By Paul Horsley

Angels in America, currently playing at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s Copaken Stage, is an odd duck in American theater and is likely to remain so. Set during the height of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s, the two-part, six-hour epic contains some of the greatest writing by an American in modern times. Yet more than 20 years after its inception the subject matter—the politics of gay life, conservative hypocrisy, illness, spirituality in the face of death, with the downfall of the Soviet Union thrown in for good measure—still make it challenging. Its frank language and raw sexual content (including simulated gay sex) may ultimately present obstacles to its ever joining Hamlet or Come Back, Little Sheba as canonic theater we recommend for high-schoolers. But its all-encompassing view of American life during the Reagan years has been matched by no other work of literature that I can name, and its continued relevance fairly leaps out at you from the stage.

Angels (Part I: Millennium Approaches; Part II: Perestroika) is funny, clever, heartbreaking—and in the end, marvelously entertaining. Its humor, ranging from shtick to the kind of profound wit that one finds in Shakespeare, is a key to its success. At no point during David Cromer’s unconventional but breathtaking Rep production, which included convincing performances across the board, was I the least bit bored. Yes, the mind can wander during the final bits of Perestroika (the same was true for the original 1990s New York production), but this may be because these passages deal in language that requires deeper contemplation. (“Let any Being on whom Fortune smiles creep away to Death before that last dreadful daybreak,” says the Angel to Prior, who is dying of AIDS, “when all your ravaging returns to you with the rising, scorching, unrelenting Sun: When morning blisters crimson and bears all life away, a tidal wave of Protean Fire that curls around the planet and bares the Earth clean as bone.”) Um, yeah, okay!

Those of us who experienced the initial AIDS crisis and its gruesome fallout first-hand might find it difficult, in some ways, to evaluate Angels objectively. (Does a straight, happily married 40something JoCo banker, even one who is attuned to world theater, find these plays as engaging as I do? I’m not sure.) So it was with some relief I read, in Tony’s own Afterword to the 1995 published edition of Angels, that he too has struggled with the boundaries of suffering-versus-art: “It doesn’t take much more than a passing familiarity with Angels to see how my life and my plays match up,” he writes, even going so far as to question the “morality of the act” of using one’s raw-nerved experience to make literature. But then, where would we be without art born of personal suffering? It is this shared experience, after all, that engages the artist and his/her art with the observer.

Moreover, Angels will continue to have relevance in a world in which politicians and religious leaders still want to deny rights to gays and lesbians, and in a world in which HIV and AIDS infections continue to rise, with no cure and no vaccine, and with far too little political or personal empathy toward those contracting it worldwide.

Having said that, the essential point for me was that the Rep’s production does what theater does best: It urges us to scrutinize the very foundations of our existence. It makes it clear, ultimately, that this is not a “gay play”: It is theater about love, betrayal, fidelity, honest. You don’t need to be a woman with a closeted gay husband to know what it’s like to feel abandoned or misunderstood by the person you love. (I was never a Prince of Denmark for that matter, but I can certainly relate to the paralyzing effects of Hamlet’s relentless self-analysis.)

Takeshi Kata’s spare scenic design begins with three graded step-like levels, rather than dwelling on the traditional “angel fountain” of the original staging. (Only at the end of Part II does one see an image of New York’s Bethesda Fountain, briefly.) On these multiple stage levels the starkest of props appear: an armchair, a lamp (lots of lamps), beds (lots of beds, especially sickbeds), i.v. drips. Contrapuntal action is often enacted in cross-patterns, with Joe and Harper arguing upstage center while Prior and Louis argue on a lower level stage right. The connections between their struggles are made fascinatingly clear, and they make one realize how much all relationships share in common—gay, straight, familial or otherwise.

Kromer and his powerhouse team from around the U.S. (including lighting designer Keith Parham, sound designer Christian Gero and costume designer Alison Siple) do not always abide by the letter of Tony’s stage directions. (“No blackouts!” the playwright wrote in 1995. “Invent great, full-blooded stage magic for every single magical appearance and special effect!”) But their minimalist approach is effective, as when the Angel’s appearance in Part I is accompanied by light so bright your eyes flinch and by the sound of an approaching jetliner that is so deafening that its cessation is both relief and jolt. And if an Angel entering the stage on a rolling ladder seems pedestrian, one’s eyes are captivated by David Hyman’s wing design—shimmeringly menacing and undulating imperiously on Jennifer Engstrom’s arms.

