Heaven on Stage

Talk about divine visitation. The HRDC's production of Angels in America has debuted on the Loeb Mainstage with all the power and majesty of its title figure.

Safe to say that expectations ran high for this event. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches is, after all, one of the uncontested dramatic triumphs of the decade: a box-office smash, a genuine epic and the recipient of four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. One might say, then, that the transcendence of director Leah Altman's production is somehow inevitable, that it "comes with the territory."

But one would be wrong to say so, and worse, one would be unfair to the stupendous work of Altman and her cast and crew. No play is so great that it is foolproof. If anything, mediocrity is more obvious when the potential exists for a brilliant night of theater. Angels in particular--with its large cast, its tricky, complex script, and its logistical nightmares of sound, stage and light effects--raises the stakes for success remarkably high. What we experience at the Loeb, then, is the transporting magic of talented dramatists giving the play, and the audience, everything they have. Those gifts are prodigious, indeed.

The subtitle Millennium Approaches refers not only to the mid-1980s setting of the play, but, more trenchantly, to an imminent judgment--divine, humane, you name it. The numerous personalities in Angels in America are all fending off the scourges of their particular moment in history: AIDS, bribery, addiction, isolation. Prior Walter (Jesse Hawkes '99) announces early in the play that he has HIV, or as he terms it, with typical flamboyant humeur, "The Foreign Lesion; I'm a Lesion-aire, Lesion-aire's disease."

Prior's live-in lover of four years, Louis (Adam "Waka" Green '99), is crushed by the news, but he suffers from chronic ambivalence, a weakness of conviction so severe that when discussing their grim future, Prior bemoans, "I wind up comforting you. As Prior's affliction confines him increasingly to be and eventually to a hospital, Louis gets skittish and leaves him, largely to complain to everyone else about his own suffering.

Louis' is not the only weak will in the play. In sort of parallel plot, a legal clerk named Joe (Geof Oxnard '99) exists in a permanent conflict of ideas and realities. He insists he loves his wife Harper (Jessica Shapiro '01), a fragile agoraphobe with a Valium dependency, but he seems to find plenty of reason not come home on time. He is careerist enough consider a move to Washington, D.C., despite his wife's objections, but also has enough belief in his Mormon ideals as to request that his boss refrain from taking the Lord's name in vain.

Joe's boss is not just any boss. He is Roy Cohn (Jim Augustine '01), the infamous legal viper who had close personalties to Joseph McCarthy and who helped ensure the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Kushner's Cohn hates himself as venomously as he does everyone else. When his doctor of thirty years (Lisa Nosal '98) diagnoses him with AIDS, Cohn thunders back that "AIDS is what homosexuals have! I have liver cancer!"

The fight against AIDS is a primary concern of the text, but the truer, larger battle waged in Angels in America is for spiritual wellness. Most of the play's characters meet each other at one point or another: in offices, in hospital wards, in dreams and in hallucinations. Visions and visitations abound. Reality curlicues easily into fantasy until the play's final moment, when the two are permanently fused.

A central strength of the Loeb production is that the play's array of visual and sound effects are strikingly presented without sacrificing the play's momentum or the characters' integrity. The technical discipline in the lighting designs of Mike DeCleene '97 and audio work of Leeore Schnairsohn '98 is remarkably rare. Consider, for example, how Kathryn Walker's recent staging of The Bacchae in the Agassiz smothered its actors in an admittedly dazzling weave of colors, echoes and choreography. Kushner's whole point, in fact, is that wonder and magic are essentially human phenomena; not wrought upon his characters but arising from them, pouring out or passing through.

Angels in America doesn't really have any "lead" characters, and Altman's cast performs with the smooth excellence of a true ensemble. Shapiro, in her first Harvard performance, is a revelation. Harper is a sympathetic character but not necessarily a likable one. Shapiro dares to make her paranoia and love-starvation obvious from her first scene, but accents her performance so shrewdly with comedy and irony that the character devastates rather than depresses.

Hawkes, too, is exceptionally good, also quite bold in his appropriation of traditional affectations like crisp consonants and long, drawn-out vowels. His genius is in demonstrating how Prior himself uses affectations to take on the world, an effort made all the more poignant by his persuasive bursts of anger and resentment. Augustine's fussy accent and flying hands do not always work so well. At times, his Roy Cohn resembles Woody Allen's nastiest, mightiest older brother, but he does bring Cohn's despotic intelligence and fierce defensiveness vividly to life.

Finally, for all the undergraduates who ever left Common Casting because the parts offered were too small, Nosal's performance should be required viewing. Performances, actually. In two brief appearances as Joe's mother, she achieves brutality without being broad. Her bravura work, though, is in her single scene as Henry, Roy Cohn's doctor. "You can call [the disease] whatever you want," she tells Roy, telegraphing to the audience both how accustomed Cohn is to getting what he "wants" and how little chance he stands against this final enemy.

