Angels in America

I have wanted to write this post for a long time, but I was waiting until I could visit the invaluable Royal National Theatre Archive to check my memory of their early productions. It doesn't look like I'll be in London any time soon, and I have the time now to write a long post about a long play, so here goes.

Growing up in London meant that theatre has always been an important part of my life. I have seen a great many plays including some legendary performances and magnificent productions, such as Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear. One of my particular theatrical interests is long-form plays. Highlights of this genre have included:

Play Text

• Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 9-hour Illuminatus Trilogy
• The Magic Theatre's all-night production of Murray Mednick's Coyote Cycle
• The Royal National Theatre's 6-hour adaptation of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials
• Taylor Mac's 3x8-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

But there is one such play that is very special to me, Tony Kushner's 7+ hour Angels in America. It is clearly among the greatest plays of the 20^th century. I was there at the beginning, and I have seen many productions since. Below the fold I recount my history with this masterpiece.

Introduction

Anyone interested in this play should read both the text of the two halves, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, and Isaac Butler and Dan Kois' magisterial and comprehensive oral history, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. Because my story starts in 1991 I have used both to refresh my memory. Below the many quotes without links are from Butler and Kois, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. I also viewed the National Theatre's 2017 production on the National Theatre at Home streaming service.

When I moved to the Bay Area in 1985 It was a decade since I'd lived in London and I was starved of theater. So I went a bit nuts and over the next few years subscribed to American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Magic Theater and the Eureka Theater.

Eureka Theatre (1991)

The story of the play starts with a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Tony Kushner to write a "two-hour play, with songs" for "five gay men and an angel" that the Eureka would produce. In 1989 the play was developed and in 1990 workshopped at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles.

KUSHNER: I wrote the part of Harper for Lorri Holt, Hannah for Abigail Van Alyn, Sigrid [Wurmschmidt] was the Angel. And Jeff King, I wrote the part of Joe for him. And that took care of the Eureka company. My first year at NYU, I became friends with Stephen Spinella. I thought then, as I think now, that he was one of the most remarkable actors I'd ever met, and I loved writing for him, and so I wrote Prior Walter for him.

As a subscriber to the Eureka I had responded to their call for donations to stage Angels in America in their next season, so I was anxious to see it. By the time it arrived at the Eureka it had evolved into two long plays with five gay men, two women, and angel and no songs.

I believe I saw Millennium Approaches the weekend after it opened, and Perestroika the following weekend. The cast was different from that at the Mark Taper. Rick Frank (Roy) and Sigrid Wurmschmidt (Angel) had both died, and Lori Holt had a new baby. It was:

• Hannah: Kathleen Chalfant
• Roy: John Bellucci
• Joe: Michael Scott Ryan
• Harper: Anne Darragh
• Belize: Harry Waters Jr.
• Louis: Michael Ornstein
• Prior: Stephen Spinella
• Angel: Ellen McLaughlin

The Eureka was staging Millennium Approaches, a four-hour play full of scene changes and magic, with almost no money. So another abiding memory is that they got this enormous impact with an incredibly stripped-down production:

[Ellen] McLAUGHLIN: Not that many people saw the Eureka version of it, but it was very important to those who did. I think there was a kind of beauty to the hammer and nails and spit and Scotch tape quality of that first version. It was moving because we had nothing.

In some ways it reminded me of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's annual free shows in parks around the Bay Area. The same quality of conspiring with the audience's imagination:

KATHLEEN CHALFANT: It was in some ways the most beautiful version of the play, and the most Poor Theater version of the play.
[Dennis] HARVEY: They basically had a giant shower curtain in front of the stage. For scene transitions they would just whip the shower curtain across, one actor at the front and one at the back, and when they got the other side it would be a new scene.
KUSHNER: To this day no one has ever done better with the magic. David [Esbjornson] is incredibly clever designing and building gizmos, so every magic trick in the play, David figured out a way to do it. There was no money or anything. He built all this shit — it was incredible.
DEBORAH PEIFER: That sense of amazement of a book popping up out of the floor in flames, all done with lighting.
KUSHNER: He did it all with bungee cords.

My most abiding memory of that first part was walking out of the theater to my car after midnight realizing I had seen the birth of a masterpiece. Theater critic Deborah Peifer sums up my reaction:

PEIFER: I have never in my life seen a situation in which people did not leave the theater during the intermission unless they had to. And I'm not talking about Can I get a cup of coffee? but Can I make it through the next act without a bathroom break? People could not bear to be out of that theater while this thing was happening.

