By Paul Horsley

Maybe all you know about Angels in America is that it’s a monumental, mystical, two-part, seven-hour stage work that wrestles with gigantic subjects such as good and evil, sex and human frailty, love and hypocrisy, and death. Or that it changed the course of American theater. Or that it dealt with AIDS at a time when its dark wings fluttered over the very people who brought it into being. All of that is true. But if you haven’t seen Angels on the stage the joke’s on you, because it’s also one of the funniest, most engaging and joyously inspiring works of 20th-century literature.

From February 20th through March 29th the Kansas City Repertory Theatre tackles Tony Kushner’s two-part play, which won a Pulitzer Prize and fistfuls of Tonys and other awards. The powerful cast drawn from the best of American actors will present the play’s two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, in alternating repertory on the Copaken Stage downtown. (And on some days you can attend both parts in a single day, as I did once in the mid-1990s in New York, a day I’ll never forget.)

If Angels were just about the AIDS crisis and the Reagan years we wouldn’t still be watching it more than two decades later, in cities all over the globe. Its themes of love, death and spiritual clarity in the midst of suffering are universal, and the sheer beauty of its language has assured it a permanent place in world drama. “There are a few times in your life when a play is so vivid and beautiful that it leaps off the page,” said Claybourne Elder, who plays aspiring legal clerk Joseph Pitt. “I can truly only think of a handful of times that I’ve read a play and just been mesmerized.”

At the center of Angels are a gay couple on the rocks (Prior, who is just learning to deal with his AIDS diagnosis, and Louis), a closeted Mormon and his drug-addled wife (Joe and Harper), and real-life attorney Roy Cohn, who himself died in 1986 of the very disease that the conservatives he represented were pretending didn’t exist. And of course the Angel, who floats in and out of the other characters’ lives and helps them, and us, try to make sense of things.

The lives of the two couples intersect partly because of Joe’s conflicted sexuality, with Roy as intellectual provocateur in the center. “Does is make any difference?” Joe asks his wife in Millennium Approaches, when she begins to understand he is gay, in words that many tortured believers from various religions might have uttered at some point. “That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me? … More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell.”

But Angels is far more than a tale of conflicted sexuality. “These plays are about the addiction to being alive, regardless of how horrible and brutal life is,” said Jennifer Engstrom, who performs the role of the Angel (and several other roles, as do all but one of the eight principal characters). “We choose more life, we move forward. Anyone who has suffered any kind of loss, anyone who can’t imagine a world without someone else in it, finds they wouldn’t abandon life on earth to erase that pain. We still choose life. And in that sense, it is a timeless piece.”

Part of the Rep’s 50th anniversary season, this Angels is directed by MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” recipient David Cromer, whose 1998 Chicago production of Tony’s play electrified Rep Artistic Director Eric Rosen as a young actor/director, and whose Glass Menagerie (2009) and Our Town (2014) have been Rep highlights. This season is a “yearlong examination of how theater changes the world,” Eric said of the anniversary celebration. “In my lifetime, no play has changed how we live more significantly than Kushner’s masterpiece.” David said he was quite eager to work here again after the acclaimed Our Town. “I love this company. Kansas City audiences are smart and ready to embrace new ideas.”

As a director, David “has a reverence for the skills of the playwright, and he wants to serve that,” said Kansas City-based Mark Robbins, who portrays the controversial Roy, arguably the play’s central character. “He encourages us to trust the text. And … if we tell the story on a textual level very, very clearly, the emotion rides the coattails of the text. It’s not sentimental, but it is lyrical, and he exerts us all to trust the energy of the words, the energy of the questions asked, in looking for answers.”

Simplicity, punctuation, not reading more emotion into the text than it actually has: Those are the hallmarks of David’s style. “Because he is himself an actor, and comes from an acting background, he produces some of the most beautifully acted things that are happening right now,” said Claybourne, whose upbringing as an openly gay Mormon contains striking similarities to (and substantial differences from) that of his character. “That is unique in a director, to have somebody who wants to talk through vocal production, and punctuation of lines, and why he thinks that way.”

Claybourne says a lot has changed in the 20 years since Angels shone such a bright spotlight on the faith he was raised in. “I came up in a family that is very supportive, even though they are very ‘orthodox’ Mormons. … When this play was written, Mormonism was a lot less known. It was just this mysterious thing. People now have a much broader understanding of what Mormonism is in general.” Taking out that mysticism “takes a lot of the work of this play,” he said, “because you don’t have to spend the time learning that. … As actors and director, and as a team, we can take it from there and build it higher that it could have gone otherwise.”

Some have questioned the realism of the character of Roy Cohn in this play, and Tony Kushner does include a disclaimer in the script to the effect that, while many aspects of “his” Roy are a part of public record (including his illegal conferences with Judge Irving Kaufman during the Ethel Rosenberg trial), “this Roy is a work of dramatic fiction; his words are my invention, and liberties have been taken.”

For Mark, Tony’s goal was to create “a sort of avatar, for lack of a better word, of Roy Cohn,” and for dramatic rather than historical goals. This character “bears the same relationship to the real-life Roy Cohn as the Richard III in Shakespeare bears to the real Richard III, or Henry V in Shakespeare’s play to Henry V. The playwright takes certain selected attributes of character, or of the myth of the character, and uses those in a theatrical way … to get the effect that he wants for the story he’s telling.”

What strikes many about Angels initially is the sheer language, which not only jumps off the page when you read it but is uniquely designed for maximum impact in a live theatrical setting. “It is like a piece of music,” Jennifer said, “the beat and the rhythm. … It’s so clear how he wants it to sound, how this piece of music will move and escalate and crescendo and decrease. … It’s like you get to play the best piece of music you’ve ever played. You don’t have to do anything, you just play it.”

And indeed, there is much in Angels that does seem to work best in a live setting, Jennifer added. “It makes me proud to be of the theater. There are things that just can’t translate, that you have to see in the theater to understand the weight of them. … It has to be in a room full of living, breathing people, all experiencing the same thing in real time, in real life. Sharing the same oxygen. And then it goes away. There’s something so beautiful and sad about a performance that lives and then dies and then it’s gone. You know, it’s not recorded, it’s not curated. … It’s ephemeral.”

Angels in America, which runs February 20th through March 29th on the Copaken Stage, also stars Jessiee Datino (Harper), Nik Kourtis (Louis), Peggy Friesen (Hannah), Seamus Mulcahy (Prior) and Paul Oakley Stovall (Belize). Call 816-235-2700 or go to kcrep.org.

Photo of David Cromer at top courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, find him on Facebook or email him at phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

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