6½ - hour epic (split for convenience into 2 parts) that deals with a huge range of emotions and issues in very difficult personal situations.  It’s a story very much of the time in which it was written (1990-95) and of the time in which the story is set (1985-1990), yet it is a story with implications for all times and places.    It poses many technical difficulties in staging, yet the best production would be one in which the technical aspects of the show are kept as simple and (at the author’s express request) as obvious as possible. An actor’s script it certainly is, which requires each of the eight actors to play two or more roles, yet one in which many of the characters are difficult to understand unless you have walked in their shoes.  And who among us has ever “walked” in the shoes of an angel?

Kushner’s script is subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  It was written, rewritten, and developed over a period of several years.  The two parts were premiered separately, Millennium Approaches in 1991 and Perestroika in 1992.  The complete work had its first staging in 1993.  That subtitle, of course, flings this piece right into the ongoing battlefield of gay rights and recognition, as well as plunking it smack into the middle of the changing cultural landscape within the gay community itself.  It’s impossible to sort out critical reaction to the play from the emotionally-charged debates which have occurred and continue to occur over these issues.  This difficulty presumably also applies to my review! 

For your convenience, gentle reader, I am going to split my comments into 2 parts.

[1]  The Script

This sprawling, epic conception is a major and significant work of art, and well worthy of its claim to a place in the canon of major dramatic works.  But it definitely has its flaws.  (Indeed, show me a great work of art that doesn’t – if you can!)  There’s a great deal of philosophising in the play.  Some of it comes very naturally, indeed organically.  The prime example of this is the entire long scene with the angel which begins Part 2.  Her language attains a degree of poetry and insight, combined with a uniquely tragic authorial vision, which place it high in my estimation as a major piece of dramatic literature.  The overall similarity in tone to the text of Waltraute's long, tragic monologue in Act 1 of Wagner's Götterdämmerung was especially striking. 

However, some of the other philosophical passages appear much more contrived, indeed almost stuck on, and decidedly pretentious.  Sadly, this was especially true of the ending – a long and involved exegesis on the myth of the fountain of Bethesda which hits us over the head with a tedious explanation of what many in the audience have already intuited from the play as a whole, if only subconsciously.  These weaker philosophic passages marked the only places during the production when I checked out of the play, momentarily, saying to myself, “Oh, no, they’re off on that again.” 

Once the author pulled out of his self-made philosophical traps, the script sparkled with wit, humour, energy, fire and endless surprises.  In a play of this kind, any “conventional” resolution of any problem would be a cheap cop-out, and would drag the play down to the level of soap opera melodramatics.  It’s very much to Kushner’s credit that he largely avoided conventional expectations; indeed, he did a fine job of subverting them in his writing. 

The script does go over the top occasionally with its humour.  Thank goodness the momentary parody of the ending of The Wizard of Oz (movie) remained only momentary.  Of course it was a tip of the hat to the gay community’s reigning cultural icon, Judy Garland, but it was so blatantly stuck on that it made me cringe.

The other major question remaining is somewhat didactic of me, but I am going to ask it anyway.  I have read that Kushner is a major admirer of the Brechtian epic method of gently easing the audience out of their emotional involvement with the characters every time they begin to slide into it.  But did Kushner intend this play to be an exhibition of Brechtian authorial technique?  I would have to say no.  Angels in America, epic in size though it may be, is a very searing and involving experience on many levels.  Although many of Brecht’s epic devices are used, Kushner’s characters ring with emotional truth and depth, each one struggling with his or her own agony as they draw us into their world.  I emphatically agree with Damien Atkins who said in an actor’s note in the program: 

…I realized that “Angels in America” is also (and perhaps most importantly) a call to citizenship, a desperate cry for all the living to care more about each other – to find in our lives, and in our words, more compassion.  The play implores us – dares us – to have as much compassion for Roy Cohn, who says and does unspeakable things, as we do for Prior and Harper and Louis and everyone else.

Compassion is a mode of feeling that seems very much out of fashion today, perhaps even more so than 20 years ago when this play was written.  I think it is this sad reality that makes the play as timely today as it was when first staged – and in some ways, perhaps even more so.  I might even go one stage further, and argue that a more appropriate subtitle for today would be “A Gay Fantasia on Human Themes”, since so many of the issues arising in this play are now seen coming to the surface in other societies than the United States.

[2]  The Production

Soulpepper’s management offered us the opportunity of witnessing the entire two parts in one day, with a 3 hour break in between Part 1 and Part 2.  In my opinion, this is the only desirable way to see it.  The work is such a continuous whole that a lapse of a day or two between parts would be destructive to the overall, cumulative power of the performance.

It took me about 2 or 3 minutes to enter into the world of the play at the beginning, but once I did I was hooked.  From then, I was riveted for practically every step of the way (with exceptions already noted).  The time stretches between intermissions are lengthy, but it was inevitable that I should sink right back into the world of the play after each break -- and then be shocked at how much time had elapsed when the next break came. 

