The first time that the two parts of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” were performed together, in 1992, I was with Kushner backstage at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles, after the curtain went down. He stood dazed and rumpled among well-wishers. On a nearby bulletin board he had pinned a letter to the cast. “And how else should an angel land on earth but with utmost difficulty?” it read. “If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain . . . and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst.”
“Angels in America”—which is composed of two three-hour plays, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”—proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie.” Where Williams’s 1945 play caught and defined the postwar mood of release, with the imminence of new life, Kushner’s saga, which revolves around a victim of the AIDS epidemic, caught and defined the mood of ruthless Reaganite self-interest, with the imminence of new death. Eighteen years later, “Angels in America” (in a Signature Theatre Company revival at the Peter Norton Space, under the splendid direction of Michael Greif) is as majestic and luminous as ever—a kind of brainstorm; with the passage of time, however, its music strikes different dominant chords. Now the play’s most visionary element is not what it has to say about the homosexual struggle but what it has to say about the grinding undertow of reactionary and progressive historical forces. “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come,” Prior Walter (Christian Borle), the AIDS survivor, says, looking ahead to the new millennium. But the millennium has come and the rights of gay citizens are still a work in progress. As our own fractious moment shows, the world spins, but not always in the same direction.
Kushner uses as the epigraph to “Millennium Approaches” some lines from Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Testing-Tree”: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.” The genius of the play lies in the marriage of Kushner’s informed mind with his informed heart. “Angels in America” is both a landscape of loss and a map of the paths of denial, fury, humor, and mourning that homo sapiens use to travel beyond sorrow. The play takes two couples—a young Mormon pair, Harper Pitt (Zoe Kazan) and her lawyer husband, Joe (Bill Heck), and a homosexual couple, Prior and his squeamish, self-loathing lover, Louis Ironson (Zachary Quinto)—and lets betrayal blast them apart. “I don’t understand why I’m not dead,” Harper says at one point. “When your heart breaks, you should die.” A reeling constellation of splintered souls, these four ricochet off “the polestar of human evil,” the infamous, hectoring Republican lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn (Frank Wood), who is filled with incandescent certainties, the strongest of which is that he is not homosexual, despite the fact that he has contracted AIDS. “Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council,” he tells his doctor, forcing him to write a diagnosis of liver cancer in his records. “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. . . . Does this sound like me, Henry?”
In an act of extraordinary theatrical and literary aplomb, Kushner lets his compelling characters, each speaking his own unique, mournful jazz, collide with both the real world and the world of their perfervid imaginations. Ethel Rosenberg haunts Cohn, who claims responsibility for sending her to the electric chair; the Valium-popping Harper, whose closeted husband admits that he doesn’t desire her, takes an imaginary trip to Antarctica and communicates with the homesteaders she sees in a diorama at the Mormon Visitors’ Center; Prior is visited by the Angel of the Continental Principality of America (Robin Weigert), who is full of Oz-like pyrotechnics and hilarious Biblical gas. The Angel flies in on steel-gray wings to hail the delirious Prior as a prophet and to preach the gospel of entropy. “Turn back. Undo,” she says, adding later, “On you, in your blood, we . . . have written: STASIS! The END.”
The journey that Kushner’s characters take is an epic one, and the transformations are as incredible to watch as they are to enact. (They’re made even more exciting by the intimacy of the theatre, the Brechtian handling of the sets and props, and Wendall K. Harrington’s clever projection design.) As Cohn, Wood, with his shiny pate, his leathery suntanned skin, and his tongue probing the corners of his mouth, bears an uncanny resemblance to the original lowlife. It’s a bravura role—Kushner gives his devil the best part—but Wood’s performance downplays Cohn’s showboating and lets his reptilian cunning subtly suggest his corruption. Cohn is an unrepentant son of a bitch, an almost likable sociopath who takes a “fatherly” interest in the ambitious Joe, encouraging him to become a “Royboy” in Washington, regardless of his wife’s wish to remain in Brooklyn. (“Love; that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap too,” he says.) Once Cohn is in the hospital, delirious with hate, the scenes between him and his black nurse, Belize (the sardonic Billy Porter), a former drag queen, are electric. Cohn, who finagles his own stash of rare AZT pills because the hospital’s trial dosage includes placebos, brushes aside the in-house medication. “I supply my own pills,” he says. “I already told ’em to push their jujubes to the losers down the hall.”
