Transcript Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Angels in America
A Gay Fantasia on
National Themes
Part I : Millennium
Approaches
Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
• Anthony Robert Kushner
is an
American playwright and screen
writer. He received the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama in 1992 for his
play, Angels in America: A Gay
Fantasia on National Themes, and
co-authored with Eric Roth the
screenplay for the 2005
film, Munich.
Context
• Angels in America is a play in two
parts by American playwright Tony
Kushner. It has been made into
both a television miniseries and
an opera by Peter Eötvös.
• Critical reaction to the play was
immediately and overwhelmingly
positive: the influential New York
Times theater critic Frank Rich, for
instance, called it "a searching and
radical rethinking" of American
political drama and "the most
extravagant and moving
demonstration imaginable" of the
artistic response to AIDS.
Characters
• The play is written for eight actors, each
of whom plays two or more roles.
Kushner's doubling, as indicated in the
Theatre in the Park
published script, requires several of the
Prior Walter (Eric Carl), right, and Louis Ironson
actors to play the opposite sex.
 There are nine main characters:
(Matthew-Jason Willis) in Angels in America.
• Prior Walter - A gay man with AIDS.
Throughout the play, he experiences
various heavenly visions.
• Louis Ironson - Prior's boyfriend. Unable
to deal with Prior's disease, he
ultimately abandons him.
Daniel Belcher as Prior Walter and Topi
Lehtipuu (with guitar) as his lover, Louis Ironson
Characters
• Harper Pitt - A neurotic
Mormon housewife with
incessant Valium-induced
hallucinations. After a
revelation from Prior (whom
she meets when his heavenly
vision and her hallucination
cross paths), she discovers
that her husband is a gay.
Kirsty Bushell as Harper in
Angels in America.
• Joe Pitt – Harper's husband
and a deeply closeted gay
Mormon who works for Roy
Cohn. Joe eventually abandons
his wife for a relationship with
Julia Migenes as Harper Pitt
Louis. Throughout the play, he
confronts Omar Ebrahim as Joe Pitt
struggles with his sexual
identity.
Characters
• Roy Cohn - A closeted gay lawyer. It
is eventually revealed that he has
contracted AIDS, which he insists is
liver cancer.
• Ethel Rosenberg - The ghost of a
woman executed for being a
Communist spy. She visits Roy, the
man responsible for her conviction.
• Hannah Pitt - Joe's mother. She
moves to New York after her son
drunkenly comes out to her on the
phone. She arrives to find that Joe
has abandoned his wife.
• Belize - A former drag queen and
Prior's ex-boyfriend and best friend.
• The Voice/Angel - A messenger who
visits Prior.
Roberta Alexander as Henry the doctor and Donald
Maxwell as Roy Cohn receiving his diagnosis of AIDS
Daniel Belcher as Prior Walter gets the word in his
hospital room from Barbara Hendricks as the Angel
Plot
• Angels in America focuses on the stories of two
troubled couples, one gay, one straight: "word
processor" Louis Ironson and his lover Prior
Walter, and Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt and his wife
Harper. After the funeral of Louis's grandmother,
Prior tells him that he has contracted AIDS, and
Louis panics. He tries to care for Prior but soon
realizes he cannot stand the strain and fear.
Meanwhile, Joe is offered a job in the Justice
Department by Roy Cohn, his right-wing, bigoted
mentor and friend. But Harper, who is addicted
to Valium and suffers anxiety and hallucinations,
does not want to move to Washington.
Angels in America at the Théatre
du Châtelet: Daniel Belcher as
Prior Walter, Barbara Hendricks as
the Angel, and the rest of the cast
in the closing scene of the opera
Plot
•
•
The two couples' fates quickly become
intertwined: Joe stumbles upon Louis crying
in the bathroom of the courthouse where he
works, and they strike up an unlikely
friendship based in part on Louis's suspicion
that Joe is gay. Harper and Prior also meet,
in a fantastical mutual dream sequence in
which Prior, operating on the "threshold of
revelation," reveals to Harper that her
husband is a closeted homosexual. Harper
confronts Joe, who denies it but says he has
struggled inwardly with the issue. Roy
receives a different kind of surprise: At an
appointment with his doctor Henry, he
learns that he too has been diagnosed with
AIDS.
But Roy, who considers gay men weak and
ineffectual, thunders that he has nothing in
common with them—AIDS is a disease of
homosexuals, whereas he has "liver cancer."
Henry, disgusted, urges him to use his clout
to obtain an experimental AIDS drug.
