✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✭✭

by Tony Kushner, directed by Albert Schultz

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

July 31-September 28, 2013

Harper: “Devastation – that’s what makes people migrate and build stuff”

Soulpepper’s production of Angels in America is the first time both parts of Tony Kushner’s epic drama have been presented in Toronto since the Canadian Stage production of 1996.  The two parts ran in repertory from November 6, 1996 to June 29, 1997 – certainly the longest run for any play from that company.  The Soulpepper production affirms that Kushner’s plays, premiered in 1991 and 1992, form one of the greatest works of the dramatic imagination to emerge in the United States in the last century.  Under the direction of Albert Schultz, there’s a certain rockiness to the complicated exposition of plot and themes in Part 1, but that gives way to a blissful celebration of the power of the imagination in Part 2.

The focus of Part 1 of Angels is destruction in all forms.  It appears in physical and mental disease, ideals of self, and break-ups of relationships to corruption in politics, and unequal treatment of people according to race, religion and sexual orientation.  The focus of Part 2 is the recovery from this destruction and the restructuring (the literal meaning of “perestroika”) of individual lives, relationships and society.

In Part One, set in 1985-86, we follow three interrelated plots.  The young Jewish man Louis Ironson (Gregory Prest) has been living with his WASP boyfriend Prior Walter (Damien Atkins) for four years.  On the day that Louis has attended his grandmother’s funeral, Prior decides to reveal that he has AIDS.  Louis can’t handle the news and sees himself tied to someone who is dying.  Full of guilt he abandons Prior when Prior needs him the most.

Meanwhile, the Jewish, right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn (Diego Matamoros), based on  the infamous McCarthyite lawyer of the same name (1927-86), offers his protégé, law clerk Joe Pitt (Mike Ross) the chance to be promoted to a post in Washington.  While such a promotion would be the right career move for the enthusiastic Mormon Republican, he doesn’t see how he can convince his wife Harper (Michelle Monteith) to move from New York when she is so generally fearful she won’t even leave their apartment.  Her anxiety has led to an addiction to Valium to such an extent that she has begun to have conversations with imaginary people like a Travel Agent (Troy Adams) and to have hallucinations of threatening men hiding in her bedroom. 

Plot lines cross in unusual ways.  On the level of imagination, Prior suddenly appears in one of Harper’s hallucinations and tells her her husband is gay.  On the level of reality, Joe meets Louis, who immediately assumes Joe is gay, which Joe denies.  As we discover, Joe has been battling his own homosexuality for a long time as a sin that must be repressed.  The pressure of deciding whether to move and of Harper’s worsening condition, undermine his resolve and he is forced to admit his true nature to himself and to Harper.  He begins to pursue Louis to see what will happen.

There are further links between characters.  Harper is not the only one to have visions, so does Prior, who sees two of his ancestors (Diego Matamoros and Mike Ross) who died of the plagues of their times.  Furthermore Prior begins to hear the voice of an Angel (Raquel Duffy), announcing that the millennium is approaching and history is about to crack wide open.  Prior is not the only one with AIDS.  Cohn’s doctor (Nancy Palk) diagnoses Cohn with the disease, but he denies both that he is a “homosexual” (which to him means a person with no clout) and that he has AIDS (that he decides to call liver cancer).  Yet, Cohn too has a vision when the ghost of accused spy Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53), who was executed rather than given life in prison because Cohn lobbied the judge so persistently for the death penalty.

The subtitle for Angels in America is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”.  Part 1 basically tells a naturalistic story which includes an increasing number of elements of fantasy such as Harper’s invisible Travel Agent and various ghosts, culminating in the  appearance of the Angel.  Part 2, set in 1986-1990, moves beyond this dichotomy of naturalistic-versus-fantastic into mythopoesis itself.   

After a comically earnest prologue about the necessity for change from the world’s oldest living Bolshevik (Nancy Palk), we learn in Part 2  that the Angel has descended to give Prior a prophecy and to make him a prophet.  The prophecy from heaven – a heaven which God abandoned in 1906 – is that human progress should cease because it disrupts heaven and was the cause for God’s departure. 

Prior’s struggle now moves to a higher plane in having to decide whether to take on the role of prophet or to reject the prophecy he has been given.  All of the events of Part 2 culminate in his decision.  Meanwhile, Harper, the other abandoned lover, who hit bottom when she imagined she was in Antarctica, has left home only to spend her days in the Mormon Information Center looking at a diorama where one of the depicted Mormon pioneers looks just like Joe.  Roy Cohn, now hospitalized and cared for by Belize (Troy Adams), Prior’s former lover, also faces abandonment.  A committee is voting to expel him from the legal profession and, less important to him, his life is ebbing away.  Unlike Cohn, however, whose condition continues to worsen, Prior and Harper improve and discover an inner strength they didn’t know they had.  It is Harper who realizes that suffering has a role in human progress.  As she puts it, “Devastation – that’s what makes people migrate and build stuff”.

Lorenzo Savoini’s set reflects changing world of Parts 1 and 2.  His set for Part 1 looks like a box with six doors across the back wall and two each in the two side walls.  For most of Part 1 the characters use the doors for exits and entrances.  Yet the two side walls are on pivots and swing open to allow the fantastic characters entry.  In Part 2, where the common rules no longer apply and people are seeking a way to heal the rifts in their lives, both side walls are swung open and the back wall is no longer solid with even the middle section of it missing.  Thus, in Part 2 the three walls come to symbolize changeability rather than stability.  They, like the human world, is one of mutability, not stasis.