The set designed by Lorenzo Savoini was simple but evocative.  I was particularly struck by the detail that each of the ten doors surrounding the space was different in colour, tone, or in the details of locks and latches.  Yet all ten were tired, worn, old – and actually came across as prematurely aged in relation to the clean classic revival details of the dark iron-grey wall panels.  We were left to decide for ourselves exactly what message the revised set of Part 2 portended – panels twisted open, one wall section missing, the central bed skewed at an odd angle, and looking (being?) smaller than the central bed in Part 1.

Lighting designer Bonnie Beecher produced wonderful lighting effects to highlight the multitude of spaces and times in which the story unfolds.   Richard Feren’s sound designs came into play in the outdoor scenes of course but also – crucially – in the hallucination and dream sequences.  The humming sounds during the visitations of the angel evoked powerful spiritual energy without any tacky devices like in-your-face chanting choirs of celestial voices.

The eight actors produced between them a whole raft of memorable performances.  The eight main roles they portray are all flawed, wounded, hurting human beings, each with his or her own cross to bear.  Damien Atkins, as AIDS-infected Prior Walter, has the most obvious cross but Atkins showed us other, less pleasant dimensions of the man and kept him from becoming a mere cypher of suffering sainthood.  Prior often uses humour to keep the horror of his situation at bay, and Atkins made the most of this, with splendid comic timing aplenty – particularly in the major scene with the Angel.  Gregory Prest did splendid work as Louis Ironson, the educated, philosophical Jewish lover of Prior who spends the entire play sinking lower and lower in his own estimation.  Ironson is a man of tremendous verbal energy, who can find a literary or philosophical or historic reference to any situation (I can relate), and his increasing bafflement as his words fail him again and again has to be handled carefully, lest it go too far, too fast.  Prest played the man and his limitations admirably.

Mike Ross portrayed the closeted Mormon legal clerk, Joseph Porter Pitt, with humanity shot through with emotional pain as he struggled to cope with his hallucinating wife and his repressed homosexual nature.  His situation is the closest the play comes to a conventional melodrama, the tale of a man who loves and loses, again and again, ending with nothing and nobody.  Ross ensured that the character remained intensely human, never turning into a soap-opera star turn.  Michelle Monteith as Harper Amaty Pitt gave us a fascinating character study, a woman drifting back and forth between reality and unreality so slowly and smoothly that neither she nor we could say for certain when and where the line was crossed. 

I actually felt sorriest for Troy Adams who plays the role of Belize, the ex-drag queen nurse.  His part comes closest at times to becoming a 2-D stereotype of any of the characters, and that’s a nasty situation for any actor to cope with.  Adams managed to breathe humanity into even those moments, and showed particular power and depth of character in the final scenes in hospital with Roy Cohn.  As Cohn himself, Diego Matamoros gave an excellent account of the manipulative power broker who finally comes up against the wall in a situation (AIDS) where he can’t buy his way out.  As nasty a piece of work as Cohn is, Matamoros yet drew our sympathy as he died in hospital, alone except for a nurse he hated and the ghost of the woman he had doomed to execution decades earlier, Ethel Rosenberg. 

Joe’s mother, Hannah Porter Pitt was played by Nancy Palk.  As written, she is probably the most perplexing character in the piece, a woman of vehement mixed emotions kept on a tight rein of social, moral and religious expectations.  In the scene where she sits through the night at Prior’s bedside in hospital, humanity begins to seep out of her through little tiny cracks in her façade.  Palk did fine work in keeping those little leaks from spreading out to drown the character.  Her compassion was of a piece with everything else about her personality (restricted, proper, repressed and conventional) but it was still very real for all that.

Raquel Duffy had the tough task of portraying the most unconventional character of the lot, the Angel who appears to Prior Walter – in dreams?  In hallucinations?  In reality?  With movement restricted by flying wires and huge stiff silver wings, Duffy still gave a powerhouse performance of that beautiful sequence of the script to which I already referred – and more besides.  Hortatory voice and blazing, glaring eyes, peremptory gestures, an expression of unutterable sadness on her face as she described how heaven had disintegrated into disorder, all went to create a memorable portrayal of a character that could so easily have become embarrassing. 

The actors did a splendid job of playing the numerous minor characters too.  I won’t try to credit all of them, because it was too often hard to be sure who was doing which parts, but I simply have to mention the splendid apparition of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg by Nancy Palk (I think).  Her recurring presence at Roy Cohn’s deathbed became one of the most memorable portrayals of the entire show, a smug, self-satisfied woman who has at last been proved right beyond all doubt. 

Kudos, also, to director Albert Schultz who kept this huge, sprawling, sectional piece on a tight rein throughout.  His choices in matters relating to stage pictures were mostly very well-judged (a couple of embarrassingly tacky “Brechtian” crosses and upstagings in the opening sequences aside) and the balance nicely drawn always between reality and imagination, a critical element.  The play cracked along at a good clip, never rushing but never dragging either, and even the overwritten parts of the script crackled with energy and purpose. 

If Angels in America is, as I have said, a flawed masterpiece, then this gifted company, director, and staging team have performed the admirable feat of making it seem closer to perfect than it really is, a provocative, powerful and emotional theatre experience not to be missed.