The great work returns! The long-awaited “Angels in America” homecoming revival has landed at Berkeley Rep and it’s a revelation. In the gospel according to Tony Kushner, theater should make you think as hard as you feel.
“Angels,” which just celebrated its 25th anniversary on Broadway, remains his masterpiece. It’s a landmark play that lives up to its reputation, inviting the audience to engage deeply for a 7½-half hour epic (including four intermissions) that wrestles with capitalism, democracy and civil rights but ultimately transcends all of its ideology with heart. While Tony Taccone’s revival of the two-part Pulitzer-winner at Berkeley Rep may not be perfect, it is magnificent in its urgency, clarity and almost therapeutic power in the Trump era.
Framed by Takeshi Kata’s gorgeously stark scenic design of panels and projections, directed with understated rigor by Taccone, “Angels” retains its mystery. As with any truly sublime piece of art, “Angels” exhilarates and exhausts, thrusting you back upon yourself to discover your own truths. Revisiting this marathon theatrical experience is a richly rewarding long day’s journey into contemplation.
Certainly “Angels,” which originally debuted at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre in 1991, is a richly complex work that requires actors who are deft with baroque material. In some cases the memories of previous incarnations haunt your memory. Not all of the actors in this revival can fully animate the play’s big ideas yet those that can are thrilling.
The magnetic Randy Harrison (“Queer as Folk”) is a baby-faced Prior who’s easy to cheer for and he also fleshes out the metaphysical yearning that gives the character, who is dying of AIDS, wings. When his fickle lover Louis (Benjamin T. Ismail) abandons him, Prior is wounded.
Louis, a left-wing purist, leaves him to dally with Joe (a somewhat flat Danny Binstock) a gay Mormon Republican who has just cast off his wife, the visionary pill-popper Harper (a lackluster Bethany Jillard.)
Besieged by disease, Prior finds salvation in the appearance of an angel (the mesmerizing Francesca Faridany) who anoints him as a prophet.
All around them the world caroms out of control in Reagan-era America. Global warming unravels the environment. Greed hijacks the political process. The universe of pop culture and political dialectics collide.
All of themes still resonate but perhaps none more so than Kushner’s suggestion that the Tammany Hall style corruption that took root in the ’80s was destined to reach its zenith eventually.
The links between the play’s arch villain Roy Cohn (a staggering turn by Stephen Spinella) the rise of McCarthyism and Donald Trump are terrifying indeed. Power is the only god to which Cohn worships and if he fears death it’s only because he can’t stand to lose control.
The Tony-winning Spinella, the original Prior, makes a gobsmacking Cohn, a monster who sucks people in with his animal charm. The sheer breathless audacity of this Cohn, alternately seducing and brutalizing his prey, is endlessly fascinating in the age of #MeToo.
There are flaws in this epic theater day, of course. Navigating the collage of themes and motifs in the play is no mean feat and Ismail doesn’t always find the intellectual fire in Louis’ rants. Caldwell Tidicue throws shade with the best of them but he has trouble with the density of the language as Belize, the drag queen cum night nurse.
But there are also performances that will dazzle you. Carmen Roman is one of the most memorable Hannah’s ever. The actress imbues the Mormon matriarch with an unexpected vulnerability underneath the grit and gumption. She’s also indispensable in smaller roles such as a rabbi, the oldest living Bolshevik and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, one of the play’s most touching grace notes.
Prepare yourself for an intensely immersive experience, a day-long undertaking spinning around the necessity of and chaos generated by cataclysmic change. This is a primal ritual so intense it stays with you long past the final curtain. You can see each part separately but the marathon is incomparable.
Kushner dares you to dive deep into the world of the play and leave the theater feeling all kinds of woke, forged within a community of believers in art. In a society that venerates the instant over the insightful, a culture that would rather post than ponder, “Angels” feels like quite a miracle.
‘ANGELS IN AMERICA’
Part 1, “Millennium Approaches,” Part Two, “Perestroika”; written by Tony Kushner, directed by Tony Taccone for Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Through: July 22
Where: Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley
Running time: Part 1 (three hours and 30 minutes); Part 2 (four hours); each with 2 intermissions; parts 1 and 2 can be seen separately or in succession with a 2½-hour break between performances
Tickets: $40-$100; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org