To call this a brilliantly realized, profoundly funny, wickedly thoughtful piece of theater is to discover the severe limitations of language. I find myself wanting to say simply, it's more than I ever imagined. This is an experience in the theater you will remember for your whole life.

Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter, May 30 1991

Perestroika was even more stripped-down, little more than a staged reading:

KUSHNER: Originally, every act of the five acts of Perestroika started with a clown scene set in the Soviet Union. These ended up being the first five scenes of my play Slavs! [1994].
ESBJORNSON: I used the five Bolsheviks as curtain raisers. I made the actors hold the scripts in hand while they moved around. And then at one point in each act, they laid down their scrips and acted out what I considered to be the central point of that act.

It wasn't just that there were five acts, but each of them was rather long. Butler and Kois' description of the first night matches my later recollection of how long it was:

[Brian] THORSTENSON: It got to the scene between Hannah and Prior where Prior's in the hospital and Prior says "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." They finished the scene and the audience erupted into this ... applause ... I think it lasted a good five minutes. Kathleen and Stephen looked out at the audience, like, What is going on?.
McLAUGHLIN: I came out late into the evening as the Angel wearing the wings and the whole get-up, stood in front of the curtain and said, Act 5: Heaven, I'm in Heaven.
And the woman in the front row said "Act FIVE?! Oh my GOD! DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?!"
And I said "No". Because I honestly had no idea. It's not like I was wearing a watch.
And she said "It's MIDNIGHT, for God's sake! What's going on with the playwright? ACT FIVE? How long is it?
And I said, :We've never done it so I don't know, maybe forty-five minutes?" And she said, "The buses aren't even running anymore! How are we supposed to get HOME?" And she turns to the rest of the audience and says, "Are we going to stay?" And people sort of nodded and mumbled and she says "Well, I guess we'll stay, but I mean really ..."
And then she said, "But that's the end, right? There isn't an Act 6 or something?"
And I said, "Well, there's an epilogue."
And she said, "Oh my GOD, is he NUTS? An EPILOGUE? How long is THAT?"
And I said, "Well, apparently we HAVE TO STAY, but this is RIDICULOUS. TELL HIM HE HAS TO CUT!"
And then I said "Well, the longer we keep talking here ..."

Millennium Approaches was a real play and, despite being over four hours, had the audience in the palm of its hand with rapt attention. Perestroika was really different. Because it was clearly a work-in-progress, the audience felt that they were part of the process of creation, willing the show into existence.

Sometimes at the Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor residency program for new work the teams show their work — an example was Julia Cho's Aubergine which I saw both as a work-in-progress at the Ground Floor and next year in the Rep's season. Even as works-in-progress these shows are way shorter and way more polished than this Perestroika, and there is none of that show's unique, intense audience involvement. Of course, as the Angel notes, this was heightened by the show's length:

McLAUGHLIN: And then after the show, as the actors were basically limping to the dressing rooms, Tony, looking sort of glassy-eyed, came over to us and said, "You know, a really interesting thing happens after and audience has been in the theater for a really long time, they start to lose their bearings and become very malleable. They, like, forget what the think they believe about things and what they do for a living and their names and where they live and ..."
And we were like, "Yeah, Tony, and you really have to cut it."

It was magnificent but it killed its host. Butler and Kois quote the Eureka's business manager:

ANDY HOLTZ: That was the end of the Eureka Theatre as a producing company, The play that cemented the Eureka's place in the history of American theater was also the play that was too epic for such a small company. It's, like, the mom died giving birth to this amazing baby.

Royal National Theatre (1992)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the play's whole history is that, apart from a workshop at Juillard, the next production of Millennium Approaches was at the National Theatre in London. At the time, the National Theatre's productions on their two big stages, the Olivier and the Lyttleton, were pretty conservative, as befits the national flagship. But they also had the Cottesloe (now the Dorfman). It is essentially an empty cube, with tiers of seats on two sides. It can be configured in many different ways. For example, for Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads most of the floor was arranged with tables and chairs, with the audience there being some of the patrons of the pub.

