Every generation, at some point, develops a sense of its own significance. In "Angels in America," Tony Kushner's lumbering epic of a play, it is 1985, God has abandoned Heaven, and phantoms arrive to warn that "history is about to crack open." No matter that it is 2008, the apocalypse has not arrived, and no Reaganite majority has taken permanent hold of social discourse, this work still presents itself as significant in virtually any context.
The two-part, six-hour, Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play is receiving its first U.S. professional production in 10 years by Boston Theatre Works. Kushner's overwhelming vision of death, religion, hallucinatory love and pending apocalypse is grand enough on paper but this production, though scrappy and heartfelt, doesn't go quite far enough to make that vision real.
Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the play's immediate terrain is the arrival of AIDS as a hidden plague and the lives that it unravels. It is a domestic drama that spirals outward to incorporate the full extent of American malaise. As soon as Prior Walter (played by Tyler Reilly), a young New York aesthete, reveals his first Kaposi's sarcoma legion to his partner, Louis Ironson (Christopher Webb), a Jewish clerical worker with a self-indulgent philosophical streak, he is deserted within weeks. The ambitious law clerk Joe Pitt (Sean Hopkins) can't get his unhinged wife, Harper (Bree Elrod), to quit Valium and stop hearing noises in their empty apartment.
Added to the mix is Pitt's mentor, Roy Cohn (Richard McElvain), the real-life Joe McCarthy sidekick who succumbed to AIDS in 1986. Roy, as realized by McElvain, is a caustic, cynical dinosaur who refuses to admit his homosexuality because gay men are those whom "nobody knows, with zero clout."
The story weaves back and forth between searing humor and raging drama as the lives of these characters intersect and inform each other. These people struggle with their worst habits from the doom of Part I, "Millennium Approaches," through the conclusion and thaw of Part II, "Perestroika." The sense builds throughout, as Harper puts it, that "something's going to give." She is proved correct in ways that scramble all of their lives and demand sacrifice.
The script is a model of the transition between intimate, sparse staging and overt theatricality. Co-directed by Jason Sutherland and Nancy Curran Willis, this production tries awfully hard, sometimes effectively, to make the most of that contrast. But more often, the dramatic effect is subverted by awkwardly designed theatrics. Kushner himself prescribes a method in which the principal actors play minor characters and work as stagehands.
He also suggests, though, that the bits of theatrical illusion, from the arrival of angels to a living diorama in Manhattan's Mormon Visitors' Center, should be "thoroughly amazing." The directors emphasize the fabricated nature of these effects, but most of them aren't quite impressive enough to suspend disbelief.
This production's success rests on the strength of the cast, which is no small task given that these characters have been tackled onscreen by the likes of Al Pacino and Meryl Streep in the multiple-Emmy-winning "Angels in America" TV series (2003). McElvain is a force of nature when he finds a spirit in Cohn that isn't just imitating Pacino. Tyler Reilly's beleaguered prophet, Walter, is engagingly neurotic. Maurice Parent terrifically fills out the roles of Mr. Lies and Belize, the ex-drag queen intermediary between Walter and Ironson and Cohn's nurse. Susanne Nitter varies herself well as Pitt's cold mother and Ethel Rosenberg's ghost. Everyone is strong, and they ably support each other and the play's ambitious runtime.
For all its flaws and inevitable overshadowing by the film version, this production cannot prevent the heart of the play from doggedly shining through. The story is an operatic deconstruction of how people change and how the world keeps on turning. Those in power, on earth or in heaven, might prefer that we shut up or slow down. But even when it's necessary to cater to the Roy Cohns of the world or lie suffering and alone, these people don't give up so easily.
The play's ending is heavy-handed and leans a bit close to sentimentality, but it nevertheless becomes an ode to the strength of each generation to literally shout its purpose from the rooftops. It's a huge story, and one just wishes it were given the theatrical expression to match it.
Angels in AmericaWritten by Tony KushnerDirected by Jason Southerland and Nancy Curran WillisAt Boston Center for the Arts through Feb. 10Tickets $10 to $48
