Review/Theater; Marching Out of the Closet, Into History
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By FRANK RICH,
Published: November 10, 1992, Tuesday

Some visionary playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize the theater. Tony Kushner, the remarkably gifted 36-year-old author of "Angels in America," is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.

As a political statement, "Angels in America," a two-part, seven-hour epic subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," is nothing less than a fierce call for gay Americans to seize the strings of power in the war for tolerance and against AIDS. But this play, by turns searing and comic and elegiac, is no earthbound ideological harangue. Though set largely in New York and Washington during the Reagan-Bush 80's, "Angels in America" sweeps through locales as varied as Salt Lake City and the Kremlin, and through high-flying styles ranging from piquant camp humor to religious hallucination to the ornate poetic rage of classic drama.

When was the last time a play embraced intellectual poles as seemingly antithetical as Judy Garland and Walter Benjamin, Joseph Smith and Mikhail Gorbachev, Emma Goldman and Nancy Reagan? Almost anything can happen as history cracks open in "Angels in America." A Valium-addicted Washington housewife, accompanied by an imaginary travel agent resembling a jazz musician, visits a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. An angel crashes with an apocalyptic roar through the ceiling of a Manhattan apartment to embrace a dwindling, Christ-like man spotted with Kaposi's sarcoma. A museum diorama illustrating the frontier history of the Mormons comes to contentious life. Ethel Rosenberg returns from the dead to say kaddish for her executioner, Roy Cohn.

No wonder the audience is somewhat staggered as it leaves the Mark Taper Forum, where the complete "Angels in America" had its premiere in a day-and-night marathon on Sunday. (It is scheduled to travel to the New York Shakespeare Festival in February.) The show is not merely mind-bending; at times it is mind-exploding, eventually piling on more dense imagery and baroque spiritual, political and historical metaphor than even an entranced, receptive audience can absorb in two consecutive sittings.

Part 1 of "Angels in America," titled "Millennium Approaches" and a sensation at the Royal National Theater in London this year, remains a dazzling, self-contained piece. While the new, at times stodgy Taper production, directed by Oskar Eustis with Tony Taccone, does not yet reach the imaginative heights of Declan Donnellan's London staging, the work's alternate chords of deep grief and dreamy wonderment still produce exhilaration for the heart, mind and eyes. Part 2, titled "Perestroika" and never before seen in a full production, seems a somewhat embryonic, occasionally overstuffed mixture of striking passages, Talmudic digressions and glorious epiphanies. Mr. Kushner is by no means exhausted, but he may have to harness his energies more firmly to keep his audience from feeling so by the final curtain.

Huge as the playwright's canvas is, both parts of "Angels" focus intimately on two couples, one gay and one nominally heterosexual, in which one partner abandons the other. Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello), a Jewish leftist and legal cleric, runs out on his AIDS-stricken lover, a WASP esthete named Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), once the disease's ravages leave blood on the floor. Joe Pitt (Jeffrey King), an ambitious Republican lawyer clerking in Federal court, deserts his loyal but long-suffering wife, Harper (Cynthia Mace), once his homosexual longings overpower his rectitudinous Mormon credo. Whether intact or fractured, the couples intersect throughout the play, brought together by chance events, by interlocking fantasies (erotic and mystical) and, indirectly, by the machinations of Roy Cohn.

As written by Mr. Kushner with a witty, demonic grandeur worthy of a Shakespearean villain, and played with maniacal relish by the braying Ron Leibman in high, red-faced dudgeon, Cohn is the Antichrist of "Angels in America": the witchhunting accomplice of Joe McCarthy is seen in his final guise as an unofficial Mr. Fixit in the Ed Meese Justice Department and New York City's most famous closeted gay AIDS patient. In one brilliant passage, Cohn argues that he is a heterosexual who has sex with men rather than a homosexual because gay men, unlike him, are "men who know nobody and who nobody knows, men who have zero clout." It is Mr. Kushner's sly point that gay people could learn something from the despicable Cohn about the amassing of political power, and it is one of the play's most provocative strokes that this cutthroat often has the funniest and smartest lines. For Mr. Leibman, the vindictive, cadaverous Cohn may be the role of his career, and his performance need only shed some Don Rickles shtick to realize it.

