New York is the recipient of the stunning and superb revival of the two-part masterpiece Angels in America from London where Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play actually began a quarter century ago before it took Broadway by storm in 1993. Repeating their roles in this glorious new National Theater production are Nathan Lane as Roy Cohen and Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter. The king-size play is being presented as a unit with its two lengthy parts staged in consecutive evenings or with a matinee and evening option. “Millennium Approaches” is the first part of this massive work subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” The best news is that Angels has landed with its wings intact. It is a seven-hour, epic-scaled play that uses the AIDS epidemic as a defining metaphor for the eroding of our country’s moral, spiritual and ethical postures during the 1980’s. There is, at the end of the first three and one-half hours (including two intermissions) a feeling that a remarkably stirring and unconventional theatrical experience is passionately and purposefully unfolding. Whether or not you have seen the play as produced in 2003 as a mini-series by HBO, the excellent Off Broadway revival in 2010 or even perhaps even the opera, the original play, however slightly tweaked over the years by Kushner, remains a must-see dramatic event. It is a huge, impressive endeavor upon which Kushner has implanted much that is skilled and much that is soulful. Tarnished only slightly by a somewhat archetypal embrace of characters and situations, it vehemently condemns the collectively biased course that our nation took during the Reagan-Bush era. How the play translates and illuminates its message in today’s polarized political landscape is all too terrifyingly clear. Episodic, but not fragmented, Angels in America revolves around the fatefully integrated lives of five principal characters. Each in his or her own way is either discomforted, disenfranchised, or disillusioned. The characters include a gay couple, one of whom is dying of AIDS, a repressed homosexual Mormon Republican lawyer, his hallucinating agoraphobic wife, and Roy Cohen, the opportunistic closeted homosexual lawyer. All plummet through the plays’ social, political and psychological mayhem as well as expediently through set designer Ian MacNeil’s impressive neon-framed mobile settings. Both parts of Angels have a wildly unconventional, part-real-part-fantasy-part-farce structure that not only stretches previously prescribed dramatic boundaries but also gives characters room to coexist in unorthodox counterpoint to each other. Marianne Elliott’s splendid direction unleashes an exhilarating freedom of expressiveness in each interlocking scene, as well as within each of the extraordinary actors, many of whom double, triple, and quadruple their roles. In this regard, Denise Gough, Susan Brown, and Amanda Lawrence stand out for their multiple excursions. Given Kushner’s penchant for broad and brash humor, many of the roles are vitally charged with large doses of vitriol, vinegar, and, especially in the case of Cohen, a distinctly vituperative sleaziness. Lane is to put it mildly, spectacularly brilliant as Cohen, the abrasive, abusive McCarthyite who attempts to further the career of his protégé Joseph Pitt (Lee Pace), a guilt-ridden Mormon and a Justice Department lawyer. Pitt’s personal problems are not only standing in his way up the political ladder, they are seen infecting the behavior of his neglected, valium-addicted wife Harper. Harper is given a memorable state of poignant disorientation by Gough. But at the heart of the play lies the painful, imploding relationship of Louis (James McArdle), a Jewish clerk and Prior (Garfield) his dying, WASP, cross-dressing lover. Although we see the tortured-by-his-desertion Louis wearing his conscience on his sleeve, it is the ravaged cloak of impending death worn on the frail shoulders of the heart-breaking Prior that prepares us for the emotionally explosive finale of Part I, the arrival through a shattering ozone layer of the winged messenger Angel (Amanda Lawrence). “Isn’t this a little too Stephen Spielberg?” asks the frightened Prior, who has already had visitations from deceased relatives. “Perestroika” (Part II) concludes with a fantastical and prophetic pilgrimage: one taken by the heart, produced by the mind, and guided by the soul of Prior Walter, the play’s protagonist. Never preachy, almost always funnier than you would expect, the play’s message of a new dawn basks in the light of earthly reality. The shifting relationships of the characters we first met in Part I continue to shock, astound, baffle and amuse us. But now these left and right wingers, the straights and the gays are on the verge of resolving their dilemmas. Except for the epilogue, the action unfolds in New York City in 1986 and follows Prior’s newly prescribed destiny as an unlikely, if noticeably unwilling, prophet of his age. Dying but spiritually evolving, Prior is driven by a desire to live. He challenges the directives of the descended Angel who has just appointed him a prophet. Allowed a distinct temperament, Lawrence portrays the winged messenger with a playfully feisty attitude. Ascending in a dizzying dream to heaven (a scene that wryly recalls Dorothy’s trip to Oz) Prior takes his case before an entire council of angels. It is thrilling to watch this amazing cast explore the depths and desires of their unforgettable characters. And Elliott’s upward and onward direction is no less dynamic in its course than is Kushner’s astounding text. “Perestroika” doesn’t depend on restraint. It relies on the wisdom of wit and comic intrusions. When it comes to laughs, it shames many recent so-called comedies. A bold sexual coupling might begin on an erotic note but ends humorously in a crescendo of harmonic discord. Given a rafter-shaking resonance by Lane, Roy Cohen’s virulent tirades, even at the moment of his death, defines his self-immortalizing gall. Some characters who seemed fragmented in Part I become more important in Part II. The former drag queen Belize (a terrific Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is Cohn’s no-nonsense nurse and Joe Pitt’s mother (Susan Brown), a devout Mormon, finds an unexpected resurgence of her real self and of her faith as she unwittingly becomes an inspiration to Prior. Inspired is the only word to describe this wondrously theatrical double-header that reveals the scarred core of this world and a sacred corner of the next.