Altman has taken equal care animating all of these (and other) characters, regardless of their time on stage. She places Angels in America where it belongs: in a complete moral universe of heroic risks, mutable ethics and terrible punishments. Altman's most recent directing project, last spring's revival of Mamet's Oleanna, was a wobbly production that tried to let its controversial subject matter speak for itself; it didn't. Here, however, she shows a sureness of perspective that recalls that other Altman, Robert, the filmmaker behind the human panoramas of Short Cuts and Nashville, and whose name has, in fact, long been mentioned to bring Angels to the screen.

Whatever the future of Millennium Approaches on film, the play is currently in the best of hands. Do not let the dopey advertisements with the Ziggy-faced Men-In-Suits keep you away; do not let anything keep you away. Enough cannot be said in praise of Kushner's play, where malignancy--both medical and personal--is more terrifying for being so unfixed, but where courage is always a choice. With this focused, challenging, inspiring production, Altman and her colleagues have made that choice

Joe's boss is not just any boss. He is Roy Cohn (Jim Augustine '01), the infamous legal viper who had close personalties to Joseph McCarthy and who helped ensure the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Kushner's Cohn hates himself as venomously as he does everyone else. When his doctor of thirty years (Lisa Nosal '98) diagnoses him with AIDS, Cohn thunders back that "AIDS is what homosexuals have! I have liver cancer!"

The fight against AIDS is a primary concern of the text, but the truer, larger battle waged in Angels in America is for spiritual wellness. Most of the play's characters meet each other at one point or another: in offices, in hospital wards, in dreams and in hallucinations. Visions and visitations abound. Reality curlicues easily into fantasy until the play's final moment, when the two are permanently fused.

A central strength of the Loeb production is that the play's array of visual and sound effects are strikingly presented without sacrificing the play's momentum or the characters' integrity. The technical discipline in the lighting designs of Mike DeCleene '97 and audio work of Leeore Schnairsohn '98 is remarkably rare. Consider, for example, how Kathryn Walker's recent staging of The Bacchae in the Agassiz smothered its actors in an admittedly dazzling weave of colors, echoes and choreography. Kushner's whole point, in fact, is that wonder and magic are essentially human phenomena; not wrought upon his characters but arising from them, pouring out or passing through.

Angels in America doesn't really have any "lead" characters, and Altman's cast performs with the smooth excellence of a true ensemble. Shapiro, in her first Harvard performance, is a revelation. Harper is a sympathetic character but not necessarily a likable one. Shapiro dares to make her paranoia and love-starvation obvious from her first scene, but accents her performance so shrewdly with comedy and irony that the character devastates rather than depresses.

Hawkes, too, is exceptionally good, also quite bold in his appropriation of traditional affectations like crisp consonants and long, drawn-out vowels. His genius is in demonstrating how Prior himself uses affectations to take on the world, an effort made all the more poignant by his persuasive bursts of anger and resentment. Augustine's fussy accent and flying hands do not always work so well. At times, his Roy Cohn resembles Woody Allen's nastiest, mightiest older brother, but he does bring Cohn's despotic intelligence and fierce defensiveness vividly to life.

Finally, for all the undergraduates who ever left Common Casting because the parts offered were too small, Nosal's performance should be required viewing. Performances, actually. In two brief appearances as Joe's mother, she achieves brutality without being broad. Her bravura work, though, is in her single scene as Henry, Roy Cohn's doctor. "You can call [the disease] whatever you want," she tells Roy, telegraphing to the audience both how accustomed Cohn is to getting what he "wants" and how little chance he stands against this final enemy.

Altman has taken equal care animating all of these (and other) characters, regardless of their time on stage. She places Angels in America where it belongs: in a complete moral universe of heroic risks, mutable ethics and terrible punishments. Altman's most recent directing project, last spring's revival of Mamet's Oleanna, was a wobbly production that tried to let its controversial subject matter speak for itself; it didn't. Here, however, she shows a sureness of perspective that recalls that other Altman, Robert, the filmmaker behind the human panoramas of Short Cuts and Nashville, and whose name has, in fact, long been mentioned to bring Angels to the screen.

Whatever the future of Millennium Approaches on film, the play is currently in the best of hands. Do not let the dopey advertisements with the Ziggy-faced Men-In-Suits keep you away; do not let anything keep you away. Enough cannot be said in praise of Kushner's play, where malignancy--both medical and personal--is more terrifying for being so unfixed, but where courage is always a choice. With this focused, challenging, inspiring production, Altman and her colleagues have made that choice