His theatrical power is matched by Mr. Spinella's Prior, another kind of AIDS patient entirely. It is the abandoned, delusional Prior who is visited by an Angel at the end of Part 1 and becomes a heaven-sent prophet of survival for his people in Part 2. Mr. Spinella, a bone-thin young man with a boy's open face and an extravagant spirit, is triumphant in this mammoth part, creating an ethereal but tough-spined sprite who fills the theater with his transcendent will to live even as his body is gutted by "inhuman horror." He is the ideal heroic vessel for Mr. Kushner's unifying historical analogy, in which the modern march of gay people out of the closet is likened to the courageous migrations of turn-of-the-century Jews to America and of 19th-century Mormons across the plains.

None of the other performances are in this league, although Mr. Mantello's cowardly Louis shows a lot of promise and K. Todd Freeman sizzles in the comic role of a one-time drag queen who ends up as Cohn's private nurse. Among the rest, the only one that does damage comes from Ms. Mace, whose lost wife exudes brash sitcom brio rather than the disorientation and vulnerability that might make the play's one major female character touching.

In their staging of Part 1, Mr. Eustis and Mr. Taccone have not departed radically from the London choreography of the overlapping scenes and celestial revelations. But the execution can be plodding, and the fabulousness of Mr. Kushner's writing, so verdant with what one line calls "unspeakable beauty," is sometimes dimmed. While the appropriately chosen set designer is John Conklin, the artist who brought so many levitating dreams to the Metropolitan Opera's "Ghosts of Versailles," his central set here, a stylized Federal building emblematizing a decaying body politic, confronts the audience with a visually heavy blank wall and, like the direction, sometimes lumbers when it might spin or shatter.

When the going gets truly heavy in Part 2, Mr. Kushner must share responsibility. The writing retreats to conventionality as he sorts out the domestic conflicts of his major characters. Long debates about the Reagan ethos and the hypocrisies of gay Republicans seem unexceptional after this year's Presidential campaign. But just when "Angels in America" seems to bog down in the naturalism and polemics Mr. Kushner otherwise avoids, it gathers itself up for a stirring cosmic denouement in which Mr. Spinella's Prior, having passed through a spiritual heaven and five years of physical hell, addresses the audience directly from the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Envisioning a new age of universal perestroika in which "the world only spins forward," Prior foretells a future in which "this disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all," in which "we will not die secret deaths anymore," in which love and "more life" will be the destiny of "each and every one."

Above him hovers the statue of the angel Bethesda. Angels, as Prior explains, "commemorate death" but hold out the hope of "a world without dying." It is that angelic mission of mercy that seems to inform the entire universe of this vast, miraculous play. Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches Part 2: Perestroika By Tony Kushner; directed by Oskar Eustis with Tony Taccone; sets by John Conklin; costumes by Gabriel Berry; lighting by Pat Collins; sound by Jon Gottlieb; fight director, Randy Kovitz; original music by Mel Marvin; production stage manager, Mary K. Klinger; stage managers, James T. McDermott and Jill Ragaway; associate producer, Corey Beth Madden. Presented by Center Theater Group/Mark Taper Forum, Gordon Davidson, artistic director and producer; Charles Dillingham, managing director, and Robert Egan, associate artistic director, in association with the New York Shakespeare Festival, JoAnne Akalaitis, artistic director; Jason Steven Cohen, producing director. At the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles. Hannah Pitt . . . Kathleen Chalfant Belize . . . K. Todd Freeman Joe Pitt . . . Jeffrey King Roy Cohn . . . Ron Leibman Harper Pitt . . . Cynthia Mace Louis Ironson . . . Joe Mantello The Angel . . . Ellen McLaughlin Prior Walter . . . Stephen Spinella Heavenly Attendants Pauline Lepor and Eve Sigall