The eight central characters of the play are so sharply etched that it’s really hard to point to a single “lead,” and—as hackneyed as it might sound—when any given actor was speaking he or she seemed like the central character at that moment. Jessiee Datino as Harper exuded blithely muscular vulnerability: Her energy-sapping love for her husband, Joe (who is gay but just figuring that out) is mitigated by her empowering visions of the truths behind things. When she says to Prior, whom she sees in a hallucination toward the beginning of Millennium Approaches, that “Deep inside you, there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease,” it’s like being hit by a rock—not just because Jessiee’s delivery is so matter-of-factly believable, but because it strikes at philosophical truths that stretch far beyond zany West Village witticisms. It seems to come out of nowhere, but is in fact an example of how profundity and frivolity intermingle in Angels.

Claybourne Elder is brilliant as Joe, the anguished Mormon legal clerk trying to make it in the big city with the help of real-life villain Roy Cohn (played with irrepressible ferocity by Mark Robbins). He exudes at once confidence and innocence, and as a result Joe’s desperate infatuation with Louis (passionate Nik Kourtis)—the urbane, high-strung, brainy Jewish New Yorker who is in many ways his diametrical opposite—is as real as it is poignant. Seamus Mulcahy walks a tight-rope as Prior, who has just revealed he has AIDS, avoiding the flamboyant flamer that the playwright so painstakingly warned against and giving the role a delicate balance of vulnerability and strength. (“A Prior played for laughs is death to this enterprise!” Tony writes. “Every moment must be played for its reality, the terms always life and death; only then will the comedy emerge.”)

Peggy Friesen as Hannah, Joe’s mother, is as startlingly familiar in her secondary roles (the Rabbi, Roy’s doctor, Aleksii and especially the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg) as in her main one as a surprisingly wise, circumspect mother. And speaking of multiple roles, part of the fun of Angels draws from sudden recognitions of the Angel “disguised” as other characters: For in each secondary role she is, in a sense, a guiding light, from the wisecracking Emily to the chain-smoking realtor and the Mormon Mother come to life in the diorama. Even the brusque homeless woman, dressed in rags and huddled over a barrel eating soup, snaps out of her dementia long enough to give Hannah the directions to Brooklyn that she needs.

At the heart of the play are two central figures, played with virtuosity by actors who could command any production if they chose to. For if the Angel is a divining voice, by her own admission she has her limitations. (Angels are, in Tony’s vision, glorious and scary but kind of dumb.) Belize, on the other hand (Paul Oakley Stovall) is an empowering force who really can have an impact on people, and does. His initial hospital scene with Roy (who has just checked in to the “AIDS ward” despite the cover-story that he has liver cancer) may seem implausible on the surface, but that Nurse Belize is willing to bring mercy to such a vile figure is the kind of deeply human miracle that we like to see on the stage—and dream of in real life. Paul’s lengthy café scene with the garrulous Louis, in which the latter can’t shut up about racial politics he seems to know nothing about, reads like it could have been written yesterday—as Belize laments Louis’ “banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn’t have a race problem.” Belize controls his anger and frustration: He’s spent his whole life learning to. Paul manages to mine this role for its deadly seriousness while continually making us laugh.

Mark Robbins plays Cohn for the hurricane-force devastation that this man must have been, teasing out an amazing range of moods and characters. From the affectionate but non-sexual paternal figure for Joe to the commandeering “just-dare-me-to-sue-you” legal monster that he was, from the profanely defiant hospital patient to the unrepentant felon who in real life brought about death sentences for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg through illegal conferences with Judge Irving Kaufman—the stage Roy comes off, perversely, as a sympathetic character. Mark plays this to the hilt: You hate him and all he stands for—the lying, cheating hypocrisy of those who ignored AIDS even as it was in their midst—but you can’t help seeing something human in his tenacity, in his stubborn drive for self-preservation in the face of death. Mark somehow plumbs the mensch that is buried deep inside Tony Kushner’s Cohn, and when he dies we feel less vindicated than just sad for humanity itself—which is, after all, unrelentingly selfish to its core.

Angels in America, its two parts performed in alternating rep, runs through March 29th. On Saturdays and Sundays, both plays can be seen on the same day, with a dinner break in between. Call 816-235-2700 or go to kcrep.org.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

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