In Hamilton, Aaron Burr gripes that the incipient U.S. Constitution is “full of contradictions,” to which his frenemy Alexander Hamilton replies, “So is independence.” Before that line was likely even a twinkle in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s eye, another future Pulitzer Prize winner was busy exploring the challenges and ironies of being an American, about 200 years on. The resulting two-part epic would prove even more groundbreaking in its sweeping spiritual humanism and sheer creative chutzpah.
Tony Kushner’s Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On American Themes blazed onto Broadway in its respective three-hours-plus installments, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, in 1993. Set in the Reagan era, when go-go capitalism flourished while a strange virus threatened to decimate the gay male population, Angels obviously reacted to then-recent history. But in its breadth of subjects and references, the play also surveys the American Century, its complex roots and its uncertain future; Perestroika’s epilogue unfolds in January 1990, just after the Berlin Wall has fallen.
The stunning new (and first) Broadway revival of Angels is haunted by everything that’s happened since—especially, and exponentially, in the past few years. The production arrives, it should be noted, via London’s National Theatre, where it played to raves last spring, and is helmed by British director Marianne Elliott, whose previous feats of trans-Atlantic magic include War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Working with a top-rate design team, Elliott mines the daunting structural and supernatural elements of Kushner’s play without a trace of empty spectacle. Ian MacNeil’s stark set evokes a vast, bleak urban landscape, with neon bars marking separate spaces, while Paule Constable’s lighting also provides breathtaking illumination, and nuance, when required.
Inhabitants range from a neurotic New Yorker to visitors from Utah and far beyond, and the superb actors here—most juggling two or more roles, as called for—traverse their interwoven paths with the resilient wit and unflagging emotional commitment Kushner’s dense text requires. Elliott has, in particular, culled milestone performances from two of the finest stage actors of their generations: Nathan Lane, cast as closeted uberlawyer and historical bully Roy Cohn, and film star Andrew Garfield, playing the fictional Prior Walter, a young man whose only use for a closet would be to find something fabulous to wear.
Prior, who lives with his lover, Louis, is diagnosed with AIDS early in Act One of Millennium; Roy receives his death sentence, as it then was, in the act’s final scene. Louis, guilt-ridden but weak in spirit—played by an oddly endearing James McArdle—will soon leave Prior and embark on an affair with Angels’ other closet case: Joe Pitt, a young Mormon lawyer whom Roy is trying to groom for Reagan’s Washington. “America has rediscovered itself,” Joe (a robust, poignant Lee Pace, new to the production) tells his long-suffering, pill-popping wife, Harper. “Its sacred position among nations. And people aren’t ashamed of that like they used to be.”
These are chilling words in 2018. But however pointed and relevant many of Angels’ political insights remain, the play ultimately celebrates progress in a non-partisan sense, as something that is difficult but necessary and ultimately inevitable. It’s a timeless and universal message—a refutation to The Angel who declares Prior a prophet, who in this staging hovers and ascends with help from a small band of puppeteers. Wryly played by Amanda Lawrence, she is as glorious a creature as she claims to be, but no match for Garfield’s remarkable Prior; the actor embraces his character’s suffering and indignation and queenly elan without self-consciousness or caricature, giving Prior such vibrant, hilarious, heartwrenching life that his not surviving seems unthinkable.
Lane, too, delivers a beautifully textured performance, expertly mining the dark comedy in his lines while making us feel the full weight of Cohn’s karmic baggage, and his fury. Confronting his doctor or later, from his hospital bed, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—played by Susan Brown, delicate and lacerating— the old Communist hunter (and mentor to Donald Trump) is by turns pathetic, funny, and terrifying.
Visions, or hallucinations, also appear to the self-medicating Harper (Denise Gough, who starts tepidly but grows and burns), who is obsessed with environmental damage. Like Prior, to whom she is connected in a series of fanciful and tender sequences, she is struggling to make sense of a world where men selfishly abandon the ones who love them most.
Moral virtue finds an earthier voice in Belize, Prior’s ex and devoted friend, and Roy’s nurse, given spectacular style and substance by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. “You’re ambivalent about everything,” Belize tells Louis; indeed, amid the many twists in Act Two, Prior finds better and braver support from Joe’s conservative mother, Hannah (Brown, excellent again).
As Belize explains at one point, “Love is very hard.” But as this majestic Angels In America reminds us, it is worth striving towards, even now. Especially now.
Angels in America opened March 25, 2018, at the Neil Simon Theatre and runs through July 1. Tickets and information: angelsbroadway.com
