Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The National Theater production of Angels in America crossed over to Broadway in the spring and immediately began to re-assert itself as one of the great cultural works of the 20th (or any) century. Tony Kushner’s expansive two-part “gay fantasia on national themes” was written in the early ’90s and set in the mid-’80s, depicting a New York City beset by Reagan-era politics and the early years of the AIDS epidemic as it ravaged the city’s gay community. Describing the entirety of Angels in America is a fool’s errand, but it centers on a gay man with AIDS, his ex-lover, his ex-lover’s new lover whose abandoned wife pops valium and subsequently shares dream space with her husband’s new lover’s ex-lover with AIDS. Also her husband’s lawyer mentor is the real-life figure Roy Cohn, a deeply closeted boogeyman specter of the McCarthy era who, at this time, is dying of AIDS himself. Honestly, if you’re already familiar with Angels in America, you’re shaking your head at my inability to sum the entire (7.5-hour!) production up in a sentence. but if you’re not already familiar with Angels in America … then listen to me for a minute, because I’m about to change your life.
So Angels in America came to Broadway with its mostly-British cast — Americans Nathan Lane and Lee Pace play Roy Cohn and his protégée Joe Pitt — and lit the town on fire … again. It’s nominated for 11 awards at this Sunday’s Tony Awards, setting the record for most nominations by a play. It is the heavy favorite to walk away with the trophy for Best Revival of a Play and several others. It will be one of the big stories on Sunday night, as only befits the masterpiece that it is.
And yet … God strike me dead, and Jesus knows I love the theater, but after experiencing the revival on stage last week, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to-rewatch the 2003 HBO miniseries version. Nothing against Nathan Lane, Lee Pace, Andrew Garfield, or any of the other talented performers (Denise Gough should win the Featured Actress Tony for her performance as Harper; James McArdle was robbed of a nomination for his performance as Louis!), but here I am. I prefer Angels in America as a movie.
Part of this is human nature. The HBO version was my first experience with Angels in America. I wasn’t a theater kid, and I had no one in my life talking about plays. I was cultured, in books, movies, music, but theater was a major blind spot. When HBO aired The Laramie Project in 2002 (itself a film adaptation of a stage play I’d never heard of), I was captivated, Matthew Shepard’s murder having loomed large in my teen years. And when that film mentioned Angels in America as a crucial text about gay culture, my ears perked up. HBO knew what it was doing, of course. Plant the seed for next year’s critically acclaimed gay-themed stage adaptation in this year’s critically acclaimed, gay-themed stage adaptation. So when Angels in America promos started appearing, featuring an eye-popping A-List cast (Streep! Pacino! Thompson!), I was hooked.
There’s no shaking your first love, and Angels in America, directed by the incomparable Mike Nichols, was mine. The mixture of theatricality and topicality, of humanity and magic, threading together politics and history and religion and gayness and feminism, from New York to Utah, heaven to Brooklyn. I was astounded and genuinely lifted up by a film in a way I’ve rarely ever been, before or since. This is special filmmaking married to special playwriting, fired onto stone tablets and placed irretrievably into my heart. I’ve since read the play several times and seen now two separate stage productions, and I can’t shake the primacy of that first love. Don’t want to.
It’s of course an unfair comparison. Film can do things the theater can’t, and vice versa. I found myself captivated and moved by the staging of the current Broadway iteration; the way director Marianne Elliott has ensemble members playing “shadows,” who move the Angel and her wings (and also the stage sets and props), a living and breathing network of souls sent to dismantle the old set and assemble the new. A living embodiment of Belize’s line about heaven (“on every corner a wrecking crew, and something new and different going up catty-corner to that”). But the film, the immediacy of those performances, of that wise, piercing, melodious and uplifting dialogue spoken by the likes of Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Al Pacino — how do you beat that? Especially since the requirements of stage acting — to project and perform to the very back of a very big theater — preclude the kind of softer, subtler performance work that is just so captivating.
Mary-Louise Parker was already a star of film (Fried Green Tomatoes; Boys on the Side) and stage (she won a Tony Award for Proof in 2001) by the time Angels in America premiered. She’d won my heart the previous year with her performance as Amy Gardner in The West Wing, a show she left after 20 episodes and one Emmy nomination in order to do Angels in America. No matter how many times I watch it, it still takes my breath away, the way she inhabits Harper’s confusion, her fear, her hopefulness, and ultimately her pioneering steps forward. Harper’s monologue at the end of the film is one of Kushner’s mot notable, and Parker just nails it. The way her voice catches when she describes the souls of the dead rising in a web to patch the ragged ozone.
Jeffrey Wright is currently performing feats of bifurcated derring do on HBO’s Westworld, but I still don’t think he’s ever been able to top his Emmy-winning turn as Belize, former drag queen, current night nurse, and interested observer to everything that’s going on. Belize may have the most tangential relationship to the events of the play, but his moments of intercession — slapping Louis down after his “Democracy in America” monologue; describing heaven to a delirious Roy Cohn — are not only some of the most mellifluously delivered parts of the film, but also the most forward-thinking.
Justin Kirk never got the credit he deserved for the performance he delivers as Prior Walter. The Emmys, perhaps predictably, went to Al Pacino and Meryl Streep (who are excellent) in the lead categories. Kirk, despite playing the film’s unquestionable lead character, was bumped down to supporting because he wasn’t famous. There, he lost to Jeffrey Wright, and nobody’s going to complain about that, least of all me. But just watching the movie tells you how much Kirk stepped up as the true lead of the film. Inhabiting Prior Walter with an energy that felt both soft and resilient, haggard and hopeful, Kirk navigates through some of the film’s most difficult scenes and comes out at the end and nails one of the film’s most important monologues.
I could continue. There are reasons to praise every single performance down to the bit players. James Cromwell as Pacino’s tetchy doctor. The great Robin Weigert in a single devastating scene as the Mormon Mother. Ben Shenkman, in tandem with Streep, saying Kaddish for Roy Cohn. There’s no competing with these performances, for me. Performances that feel, as theatrical as the material is, intensely intimate.
If you have the good fortune to make it to New York and have the means to see Angels in America on Broadway, run don’t walk. It is a transcendent piece of theater and an enduringly important American narrative. But with HBO GO right there on your streaming device, I assure you the Angels in America movie is the best thing you could possibly watch.
