Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tony Kushner, directed by Jonah Allison
Column 13 Actors Company, Dancemakers Centre, Toronto
January 14-30, 2010
The plucky, actor-based company Column 13 gives Toronto its first production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches since CanStage presented it in 1997. That alone is reason enough to seek it out, but Column 13’s minimalist, low-budget staging also shows us more clearly Tony Kushner’s play as a play rather than the play-as-spectacle or play-as-event that it was in the 1990s.
Under Jonah Allison’s thoughtful direction the play’s structure is absolutely clear. Set in the mid-1980s, Kushner’s story interleaves the break-up of a gay couple, Louis and Prior (Michael De Rose and Wesley Connor), with that of a straight Mormon couple Joe and Harper Pitt (Brandon Thomas and Angela Hanes). Riddled with guilt Louis leaves Prior because he can’t handle Prior’s slow death by AIDS. Joe leaves Harper as her Valium addiction worsens, but that itself is due to Joe’s gradual admission to himself and finally to Harper that he is gay. The evil genius and symbol Reagan-era hypocrisy is Joe’s employer, the historical figure Roy Cohn (Mark Fraser), a gay but homophobic Commie-hating lawyer, who is also dying of AIDS but claims to everyone it is liver cancer. What emerges is a portrait of a self-deluded America whose moral system is so corroded it will soon implode.
Column 13’s previous productions have all been of realist plays where the detailed, naturalistic performances Allison draws from his cast are their greatest asset. Kushner’s play requires this but also a theatrical flair that here, except for the ending, is largely missing. Since Allison comes up with such an imaginative way to stage the Angel’s miraculous appearance at the end, one wishes he found ways to heighten the play’s other supernatural elements.
All five principals give strong performances. Brandon Thomas is outstanding in depicting the pain of a man whose straight façade is crumbling and who has been taught that the desires he feels will damn his soul. De Rose manages to win sympathy for a man consumed with guilt over his cowardice. Hanes gives us chilling portrait of alienation, and after seeing Connor it’s hard to imagine anyone else as Prior. Fraser deserves praise for letting us glimpse the fear that underlies Cohn’s rage. If only the rest of the cast would project the show would be more effective, since the noise of the theatre’s heating system covers anything delivered at a conversational level. That issue aside, this is another brave, insightful evening from Column 13.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-01-18.
Photo: Jillian Niedoba as The Angel.
2010-01-18
Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches