'Angels' Confronts Human Love, Faults

Love, heartbreak, and moving have become popular clichés in movies, TV dramas, and novels. However, present these themes during the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and make angels crash out of the sky, and you’ve got an epic theatrical production that explores everything from politics to romance to meteors; you’ve got “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”

Tony Kushner’s two-play work is the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Company’s first spring Loeb Mainstage production. While the first play, “Millennium Approaches,” debuted at Harvard more than a decade ago in 1997, Harvard has never performed the second play, “Perestroika.” Co-directed by Sara L. Wright ’09 and Laura S. Hirschenberg ’09 and produced by Elizabeth J. Krane ’11 and Brittany L. Turner ’09, “Millennium Approaches” opens on April 3, 2009, followed by “Perestroika” on April 4, 2009.

“Angels in America” was originally two plays written within two years of each other in 1991 and 1992, both winning Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994, respectively, as well as a Pulitzer Prize. Over a total of six hours, the work follows the shifts, declines, and evolution of the relationships of two couples, one gay and one straight, in New York City in the 1980s.

Despite the difficulty of undertaking such an epic production, both Wright and Hirschenberg knew that they wanted to see both parts on stage.

“The two parts are two self-sufficient plays that are made into one continuous play,” Hirschenberg said. “It’s such a large undertaking, but it’s sort of a ‘sum is greater than the parts’ thing.”

Wright agreed that the production is worth the challenge. “This play has never been done in its entirety before at Harvard, and we both considered that it’s one of our favorite plays of all time,” Wright said. “Laura and I knew that it would be a daunting task, but we wanted to do something that would be a challenge and also fulfilling for our senior spring.”

A key element of the play is its meshing of reality and fantasy. One of the challenges both the cast and crew faced was how to interconnect these two realms together effectively to produce a moving play about the characters’ journeys to both physical and emotional wellness.

“These fantastical scenes blend in effortlessly, so you have to be paying attention,” costume designer Rheeqrheeq A. Chainey ’11 said, who plays Belize, an ex-ex drag queen and nurse. “You slide from Brooklyn to Antarctica in one scene, for example.”

In order to fully represent the fantastical elements of the plot, the sets were designed to be changed quickly.

“Every scene is in a different place. We needed to decide what parts of the scene we were going to abstract at the set, what is it about the show we want to bring out and physicalize,” set-designer Beth G. Shields ’10 said. “There’s order and chaos working in the same space with the idea that things are spinning out of control in people’s lives. We have these roller moving set pieces that represent the fantastical and the physical furniture that helps us recognize the real world.”

The stage will be set between the rows of the audience, like a runway, so that the two sections of the audience will be facing each other.

“It makes the show more of an experience,” Shields says. “It makes the characters more realistic, because you see them with the audience and the audience’s reactions to everything that’s going on.”

The plot uses issues of a specific time and place, such as homosexuality and the AIDS crisis, to make the cliché themes moving and realistic.

“The play puts forth a lot of political ideas, but there are themes of love, about how can you be forgiven for doing something terrible,” Gus T. Hickey ’11, who plays Louis Ironson, a gay Jewish man who leaves his AIDS-infected lover. “The main lesson that the directors are trying to push is that you have to struggle with whatever life throws at you, that you can’t stand by and let life just pass you. You have to work with both the bad and good in life.”

Because of the balance between tragedy and the supernatural, the show becomes touching without being melodramatic. The characters are passionate and have specific personalities, but the cast and crew strive to make their audiences relate with their stories.

“These characters, they’re not quite like you, but the things they go through are so relevant,” Hirschenberg said. “The play makes you see your own experiences in a different light. My personal experiences do not include homosexuality, and so it’s phenomenal for me to see that there’s not that much that divides people.” Sometimes a cliché just has to be looked at in a new light, presented with characters dramatically different from audience members and moments of magical fantasy, in order to become pertinent and moving.