The National Theatre has a history of more adventurous productions in the Cottesloe; it opened with Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's Illuminatus Trilogy featuring drugs, satanic rituals, blasphemy and nudity. The trilogy later moved to The Roundhouse, which is where I saw this marathon. My main memory was that between the plays meals were served in the lobby. The actors ate with the audience, staying in character.

Nevertheless, Richard Eyre, the artistic director, took a huge risk:

RICHARD EYRE: Gordon Davidson sent me the play and said,, "I think you'd be interested in this". By page 2, I'd decided I wanted to do it.

He chose Declan Donnellan of the Cheek by Jowl theatre company to direct it, and Nick Ormerod, Donellan's partner, to design it. I'd seen several Cheek by Jowl productions at the National Theatre. They did classical plays, so Kushner took them to New York:

DONELLAN: Sometimes when you see images of New York, you think Oh, it's not authentic New York. It's performed New York, from movies and television. But when you get to New York, you find that New York is performing itself. Everybody is ready for their close-up.
ORMEROD: In delis and diners and whatever, they act like New Yorkers they've seen in the movies.

The cast was:

• Hannah: Rosenmary Martin
• Roy: Henry Goodman
• Joe: Nick Reing
• Harper: Felicity Montague
• Belize: Joseph Mydell
• Louis: Marcus D'Amico
• Prior: Sean Chapman
• Angel: Nancy Crane

NT's 1993 Angel

David Milling was the stage manager:

DAVID MILLING: The staging was incredibly simple. It was a shiny black floor and a giant American flag as the backdrop. And then in the center of the flag there were small doors for pieces of scenery to run through. Only at the end of the play did the flag split, half going left, half going right, and the Angel tracked through in a cloud of smoke.

I'm sure that the first thing everyone who saw the show remembers is the shock at the end of the Angel bursting through the flag with a huge noise, lots of smoke and a blinding light then announcing:

ANGEL:	Greetings, Prophet;
	The Great Work begins;
	The Messenger has arrived.

(Blackout.)

But the start was almost equally memorable:

JON MATTHEWS: It opened with this image, there was nothing on the stage, and the furniture is on the sides, and they're sitting along the sides, and there was this balloon globe, and it had this light inside it, and they all put their hands on it, and then the play began.

Donellan said "My production was very much about the maintenance of tension", and I remember the production as a headlong charge forward:

KUSHNER: Caryl Churchill saw one of the early performances and came up to Declan afterwards and said, "Well congratulations, you've solved the short, choppy scene problem." When you do a play with short scenes, the scene ends, the audience has to disengage from where they've just been, and open themselves up to the next thing. That's hard to do because it involves stopping and starting over and over again. What Declan did is he dovetailed the ends of almost every scene in Millennium. He took the penultimate and the ultimate line, separated them, took the first line of the next scene and put it between the two. So you'd already be in the next scene. He wove them all together.

Donellan could do this because the staging was so sparse that it needed no time for scene changes. The actors carried in whatever props were needed for the next scene, and carried off those from the preceding scene.

It is important to understand both the risk the National Theatre was taking, as an institution supported by the government, and why it was so important, especially to the theatre community:

GARSIDE: The politics of it hit on the right moment. We were having our side of the conservative 1980s with Thatcher and the special relationship with Reagan. There was a kind of resentment of America, a dislike of their politics and how it intersected with our politics. And then there was an audience who hadn't seen a play about gay men and AIDS on a large scale, for whom the play was a revealation.

The big legal fight in gay rights at the time was against someting called Section 28. This was the big thing. It was in effect between 1988 and 2003, and barred the "promotion" of homosexuality.

Royal National Theatre (1993)

The next year both parts opened on Broadway and the National Theatre revived Millennium Approaches and added Perestroika in repertory. For the first time, I saw both parts in one day.

MYDELL: So we opened at the National, and you could see Part 1 and Part 2 in one day. That was seven and a half. People did it! We did it, and people came to see it! It didn't seem like — it felt like it was an event more than a play.

The cast was:

• Louis: Jason Isaacs
• Belize: Joseph Mydell
• Angel: Nancy Crane
• Joe: Daniel Craig
• Hannah: Susan Engel
• Harper: Clare Holman
• Prior: Stephen Dillane
• Roy: David Schofield

Part 1 was familiar, but it was the first time I'd seen Part 2 staged. First, seeing them as a seven and a half hour marathon was a revelation. Millennium ends with the mother of all cliff-hangers as the Angel arrives. Resuming the story after a quick meal is completely different from resuming it a week later. Second, Perestroika was very different from my memory of the Eureka. Kushner had done massive rewrites after the Eureka and the 1992 workshop at the Taper in LA:

KUSHNER: I know I haven't got it right yet. I'm not saying I don't think it's good — I think it's always been a good play, Perestroika — but it's never been a finished play and it never ever will be completely finished.