Roberta Alexander as Rabbi
Chemelwitz and Daniel Belcher (far
right) as Prior Walter in the
opening scene
Plot
• Prior's illness and Harper's terrors
both grow worse. Louis strays
from Prior's bedside to seek
anonymous sex in Central Park at
night. Fortunately, Prior has a
more reliable caretaker in Belize,
an ex-drag queen and dear friend.
Prior confesses to Belize that he
has been hearing a wonderful
and mysterious voice; Belize is
skeptical, but once he leaves we
hear the voice speak to Prior,
telling him she is a messenger
who will soon arrive for him.
• As the days pass, Louis and Joe
grow closer and the sexual tinge
in their banter grows more and
more obvious. Finally, Joe
drunkenly telephones his mother
Hannah in Salt Lake City to tell
her that he is a homosexual, but
Hannah tells him he is being
ridiculous. Nonetheless, she
makes plans to sell her house and
come to New York to put things
right. In a tense and climactic
scene, Joe tells Harper about his
feelings, and she screams at him
to leave, while simultaneously
Louis tells Prior he is moving out.
Plot
• The disconsolate Prior is
awakened one night by the
ghosts of two ancestors who tell
him they have come to prepare
the way for the unseen
messenger. Tormented by such
supernatural appearances and by
his anguish over Louis, Prior
becomes increasingly desperate.
Joe, equally distraught in his own
way, tells Roy he cannot accept
his offer; Roy explodes at him and
calls him a "sissy." He then tells
Joe about his greatest
achievement, illegally intervening
in the espionage trial of Ethel
Rosenberg in the 1950s and
guaranteeing her execution
• . Joe is shocked by Roy's lack of
ethics. When Joe leaves, the
ghost of Ethel herself appears,
having come to witness Roy's last
days on earth. In the climax of
Part One, Joe follows Louis to the
park, then accompanies him
home for sex, while Prior's
prophetic visions culminate in the
appearance of an imposing and
beautiful Angel who crashes
through the roof of his apartment
and proclaims, "The Great Work
begins."
Production history
• The first part, Millennium Approaches,
was commissioned and first performed
in May 1990 by the Center Theatre
Group at the Mark Taper Forum in Los
Angeles, as a workshop. Kushner
developed the play with the Mark
Taper Forum, with which he has a long
association.
• It received its world premiere in May
1991 in a production performed by
the Eureka Theatre Company of San
Francisco, directed by David
Esbjornson. It debuted in London in
a Royal National Theatre production
directed by Declan Donnellan in
January 1992, which ran for a year.
Jeff Orton in a revival of Angels in
America, Part 1 at the Rep.
Production history
Eureka Theatre
• The second part, Perestroika, was still being
developed as Millennium Approaches was
being performed. It was performed several
times as staged readings by both the
Eureka Theatre (during the world premiere
of part one), and the Mark Taper Forum (in
May 1992).
• It received its world premiere in November
1992 in a production by the Mark Taper
Forum, directed by Oskar Eustis and Tony
Taccone. A year later on 20 November
1993, it received its London debut at the
National Theatre, again directed by Declan
Donnellan, in repertory with a revival
of Millennium Approaches.
Production history
• The play debuted on Broadway at the Walter Kerr
Theatre in 1993, directed by George C. Wolfe, with
Millennium Approaches being performed in May
and Perestroika joining it in repertory in November.
The original cast included Ron Leibman, Stephen
Spinella, Kathleen Chalfant, Marcia Gay
Harden, Jeffrey Wright, Ellen McLaughlin, David
Marshall Grant and Joe Mantello.
• Among the replacements during the run were F.
Murray Abraham (for Ron Leibman), Cherry
Jones (for Ellen McLaughlin), Dan Futterman (for
Joe Mantello), Cynthia Nixon (for Marcia Gay
Harden) and Jay Goede (for David Marshall Grant).
Both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika were
awarded the Tony Awards for Best Play back to
back in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Both parts also
won back to back Drama Desk Awards for
Outstanding Play.
Staging
• The tone of the play keeps going back and forth between comedy, dark
humor and the supernatural. Some special effects may require special
machinery (for example, the Angel is supposed to crash through the
ceiling of the theater) but Kushner insists on the fact that this machinery is
meant to be visible by the spectators.
• In the "Playwright's Notes" he says: "The play benefits from a pared-down
style of presentation, with minimal scenery and scene shifts done rapidly
(no blackouts!), employing the cast as well as stagehands — which makes
for an actor-driven event, as this must be. The moments of magic [...] are
to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion — which means
it's OK if the wires show, and maybe it's good that they do..." It is definitely
an instance of what Bertolt Brecht theorized as the Verfremdungseffekt,
which can be translated as "alienation effect" or "estrangement effect",
whose goal is to constantly remind the spectators that what they are
seeing is not taken from the real world but is an art fact created from
scratch.
