It’s one of the
biggest plays of the late twentieth century, perhaps one of the last entries in
the American canon, one of the newest classics, and it’s not without its own
kind of grandeur. Written as two plays, and billed as “an epic double-comedy of love and hate,
heaven and earth, past and future,” Tony Kushner’s Angels
in America is set in 1985, and revolves around a group of “marginalised
individuals in New York in the last years of the Cold War,” as the AIDS
epidemic sweeps them all up in its path. To see the two plays in sequence on
consecutive days is by turns compelling and grueling, and I don’t think it
would be any easier seeing them on the same day.
Staged within a beige-tiled
atrium, Angels in America is directed
with a vitality and cleverness by Eamon Flack, and to use a character’s
analogy, it’s all a bit like an octopus with its eight arms waving about,
trying to keep track of every character, every actor, each plotline, and still
keep everything in the scope of the bigger picture. Now a generation old (as a
complete play, it is a year or two younger than I am), whether you realise it
or not, it’s “actually a play about the beginning of the era we’re now in the
thick of.”
Having read the play and seen the HBO telemovie, I
thought I knew what the play was about, and I guess I still do. But there’s a
strange alchemy that happens when you see a play – this play – performed on
stage, and particularly one like Belvoir’s corner, and it takes on a life of
its own, well outside of any preconceived idea you had of it or its prior
forms. And while as an entire piece of theatre, the two parts were rather
beautifully produced and created, there was a kind of emptiness to the first
two acts of Part One, a lack of
‘life’. Seemingly staged by Flack on either the edges of the stage or in the
middle of the space, the action never seemed to fill the space entirely as it
shifted from place to place, from character to character. At least, not until
the beginning of Act Three when the prior Walters visit Prior Walter in his
bedroom. From then on, as everything began to accelerate towards the inevitable
climax of Part One, the space came to
life with the exuberance, wit, energy and almost apocalyptic sense of play that
is embodied in Kushner’s play. By the end of Part Two, the multiple storylines have, like the characters,
converged upon New York, and the characters achieve (for the most part) a kind
of absolution in the face of their struggle. And Flack, having directed the
marvelous As You Like It and tender Babyteeth for Belvoir, turns his cheeky
playful seriousness to this play, and the result is a rare kind of revelation.
Reading the play again, afterwards, a lot of the humour in the scenes is
Kushner’s, is intrinsically there in the words and the rhythm of the life of
the scene; what Flack has done has been to amplify it, make it seem fresh and
new, almost a daring of style. Moments like the Angel’s entrance in the closing
moments of Part One, and the revealing of the book containing the flaming aleph
immediately prior to it, are built out of a simplicity and an ingeniousness
that seems to be inseparable from Flack’s directing style. The entrance of a
character into another’s private dream – like Mr Lies into Harper’s
valium-induced experiences – are created from the simple magic contained within
a handful of glitter. When coupled with Belvoir’s visible lack of space for
stage machinery, and the malleability of the stage design, these solutions seem
almost too simple to be effective, but they are effective; in fact, they’re
more than that – they’re almost perfect.
The cast were all superb – I don’t think any actor played just one
character; through the magic of doubling and costumes (by the ever-inventive
Mel Page) and the bare-mechanics of Flack’s scene changes, every actor became
someone else, effortlessly, totally, convincingly. Opening each Part, was Robyn
Nevin, first as Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, then as Aleksii Antedilluvianovich
Prelapsarianov, the world’s oldest Bolshevik. Both characters perform a similar
function, both a kind of omniscient narrator sent out to ‘prepare the way’ for
the forthcoming play, and are rather obliquely humorous. Mitchell Butel as
Louis is splendid, his speeches (when he gets going) become something akin to
Woody Allen’s in Manhattan and Annie Hall. We feel the pain, the
sacredness, the dumbfounded confusion, of Luke Mullins’ Prior Walter, just as
much as we see and hear it. Amber McMahon’s Harper is both naïve and
unperturbed by the whole thing, though her resolution didn’t seem to fit within
the context of everyone else’s; she is perhaps the only character who doesn’t
achieve a satisfactory ending. Robyn Nevin was equally hardy and determined as
Hannah Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg, and the fact they were played by the same
actor perhaps says more about their purpose and effect than of them themselves;
underneath their hardiness however, was a tenderness, and it’s something that
could easily have been lost in the hands of a less-skilled actor. Ashley
Zuckerman as Joe, like his wife Harper, was naïve, innocent, very much caught up
in the whole thing without quite knowing what he was doing or what was
happening, who people were. His relationship with Roy Cohn (played by Marcus Graham) seemed at times flat and un-real, but that is perhaps the point – it was
more out of desperation on Joe’s part, a need for a father-figure and or mentor
than anything else; Cohn – being who he was – used Joe and turned him against
himself, his wife, his mother and almost everything else in the world. DeObia
Oparei, as Belize and Mr Lies, was a glorious mix of charm, warmth, coldness,
sass, and conviction, so sure of himself and his world yet able to snap into
the defensive mode as the occasion arose. Played by Paula Arundell, the Angel
was both fierce and aloof, a kind of hell-bent (and almost literal) deus ex-machina, and I don’t necessarily
think Kushner intended it to be a Judeo-Christian biblical prophesying type of
angel, but more the idea of ‘an Angel’ – a manifestation of an idea as opposed
to any specific religious entity. And in its own way, it was thrilling,
haunting, beautiful, dangerous.
At its core, Angels in America
is a ‘gay fantasia’ on a theme of America – just as “Chekhov’s Russia is a
mental Russia,” so too is Kushner’s play “about a human struggle called
America” – and speaks about all that is “expansive, rough, wild and incomplete
in human life,” rather than anything complete, contained, tidy, labeled. And just as Kushner’s play looks forward and
back to the old and the new, a bit like a lighthouse, so too do the stories we
(must) tell embody all that has come before and all that will come afterwards.
In a word, the play contains the new-millennial elements of “language,
imagination, elan, will, love, connectedness, argument, ideas, a love of life,
a sense of humour…” and proves that more than anything else at the moment, we
need to live. We need – we crave – “more life.”
Theatre
playlist: 14. God
Music, from Black Angels, George Crumb, perf. Australian Chamber Orchestra
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