Angels in America, in halves and in sum, soars at the Rep
It’s not heaven’s brood but the better angels of our nature that save us.
The Kansas City Repertory Theatre, partnering again with director David Cromer (whose Our Town was staged here last fall), presents a long-overdue production of Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika, in rotating repertory. The millennium has approached and receded since Tony Kushner’s American epic was first staged, but the Rep’s production proves that his take on Reagan conservatism and the AIDS crisis still has a lot to offer modern audiences.
There’s something to be said for binge-watching the pair as though they’re the latest Netflix series. (The cast rotates shows from night to night; you can see both parts back to back on the weekend.) Perestroika is the comedic punch line to Millennium’s intricate setup, and the cumulative effect is worth the commitment for theatergoers with stamina and seven hours to spare.
Angels in America is a knot of human relationships, and Roy Cohn and Prior Walter are the men holding opposite ends of the string. Though the two are both dying of AIDS, they couldn’t be more opposed politically or socially. Prior (Seamus Mulcahy), a gentle-souled WASP and a consummate glamour-puss, greets the virus with gallows humor and fabulous oversized sunglasses. Roy (Mark Robbins), a hot-blooded conservative and aging Jewish lawyer, stays closeted and caustic to the last.
In another storyline, Joe Pitt (Claybourne Elder), a Mormon who is the chief clerk for a Federal Appeals Court justice, cares for his wife, Harper (Jessiee Datino), a Valium addict who finds more solace in her hallucinations than in her marriage. And in a third, an angel (Jennifer Engstrom) anoints Prior a prophet, hoping to lure a restless God back to Earth.
Kushner connects his characters as though running a switchboard, plugging them in and out of relationships and antithetical pairings to bring his layered thesis on American life to the surface. Prior may be dying, but he has a soul “entirely free of disease”; Joe is the picture of all-American health but has, in his view, a sick and sinful heart. The angels are all-powerful, but they’re incapable of imagination and creation, whereas Harper can create anything in her Valium-addled dreams but can’t save her marriage from Joe’s growing disdain.
Religious diametrics further add to the mash. There’s the rich history and philosophy of Judaism, which is ignored by Prior’s boyfriend, Louis, who can barely stumble through the kaddish, and reviled by Cohn, himself a Jew. And then there’s the distinctly American genesis and character of Mormonism, idealized by Joe even as he betrays church teachings.
The Rep doesn’t rush Millennium, and though there’s little dead space, the actors take their time teasing out the play’s themes. That pace works, in part, because Cromer has shaved off seconds elsewhere. Stagehands manage props and furniture as scenes continue around them, a move that saves us from thumb-twiddling between the play’s multiple scene changes.
It also helps that the Rep’s cast is staggeringly good in both parts. Mulcahy bewitches as withered-bloom Prior, struggling to maintain composure and grace against AIDS’ indignities. Datino taps into Harper’s impulsive, imaginative energy. Local favorite Peggy Friesen is effective in a handful of roles, especially strong as the world’s oldest living Bolshevik and as the steadfast, unsentimental Hannah Pitt (the “only unfriendly Mormon”).
As Prior’s cowardly lover, Louis Ironson, Nik Kourtis is convincingly frenetic; each deluge of words drips with anxiety and oblivious arrogance. Kourtis doesn’t play up Louis’ neuroses but tries desperately to mask them, mastering the impulses of a man simultaneously self-loathing and self-absorbed.
Paul Oakley Stovall brings great nuance and pitched comic timing to night nurse (and ex–drag queen) Belize, landing blows on his favorite punching bag, Louis, even when innocently narrating the plot of an antebellum bodice-ripper.
And Claybourne Elder gives an authentic portrayal of closeted gay Mormon and human pair of khakis Joe Pitt, though he’s admittedly a less interesting solo voice compared with the rest of the Angels choir. This has nothing to do with Elder, who brings confidence and texture to the role, and everything to do with Kushner, who has written the character with the depth and charisma of a particle-board end table.
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Two actors make particularly strong contributions in both shows. Mark Robbins crackles as Roy Cohn, the ambitious, gleefully bilious McCarthy conservative. Kushner shows a peculiar love for the villain, making him one of the play’s most memorable (and best-written) characters. In Robbins’ care, Cohn is a tragic and hypnotic figure, a man whose God-like reverence for his own clout and connections can’t save him from the disease he refuses to name. (Cohn insists that he has “liver cancer.”) Robbins inhabits Cohn so completely, it’s hard not to imagine blood vessels bursting in his eyes as he launches into yet another vituperative rant against entitlement.
As the Angel (and a handful of other, no less memorable roles), Engstrom is supernatural, bringing plutonium power to each character and filling the theater with her thunderous, gently fried voice. Her resonance and stage presence are Blanchett-grade, even down to her cough.
Engstrom’s talent is crucial to the trick’s success. In Angels, Kushner carves out a strange hybrid space between kitchen-sink realism and episodic, Brechtian drama, one that demands pulsing pieces of theatrical magic while simultaneously insisting that the wires show. (In lieu of wires, this production sees Engstrom wheeled in on an industrial safety ladder.) It’s a perfect match for director Cromer’s brand of austere decadence, which dazzles without a hitch thanks to production stage manager Jennifer Matheson Collins.
The production design is cold and brilliant, the right touch for a world in which angels are “fabulous and dull all at once.” Angels prefer stasis; humanity, Kushner posits, is a messy perpetual-motion machine. Takeshi Kata’s set comprises three enormous stone steps, the chilly slabs evoking both temple and tomb. It’s appropriately grave for an epic, but the immense steps also work on a more practical level, providing clear separation for Kushner’s multiple “split screen” scenes. The stage’s only other adornment is a simple backdrop, springing to life in later scenes thanks to smart backlighting and humble cotton batting. The result is a three-dimensional cloudscape, textured and striking, changing color along with the script’s tones.
Keith Parham’s white overheads and side lights create long, sepulchral shadows, with prop floor lamps for occasional warmth. A few smart technical moves help us read expressions — white hospital sheets catch the light and project it up onto actors’ faces — but Cromer seems less interested in practically lighting his actors than modeling them in striking tableaux.
Christian Gero’s cinematic sound design seems integral to Cromer’s vision, buttressing lines with suspended strings and a few cavernous, Hans Zimmer–y chords. Angelic snippets of Eric Whitacre’s choral compositions (“Alleluia” is especially lush) weave in and out of Perestroika, placing us unmistakably in the heavens.
Perestroika suffers a tad from sprawl. Unsatisfied with just one resolution and denouement, it offers a sampler in the final act, in which Kushner seems unable to stop philosophizing. But if you have to see just one part of the Rep’s production, it has my vote. Millennium is a more artful script, but Perestroika is a livelier performance, its comedic structure the right vehicle for the play’s heavy themes.
And the messiness is part of the charm. If Perestroika stumbles in relaying its thesis, it also paradoxically fulfills it. America’s tangle of histories, ethnicities and religions is all but impossible to distill into a singular mode or message. We live, in the words of one character, in a “melting pot where nothing melts.”
There’s nothing quite as American as incoherence. And nothing quite as angelic as our attempts to navigate it anyway.