Schultz has staged the play in a fascinating way much along the lines of a medieval play by using a décor simultané.  This means different locations are depicted simultaneously on the same stage.  Stage right is Cohn’s domain.  It is also the realm of the hospital.  Stage left is Harper’s world.  Centre stage is a bed which is the domain of encounters.  It is where Prior and Louis meet, or Harper and Joe or Joe and Louis.  It is also there that Prior has his ecstatic/erotic encounters with the Angel.  The advantage of dividing the playing area into symbolic spaces is that movement of one character into another space takes on symbolic meaning.  Joe moves the most frequently among all three locations, but that does not mean he is the freest character.  Rather, it shows that he is the least grounded.  Harper is a prisoner in her area for most of Part 1 but moves into centre stage when she comes to master herself.  As Schultz stages it, Cohn, who thinks he can have anything he wants, is more trapped in his designated section of the stage than Harper is in hers.  For Cohn the hospital bed merely replaces his desk.     

It’s clear that appearing in this fantastic epic drama has energized the entire cast.  Damien Atkins gives his greatest performance ever.  His ability to capture the enormous range of Prior’s emotions from ecstasy to utter despair, overlaid with his quicksilver wit and sudden changes of mood is beyond praise.  He so deeply becomes his character that after seeing him as Prior it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role.  His brief appearance as a would-be tough leather boy is a complete contrast.  

You may think that you have seen everything Diego Matamoros can do, but his Roy Cohn is something new.  He makes Cohn the most venal, obnoxious, self-satisfied monster in human form you have ever seen.  Like the medieval Vice figure, he is also funny, but mostly we laugh in dismay at his outrageous attitudes and behaviour.  If Soulpepper ever feels like staging Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), Matamoros is the one for the title role.

Gregory Prest outdoes himself as Louis.  The young, neurotic, hyper-intellectual Jew may be a Woody Allen-like stereotype, but Prest makes the character entirely his own.  Prest is impressive in spouting out some of Louis’ non-stop disquisitions on politics with their paragraph-long sentences, all the time letting us see how ineffectual Louis is in dealing with reality.  Louis may be able to speak at length on morality in general without having much insight into his own particular morals.   

Troy Adams is hilarious as Belize, the black ex-drag queen.  He wins sympathy as Prior’s only confidant who can speak plainly with him “girl-to-girl”.  He is great in confrontations with Louis where just the right remark at just the right time can puncture Louis’s barrage of theorizing.  And his interchanges with Roy Cohn are priceless as Adams shows how Belize has to subjugate his hatred for the patient to his duty to care for him while fighting Cohn’s torrent of insults with cool anger.  To play Belize timing and style of delivery are everything and that’s exactly what Adams has.  All the effeminacy vanishes when Adams plays Harper’s Travel Agent, proud of his talent but concerned for his client. 

Raquel Duffy is also quite funny as the imposing Angel, who at first speaks in an archaic language full of portent but when questioned by Prior breaks into ordinary vernacular.  She makes a fine impression as Emily, Prior’s nurse, whose homey sympathy is a welcome balm to her traumatized patient but who has to put Louis’s tales of world history into a context she can understand.

With such an array of great performances it’s a shame that Michelle Monteith and Mike Ross do not mine all there is in their roles in Part 1.  Monteith has played so many disturbed young women in her career that one would think Harper would suit her perfectly.  Oddly, though, she plays the Valium addict as completely lucid and without using any of the many techniques she has shown elsewhere to show a character’s fraught mental state.  In Part 2, however, she is perfect as the recovering Harper, who having hit bottom now starts to resurface.  Monteith makes Harper’s arc from doubt to certainty to action heartening to follow.    

Ross has a similar problem in Part 1.  Things are so different now for gays in North America that perhaps Ross and Schultz forget how painful it would have been for someone like Joe first to acknowledge his true orientation and then to come out to the people he loves.  For Joe this problem is compounded by his political conservatism and by Mormonism’s emphasis on family and procreation to bring souls into the world.  Other actors who have played Joe, like David Storch in the Canadian Stage production or Brandon Thomas in Column 13’s production of Part 1 in 2010, have shown how Joe’s realization that he is gay completely devastates him.  His phone call to his mother should be tearful, not blunt.  In going away with Louis we should see that Joe thinks he is consigning his soul to hell.  Ross is great at playing the idealistic disciple of Roy Cohn, but while his Joe is troubled he is not nearly as tortured by his predicament as he should be.  Then in Part 2, the principal agony over, he is excellent and he conveys fearfulness at beginning a relationship with Louis with great sensitivity.    

When I first saw Angels in America in 1997, Part 1 seemed infinitely more interesting than Part 2 which felt mostly like an extended coda reworking the themes from the previous play.  This time Part 2 felt like the true culmination of everything that went before in Part 1, as if Part 1 were merely setting up the extensive groundwork necessary for the revelations of Part 2.  Angels is an emotionally and intellectually challenging work that is also as moving as it is enlightening and strangely optimistic.  If you see Angels in America, you must see Part 1 before you see Part 2.  But, no matter what, you must see both parts and you must see them now.  Angels rewards every moment you spend in the theatre with an abundance of humour, imagination and insight into the human condition.      

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Damien Atkins as Prior and Gregory Prest as Louis; (upper middle) Raquel Duffy as the Angel and Damien Atkins as Prior; (lower middle) Diego Matamoros as Roy Cohn and Nancy Palk as Ethel Rosenberg.  ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.