Prior’s abandonment and collapse are given particular pathos by Quinto’s edgy, melancholic performance as Louis. “Are you a ghost?” Prior asks him after a long separation, as they hold each other and dance to “Moon River.” “No. Just spectral. Lost to myself,” Louis, who is on the most protracted guilt trip in theatre history, replies. But, of all the many pleasures here—the cast is uniformly excellent, with a special tip of the hat to the resourceful Robin Bartlett, who plays a number of male and female cameos distinctively—the one that surprised me most was Zoe Kazan’s Harper. Round-faced and doe-eyed, Kazan has both fragility and sinew. With her youthful freshness, she brings to Harper a rare but crucial thing—the sense of something unborn inside her. Harper, who spends most of the evening in an eccentric bubble, takes nearly the entire play to come to terms with her loss. But when she accepts it she makes a move. On a night flight to San Francisco—in one of the most thrilling of Kushner’s verbal arabesques—Harper has a vision of repair for the ozone layer, whose hole has obsessed her doom-filled days:
She adds, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Kushner wrote those words in his thirties; I wonder if he would write them now, in his fifties. Loss happens. Sometimes what’s lost can be found; sometimes it can be repaired; and sometimes it’s just gone forever. For that kind of emptiness, no matter how well wrought the words, there is no consolation.
At one point in “Angels in America,” Harper runs into Prior at the Mormon Visitors’ Center. “We get a lot of distracted, grief-stricken people here,” she explains. “It’s our specialty.” It also happens to be the spécialité de la maison of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” a musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 film (elegantly directed by Bartlett Sher for Lincoln Center, at the Belasco), which is positively giddy with grief. Here loss, suicide, mental breakdown, even terrorism are all part of the joyride. The hubbub of heartbreak is what the show celebrates; Michael Yeargan’s ingenious abstract set and Sven Ortel’s garish projections give the characters’ frenetic internal space a madcap external one, sort of a Madrid version of “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” “Madrid is my mama / Give me the nipple, everyday I’m gonna taste it. / The tears and the drama / Ten tons of mama-milk and not a drop is wasted,” the local taxi-driver (the charming Danny Burstein) sings at the opening.
There’s a lot of theatrical craft on display in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (which has a witty book by Jeffrey Lane and an appealing Latin-flavored score and clever lyrics by David Yazbek), and Sher has assembled an A-team of actors to perform it. If you can’t feel for the characters—all of whom are a collection of “humors” rather than people—you do get an earthy whiff of Almodóvar’s camp world, a drama queen’s heaven in which deracinated women dump their inner lives hilariously onto other people. The ruckus is over Ivan (Brian Stokes Mitchell), a feckless actor so smooth that Gucci wears his shoes. He has walked out on his long-standing and pregnant mistress, Pepa (the appealing Sherie Rene Scott), for a fling with Paulina (de’Adre Aziza), the lawyer who is handling the divorce proceedings for his wife, Lucia (Patti LuPone), who wants justice after nineteen years of abandonment. Out of the women’s collective jealousy, bewilderment, rage, and desire for revenge, the show generates a few great moments of heat, including a motorcycle chase (with LuPone in a fabulous windswept wig) and one lovelorn woman throwing herself off an upstage balcony midsong, only to emerge on a rope as if in free fall; the other women join her in midair, singing from ropes of their own: “Welcome to the verge, to the cusp, to the edge / to the end of the line, to the start of something really scary.”
“Women on the Verge” is a farce, and this poses a strategic challenge for a musical. Farce is about momentum, which is hard to sustain in musicals, where the songs require the actors to stand and deliver. “Women on the Verge” meets the stop-start rhythm problem best in Laura Benanti’s manic, sensational number as the model Candela, “Model Behavior,” in which she skitters from phone to phone, babbling about her shallow life. The show’s best and most moving song, “Invisible”—Lucia’s psychological aria about her lost life, superbly performed by LuPone—breaks the farce convention and just about gets away with it. In the end, with admirable effort, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” picks up speed and flies, but never quite high enough. ♦
