Tom Stoppard may have written the four or five greatest plays of the last half-century, but for cultural significance there’s no topping Tony Kushner’s Angels in America — and the fact that each of its two parts, 1993’s Millennium Approaches and 1994’s Perestroika, won the Tony for Best Play that year only begins to tell the story. Ranging from New York to Utah and Heaven to the Kremlin, blending past and future and fact/fiction/fantasy, Angels is an epic journey of people, phantoms, and (of course) angels coming together in shifting combinations to explore how we lose and find ourselves as the old order gives way to the new. Life and death. Love and politics. Sin and salvation. Disease and regeneration. Kushner’s magnum opus — heartbreaking, hilarious, pithy without being pretentious, socially conscious without being didactic, and never, ever dull despite a combined runtime of somewhere around six hours — represents one of those rare instances where acause célèbre completely lives up to the hype.
Excited as I was to find that my first trip to Long Beach Playhouse in nearly two years would be to see Millennium Approaches, I was also wary. The problem for any theatre company taking on such a great and important piece is simple: there’s a lot of room to fall short. Tony Kushner did his job — you better do yours. Making me warier still was that they were attempting to stage this grand work not on their main stage but in their smaller, less functional upstairs space.
Fortunately, the combination of meticulous direction and a very strong cast easily overcomes the production’s built-in limitations, providing a fine showcase for one of the best plays you’re ever going to see.
The year is 1985, and Roy Cohn (Noah Wagner), a powerbroker ever since he made his bones under Joseph McCarthy during the “Red Scare,” has groomed young Joe Pitt (Brian Patrick Williams) to become an important cog in the conservative political machinery that is coming to dominate the United States. But they’ve both got an inconvenient secret: they’re closeted homosexuals. Worse still, Cohn is about to be diagnosed with HIV, while Joe, a Mormon transplant from Salt Lake City, has a pill-popping shut-in of a wife (Harper, played by Allison Lynn Adams) increasingly given to elaborate hallucinations. Meanwhile, elsewhere in NYC is another couple: Louis (Michael Mullen), a word processor in the court building where Joe works, and Prior Walter (Christian Jordan Skinner), who is about to reveal to that he has AIDS.
Over the ensuing three hours so much ground is covered — in terms of both plot and theme —that it’s hard to believe only three additional actors (Richard Martinez, Lisa J. Salas, and Alison Boole) are involved. But Kushner’s carefully assigned doubling expands the scope of what’s typically possible for such a small cast…provided the actors are up to the task.
That’s no problem here. As Cohn, Noah Wagner is biting and ferocious, while he’s delightfully jovial in his turn as one of Prior’s ancestors. As a more distant ancestor, Brian Patrick Williams is so transformed — and funny — that you might not pick him out as the same guy playing the tormented Joe. It’s like that all down the line, with every actor playing two or three roles.
Director Ryan Holihan has coached his cast perfectly. Despite dialog that’s often dense and imparts meaning at every turn, the actors always know what they and their castmates are saying, hitting all the beats and making it conversational rather than recited. Alison Lynn Adams truly lives Harper’s mania, and Richard Martinez manages his primary character (Belize, an ex-ex-drag queen and friend to Prior through thick and thin) with a perfect balance of humorous flamboyance and thoughtfulness. And as Louis, Michael Mullen delivers a ponderous (i.e., intentionally so on Kushner’s part) ramble so convincingly that you think he must be improvising.
Holihan has done solid blocking work in a play that is meant to employ minimal scenery and rapid scene shifts sans blackouts. (Per Kushner’s directive, Angels in America is “an actor-driven event.”) And even beyond what is specified in the stage directions, Holihan has found his own little ways to create and further parallels between scenes and characters. For example, initially placing Cohn offstage while his doctor provides a primer on AIDS creates a neat echo of the play’s opening scene that Kushner didn’t think of but would certainly approve.
The only way in which Long Beach Playhouse comes up short is regarding what Kushner calls the play’s “moments of magic,” which should be “thoroughly amazing” even if “the wires show.” In these moments, too often shortcomings in the sound and lighting design fail to transport us just when we need to be transported. Hopefully Holihan and co. will come up with better strategies for attacking such problems (difficult ones, considering the limitations of the Playhouse grid) when they take on Part Two: Perestroika next season, which calls for more protracted magic moments.
None of this, however, truly detracts from the exploratory voyage undertaken in Millennium Approaches. As Louis says, “[I]t should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end.” With a sure hand on the tiller and able seamanship, Long Beach Playhouse is on course for the promised land.
Long Beach Playhouse presents Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches:
When: Friday–Saturday 8:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 p.m. through October 30.
Address: 5021 E. Anaheim St. Long Beach
Cost: $14 to $24.
Details: For tix or more info, call (562) 494-1014 or visit LBplayhouse.org.
COVID safety protocols include mandatory masking throughout the duration (three hours, with two intermissions), plus proof of vaccination or a negative test result within the prior 48 hours.