Subject: `Angels in America'
Date: Published: 11/20/92 (116 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS:
    Theater:  `Angels in America'
    ----
    By David Littlejohn

    Los Angeles -- Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" is a brilliant,
 muddled, wildly overambitious seven-hour-long pair of plays.  It
 officially opened early this month at the Mark Taper Forum here,
 trailing clouds of glitter from earlier award-winning productions of
 its first half (called "Millenium Approaches") in San Francisco and
 London.  The complete, "marathon" version -- one can see the plays
 separately, or both in one day -- was scheduled to begin a two-month
 run at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre on Feb. 9.
 But even as you read this, theatrical wheelers are dealing to drop
 the plays directly on Broadway, which would give them a chance to
 test Sir Ian McKellan's prediction (made on last year's Tony Awards
 telecast) that this epic, encyclopedic anti-establishment work would
 "win every Tony in sight" for 1993.
    That may very well turn out to be true, even though the new
 second part, "Perestroika," is at least twice as long as it needs to
 be, larded with pointless layers of supernaturalism, and soured by a
 nasty rhetoric far less persuasive than the dazzling language of
 play I. Half the members of a heroic cast of eight (who play eight
 major and 20 minor roles, and push all the scenery about) seem to
 run out of energy or new ideas in play II. But whether this drying
 up is the playwright's fault or the directors' (Tony Taccone and
 Oskar Eustis) is sometimes difficult to tell.
    Mr. Kushner has said that he would still like to cut a good deal
 of "Perestroika."  I hope he gets the chance.  "Millenium Approaches"
 has flaws of its own, but it remains a stunning and provocative
 theatrical experience.  For 3 1/2 hours, the frantic, diabolically
 witty whirl of action and ideas almost never permits your attention
 to unbolt itself from the stage.  If the playwright can shave the
 second play of its more shrill and silly excesses -- perhaps even
 weld the two into one 4 1/2- or five-hour play -- "Angels in
 America" should run in New York as long as the cast can hold up.
    The tour de force role is that of Roy Cohn -- a demonized,
 much-larger-than-life version of the power-broking, closeted gay
 lawyer who came to fame on Senator Joe McCarthy's coattails.  He is
 here played by Ron Leibman with breathtaking gusto, superhuman
 energy and ferocious intelligence:  as compelling and delicious as
 only a consummate villain can be.
    The two plays are performed in dozens of overlapping, crosscut,
 sometimes simultaneous scenes.  But every scene Leibman/Cohn is in is
 electric, from his foulmouthed opening aria directed at half a dozen
 callers on the telephone, through his violent defenses of political
 amoralism, to his bravura deathbed cackles and croaks.
    The Cohn figure -- a corrupt latter-day Iago who ends up dying of
 AIDS -- allows Mr. Kushner to hammer home innumerable points about
 disease in the U. S. body politic, and to link up the two overtly
 fictional couples whose interwoven stories fill up most of the seven
 hours.
    Joe (Jeffrey King), the stiff, apparently straight-arrow Mormon
 husband of one unhappy couple is a Brooklyn attorney Cohn is trying
 to convert into a protege.  When he finally acknowledges his
 long-stifled lust for men (gayness and AIDS, in these plays, become
 large symbols for rootless "freedom" and national corruption), he
 yields to the very real attractions of Louis, a young Jewish liberal
 (Joe Mantello) who works in his office, for whom Joe's Reaganite
 Republicanism is the curse of Satan, and Cohn Satan himself.
    Before they get together, Joe and Louis each leave behind a
 loser-partner:  Joe's frustrated, neurotic wife, Harper (Cynthia
 Mace), whose Valium dreams serve as one excuse for the plays'
 tripping out into anti-realism; and Louis's boyfriend, Prior (the
 skeletally thin Stephen Spinella), whose AIDS-induced physical
 decay, graphically shown on stage, drives his lover away.  The
 resultant chains of guilt, blame, self-defense and recrimination
 provide the dynamic for much of the rest of the domestic,
 nonpolitical plots.  Belize, a brilliant black queen who is a friend
 of Louis's and Prior's -- magnificently played by K. Todd Freeman --
 ends up as the dying Cohn's belligerent nurse.  Joe's dry, wry,
 wonderful mother from Utah (Kathleen Chalfant) drags herself to New
 York to help save her son and his marriage, but ends up instead
 helping poor Prior through his trials on earth and in heaven.
    The trials in heaven depicted here -- almost all in "Perestroika"
 -- include the angels of the title (real winged ones who fly), the
 29,156th meeting of a heavenly planning commission, mysterious
 Mormonlike books and revelations, and an erotic cosmogony in which
 God abandons heaven and his angels after he grows bored with endless
 copulation, creates men and women as a diversion, but then dooms
 them to wandering, discontent and ever-increasing misery.  Some of
 this, I suppose, may be twisted to "explain" Mr. Kushner's
 this-worldly stories of AIDS, gayness and the disease that is
 America, of Cohn and the two warring couples.  But in the end, I
 thought, it added nothing of substance, and made for some fairly
 turgid theater.  The author, in fact, keeps deflating his own
 supernaturalist pretensions with cynical one-liners.
    There are also coruscating stretches of eloquence throughout the
 two plays (mostly given to Cohn, Louis and Belize), but the
 cynically deflating one-liner is perhaps the most memorable shtick
 in "Angels in America."  The Los Angeles audiences on Nov. 15, the
 two-play day I attended, laughed wildly (hysterically?  nervously?
 cruelly?  in private recognition?) at all the campy gay jokes, the
 easy Jewish jokes, the get-the-straights jokes, the anti-Republican
 (or anti-liberal P. C.)  jokes; at any number of really not very funny
 lines that allowed us a momentary escape from the bitterness and
 bleakness, the moral and physical horrors depicted on stage and
 alluded to beyond it.
    Toward the end of the first play, Mr. Mantello as Louis -- one of
 the four memorable performers here, with Mr. Leibman, Mr. Freeman
 and Ms. Chalfant -- sets off on a long, breathless monologue about
 freedom and democracy, America and Europe, race, sex, religion and
 politics, in which he keeps interrupting and contradicting himself;
 asserting, then apologizing; leaving ideas half formed and sentences
 unfinished.  The result is an irrational muddle.  But at the same
 time, it sounds eloquent, endearing and strangely true -- not unlike
 these two ungainly but formidable plays.

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