Staging
• One of the many particularities of Angels in America is that
each of the eight main actors has one or several other minor
roles to play: for example, the actor playing the nurse Emily
also embodies the Angel of America. And in this multiple
doubling of roles, the gender of each character is deliberately
played upon: the actor playing Hannah, Joe's mother, also
plays the part of the Rabbi. This is what is referred to as
"Genderfuck", which shows a dramatist's deliberate will to
throw some light on the arbitrariness and elasticity of the
traditional notions of gender categories, thereby proved to be
social constructs.
Adaptations
• Film
• In 2003, HBO Films created a miniseries
version of the play. Kushner adapted his
original text for the screen, and Mike
Nichols directed. HBO broadcast the film in
various formats: three-hour segments that
correspond to "Millennium Approaches"
and "Perestroika," as well as one-hour
"chapters" that roughly correspond to an
act or two of each of these plays. The first
three chapters were initially broadcast on
December 7, to international acclaim, with
the final three chapters following. "Angels
in America" was the most watched madefor-cable movie in 2003 and won both
the Golden Globe and Emmy for Best
Miniseries.
Adaptations
• Opera
• Angels in America - The Opera made its world
premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris,
France, on November 23, 2004. The opera was
based on both parts of the Angels in
America Fantasia, however the script was reworked and condensed to fit both parts into a two
and half hour show.
• Composer Peter Eötvös explains: "In the opera
version, I put less emphasis on the political line
than Kushner...I rather focus on the passionate
relationships, on the highly dramatic suspense of
the wonderful text, on the permanently uncertain
state of the visions."
• A German version of the opera followed suit in
mid-2005. In late 2005, PBS announced that they
would air a live filmed version of the opera as a
part of its Great Performances lineup. The opera
made its U.S. debut in June 2006 at the Stanford
Calderwood Pavilion in Boston, Massachusetts.
Amanda Forsythe, aloft as the
Angel, and Thomas Meglioranza,
far right, as Prior Walter in a
musical version of "Angels in
America" produced by Opera
Unlimited and written for the
Théâtre du Châtelet.
Millennium Approaches, Act One
(Act One is subtitled "Bad News“)
• Scene 1
• The play opens with Rabbi Isador
Chemelwitz alone onstage with a
small wooden coffin. He is
preaching the funeral of Sarah
Ironson, the grandmother of a
large, assimilated Jewish family.
Rabbi Chemelwitz admits he did
not know Sarah, whose later
years in the Bronx Home for Aged
Hebrews were sad and quiet, but
that he knows her type: the
strong, uncomplaining peasant
women of Eastern Europe who
immigrated to America to build
authentic homes for their
children. Her kind soon will no
longer exist, he says.
• Scene 2
• Meanwhile, Joe Pitt is waiting in
Roy Cohn's office while Roy
nimbly manipulates several
blinking phone lines. Roy switches
between arguing with a client
whose court date he missed,
arranging theater tickets for the
wife of a visiting judge, and
cursing out an underling. Joe
watches him uncomfortably. As
Roy uses swear words, Joe asks
him not to take the Lord's name
in vain, explaining that he is a
Mormon. Roy praises Joe's work
as a judicial clerk—he writes
decisions for his boss to sign—
and then offers him a powerful
job in the Justice Department.
Millennium Approaches, Act One
(Act One is subtitled "Bad News“)
• Scene 4
• Louis Ironson and his lover Prior Walter
• Scene 3
are sitting on a bench outside the funeral
• Joe's wife Harper is sitting alone
home and Louis is about to leave for the
in their apartment talking to
cemetery. He remembers his
herself and worrying—she
grandmother and apologizes to Prior for
imagines the ozone layer
not introducing him, saying that family
disappearing. Mr. Lies, a travel
events make him feel closeted. Louis
agent who Harper imagines,
asks why Prior is in a bad mood,
suddenly appears. Harper asks for
assuming it is because their cat, Little
a guided tour of Antarctica to see
Sheba, is missing. Instead, Prior rolls up
the hole in the ozone layer. She
his sleeve and reveals a Kaposi's sarcoma
confesses her terrible fears about
lesion, an infectious disease that
the world and the state of her
accompanies AIDS. Prior admits he did
marriage. Joe returns home and
not tell him earlier because he is afraid
Mr. Lies vanishes; he asks her if
Louis will leave him. Louis says he needs
she would like to move to
to go to the cemetery but promises he
Washington.
will come back afterwards.