Many people compare the two parts and rate Perestroika as inferior, citing that its a lot more difficult and the fact that Kushner keeps changing it. But this is likely because they have seen it as two separate plays, which is a mistake. I'm pretty sure that people like me who have seen in in a marathon see it as a single play that changes once the Angel arrives. Change is one of its major themes, after all. And it is very Kushner-esque to have the Angel, whose message is to stop change, be the cause of change in the structure of the play as she is in Prior.

Next time I'm in London I plan to visit the Archive and expand these two sections.

American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco (1994)

ACT Program

I saw ACT's production of both halves, I think on successive weekends, but I remember very little about it. It was directed by Mark Wing-Davey, who played the two-headed Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox, in the radio (my favorite) and TV versions (forget it) of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams. I'd been impressed by his production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest at Berkeley Rep.

The cast was:

• Hannah: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
• Roy: Peter Zapp
• Joe: Steven Culp
• Harper: Julia Gibson
• Belize: Gregory Wallace
• Louis: Ben Shenkman
• Prior: Garret Dillahunt
• Angel: Lise Bruneau

Dennis Harvey's review noted that:

the director throws action all over the Marines Memorial stage. Kate Edmunds’ set design is dominated by rolling scaffold bridges and graph-patterned backdrops. Their severity suggests a societal infrastructure stripped bare. Huge curtains (one a rather too-obvious American flag), one hydraulic ramp, fully exposed flying rig for the “Angel” (Lise Bruneau), fog, film projection, etc. add to the sensory overload.

This may be one reason it didn't stick in my memory. After stripped-down productions in the Eureka, basically a warehouse, and the National Theatre's Cotttesloe flexible space, the traditional proscenium stage, a more fleshed-out, much flashier staging, and the somewhat distant seating would have been jarring. Indeed, soon after this I stopped subscribing to ACT, only visiting for their excellent productions of Tom Stoppard's plays.

Royal National Theatre (2017)

By dint of waking up very early and standing in line for a long time I got day seats for a marathon of Marianne Elliot's sold-out, extraordinarily impressive production. It was a complete contrast to the earlier version. The cast was:

• Hannah: Susan Brown
• Roy: Nathan Lane
• Joe: Russell Tovey
• Harper: Denise Gough
• Belize: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
• Louis: James McCardle
• Prior: Andrrew Garfield
• Angel: Amanda Lawrence

Joe and Hannah

Elliot's staging was a fascinating way to use the National Theatre's huge resources and the Lyttleton's vast proscenium stage to simulate the original's sparse aesthetic. She used multiple revolves and mostly skeletal scenery that flowed in and out to create small patches of light in the darkness to show, for example, the phone call between Joe and Hannah. Occasionally, as for Harper and Mr. Lies in Antarctica, the whole stage was lit but bare. There was only one scene with the kind of lavish scenery one often sees in the Lyttleton. It was the Council Room of the Hall of the Continental Principalities. Kushner's stage directions for this scene fill multiple pages, and the set needs to contrast Heaven with Earth, so this choice made sense.

One of the most striking and memorable things in Elliot's production was her vision for the Angel:

ELLIOT: Every image you see of this play involves a lovely angel in a white dress on a wire. I didn't want that.

Ben Power, the National's deputy artistic director, explains the Angel's entrance:

POWER: Prior's standing on his bed, as in other productions. The lights are changing. The sound of the approaching object is getting louder and louder. It's extremely loud in the auditorium. The lights change around him and he says, "Very Steven Spielberg".

Everyone's eye are on him and they're also going up to the flies. We know what's about to happen. They're going to fly in a woman with wings. As we're looking, as it's all building to a point of climax. At that point of climax there is a sense of a drop and a full blackout, which is very disorienting.

The lights come up. Everyone's eyes are looking up, looking for what object is coming in through the broken roof. Andrew's looking up there. And there's nothing there. As his eyeline comes down, there, strewn on the floor, among the rubble, is this thing. It's a sort of creature mess in browns and blacks. And then it rises from the floor — it's clearly been dropped from a great height — and coalesces into one body.

