Brave hearts

Brown takes on Angels in America

by Bill Rodriguez

ANGELS IN AMERICA. Part One: Millennium Approaches, by Tony Kusher. Directed by Mark S. Cohen. With Harry Kellerman, Gregory Howe, Miriam Silverman, Michael Crane, and Seth Bockley. At Brown University Theatre through April 23.

None but the theatrically brave should attempt a classic in its own time. After all, if you'd recently seen Hamlet at the Globe back in its day, how appealing would a production by the boys over at Oxford have been? Well, Brown University Theatre is staging the first part of Angels in America, and their version is a respectable job as well as courageous.

As winner of the 1993 Pulitzer for drama and four Tony awards, the play prompts high expectations. Subtitled "Millennium Approaches," together with part two it is also subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." So not only do we expect a lot, we are promised prescient insight and wide-ranging topicality that people usually seek in sources like the Christian Bible or Dr. Lovemonkey.

On top of that, this is the town of Oskar Eustis, the original developer of the play in San Francisco, the dramaturg who helped playwright Tony Kushner chisel it to its eventual hard-edged shape. As artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, in its 1995-96 season, Eustis put together a compassionate yet powerful production of Angels that many preferred to the Broadway staging.

Taking 3-plus hours to tell only half of a story, part one doesn't as much sprawl as blossom, expand to try and fill the known universe. The time is 1985, the place New York City. The set design by Mike Brown establishes the transient end-of-millennium tone of the play: the background consists of packing crates, painted charcoal black, three of which boxes contain portions of the Statue of Liberty, head, torch, and clutched book. America is taking its political ideals into the next thousand years and must be careful to protect them from damage.

Religion merges with politics here in mutual urgency. For a Jewish Marxist, Kushner is respectful of Mormonism, the indigenous American religion that, in its realm, has been as successful as jazz or General Motors. The same cultural-political perspective of the playwright comes up with the perfect Satanic villain for the era: Roy Cohn, Sen. Joe McCarthy's staff lawyer and the man who made sure Ethel Rosenberg fried with her spy husband.

The Brown troupe, directed by Mark S. Cohen, is anchored by actors who do superb work in two crucial roles, at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. The unhappy pill-popping Mormon housewife, Harper, is both vulnerable and feisty, as portrayed by Miriam Silverman, whether wandering "numb and safe" in the Antarctica of her imagination, or facing the realization that her husband is a homosexual. Her moral opposite is Cohn, who Harry Kellerman pulls out all the stops for, bellowing his giddy delight in evil like an organ at a black mass.

Cohn wants Harper's husband Joe Pitt (Gregory Howe) to take a job in the Justice Department so that Cohn will have an inside man to do his bidding. (One of the blatant weaknesses in the play is that Cohn knows from the outset what a Boy Scout Joe is. One of the glories of Angels is that we couldn't care less.)

The other romantic couple is Louis Ironson (Michael Crane), a word processor in the courthouse where Joe works, and Prior Walter (Seth Bockley), scion of a Mayflower family and dying of AIDS. Louis is the sort of intellectual who yammers every notion to death before it can become an idea, and a terrible complement to the habit is that he can't bear to stay with Prior as he becomes increasingly ill. Thinking about sickness and death multiplies its actuality. As Joe becomes attracted to Louis, his buried homosexuality becomes harder to repress, until his marriage falls apart. The sort of inherent contradiction that Marxists saw in capitalism can bring about the decline of any relationship.

Repression and denial come up a lot in this portrait of America's psycho-social landscape. In addition to the closeted Joe, Cohn doesn't think of himself as a homosexual -- after all, they are politically powerless -- but rather as "a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys." Joe's mother Hannah (Susan Deily-Swearington), who is developed more fully in part two, refuses to acknowledge her son's drunken phone confession about his sexuality. In this context, the fantasy hipster creation of Harper's called Mr. Lies (Antonio M. Cabral) is talking about all the major characters in the play when he struts and jives.

Multiple roles performed by Kari Hodges and Justine Williams, from homeless ranter to wry rabbi, fill out the cast. One disappointment is that the angel remains just a voice rather than the physical presence specified in the text, descending dramatically at the final curtain. It could have been accomplished simply, with a breakaway section of the set. This is not a call for more special effects in theater, just a suggestion that sometimes the playwright knows best when the palpable is preferable to the imagined.

But overall, this production gives a solid sense of what Kushner was going for. The prospect of limitless potential was the fantasy this nation was founded upon. In the fractal geometry of human aspiration, if we look intensely enough on any scale -- at Mormonism, at a spineless lover -- we can see the awful beauty of the whole.