Lyra and Armored Bears

The National Theatre has resources that few other theaters do. One is a long history and deep expertise in stage puppetry. This reached a peak with His Dark Materials because in the play's world:

humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons" in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans.

Each actor was accompanied by a puppet of their daemon, manipulated by one or more puppeteers in head-to-toe black. It didn't take long for audience members to stop seeing them. At the end of the second part, all 28 actors came out for their curtain call. And then suddenly the puppeteers all pulled off their black head-dress, and you saw there were more of them than there were actors. And then the backdrop vanished and you saw all the way to the rear wall of the enormous Olivier stage. Standing there were all the stagehands. There were more of them than the actors and puppeteers combined. It was an amazing display of the vast resources the National Theatre can command for a major production.

Angel and Prior

Elliot's Angel was accompanied by a set of black-clad "shadows" like the daemon's. Except when Prior and she were wrestling, the Angel wasn't on a wire but being carried by the shadows. They would scurry around on all fours, sometimes converging on her to lift her up or sweep her massive wings, and sometimes heading off to the back of the set.

It wasn't just the physical resources the National Theatre devoted to the production, it was the time:

KUSHNER: I've never seen a director work as long or as hard on a production. A year of preparation. And you can see that degree — the depth of involvement, it's reflected in the design and in many of the choices she's made.
ELLIOT: We spent about a year and a half on the design. Not every day, but we touched in a lot. And I wished I had longer!
...
ELLIOT: We had eleven weeks, longer than anyone else has had.
KUSHNER: In a way it's the first adequate rehearsal period we've had for these plays.

When the production transferred to Broadway, it won the Tony for the Best Revival of a Play, and Andrew Garfield won for Best Actor and Nathan Lane won for Best Featured Actor. Both performances richly deserved the award.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre (2018)

Program

Berkeley Rep's production was directed by Tony Taccone, who co-directed the Mark Taper workshop with Oskar Eustis, and starred Stephen Spinella, for whom Prior was written and who I had seen at the Eureka, as Roy. So I have seen him play both of the victims of AIDS — his portrayal of sickness is remarkable, as was the contrast between how his Prior and his Roy fought the disease.

The cast was:

• Hannah: Carmen Roman
• Roy: Stephen Spinella
• Joe: Danny Binstock
• Harper: Bethany Jillard
• Belize: Caldwell Tidicue
• Louis: Benjamin T. Ismail
• Prior: Randy Harrison
• Angel: Francesa Faridany. Lisa Ramirez

Again, I saw both parts on a single day, as I recall starting at 1pm and ending at 11pm. It was astonishing how well the Rep's, with a regional theater's resources, stood up to the National Theatre's massively resourced production. This huge play can use huge resources, but it does not need them.

Angel and Hannah

Taccone's Angel was clearly influenced by Elliot's, but lacked the shadows. Despite this the Angel's flying, always the most difficult thing to stage, was really well done.

For the first time I got to see the "Roy in Hell" scene, which almost every production omits. It isn't in the published text. Omitting it means Roy's last appearance is when his ghost encounters Joe, a meeting between the play's two doomed characters. Including it, with Roy bargaining for something to do, is a sort of tribute to his drive and contrasts against Joe's spinelessness.

The Berkeley Rep's program had an interview with Spinella, who was initially reluctant to play Roy:

I got a text from Kushner saying — all I really remember is one word — "vital". That Roy is incredibly vital. I had already gone back and read all the Roy scenes, and it really hit me. That's the fun of playing this guy who is dying. He is fighting it tooth and nail. It's this knockdown, drag-out fight with this person who has this incredible will to live. It's different than Prior, who in a way is running away from his own death. Roy is just trying to get his ducks in a row and he's fighting the disease. He loses constantly, yet he keeps coming back. He is unrelenting, and that appeals to me. I'm not going to be in that hospital bed until I am ready to die. The hospital bed is going to have to grab me and pull me into it.

This could have been a quote from Nathan Lane.

The production gained glowing reviews from, among others, the LA Times and the SF Chronicle. For me, as my sixth viewing, seeing the play come back to the Bay Area over a quarter-century after it started here, over a single day, with such a grown-up staging, was a delight.