REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Performing now at Tempe Center for the Arts through May 16, Stray Cat Theatre takes on the formidable challenge of mounting both halves of Tony Kushner’s play, a work that resists modest ambition. The first half, MILLENNIUM APPROACHES, opened earlier this month; the second,PERESTROIKA, completed the epic this past weekend. In the coming week, the company will present the two plays in repertory, offering them back-to-back, yet Kushner’s vast, unruly fantasia was never meant to be consumed in fragments. Seen whole, its architecture is unmistakable. That Stray Cat Theatre has chosen to embrace that scale rather than dilute it is not merely ambitious, it’s fearless.
Under director Ron May’s deft command of its many moving parts, the play’s emotional center rests with two couples, both unraveling. The unusually named Prior Walter (Marshall Glass), descendant of an old American line, discovers lesions on his body that signal AIDS. His lover, Louis Ironson (Nathan Spector) finds that his love falters in the face of Prior’s bodily decay. Spector makes Louis’s guilt operatic; he dissects his own cowardice in speeches that glitter with intellect and self-loathing. Glass, meanwhile, makes Prior grow luminous in suffering, visited by ancestors from centuries past who flutter in like emissaries from history itself.
Across town, Joe Pitt (Devon Mahon), a Mormon and a rising Republican legal mind, is locked in a marriage to Harper (Courtney Weir), whose Valium-softened loneliness gives her a kind of clairvoyance. Mahon makes Joe’s crisis one of identity: sexual, spiritual, political. Weir’s pitch-perfect Harper drifts through hallucinated travel brochures and Antarctic dreams, as if the only way to survive America is to leave it in the mind.
The hinge binding these stories is the despicable real-life character Roy Cohn (a ferociously effective Louis Farber), mentor to Joe and an avatar of ruthless power. When he learns he has AIDS and faces disbarment, he insists the disease is something that happens to other men, not him. In Kushner’s audacious stroke, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Nina Miller) arrives to observe his decline. It is both a theatrical joke and a moral reckoning: history personified, refusing to be buried.
And finally, there’s Belize (an entertainingly broad Michael Thompson), a former drag queen, once Prior’s lover and, in time, Roy Cohn’s nurse. The heated exchange between Spector’s Louis and Thompson’s Belize is among the most accomplished confrontations in the production.
ANGELS IN AMERICA is often described as being one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. Such canonization can fossilize a work, but here the opposite occurs. Stray Cat’s revival seems to rediscover the volatility in the text and the humor that snaps like electricity. At heart, this “gay fantasia” is a love letter to survival. “The great work begins,” the angel proclaims. That great work is not prophecy but persistence; caring for the sick, confessing cowardice, and choosing to love again.
Seen whole, the work feels like standing inside the symphony of a storm. It is unruly, excessive, occasionally uneven. It is also exhilarating. For several blazing hours, director May has taken Kushner’s work and turned Tempe Center for the Arts into a place where history and hope argue in full view of a local valley audience. You leave the theater feeling not bludgeoned but enlarged, as if you were permitted to eavesdrop on the republic arguing with itself. In an era that preferred silence about AIDS, ANGELS IN AMERICA insists on complexity.
The play may feel softer now than it did during the nineties. Time, education, and hard-won awareness inevitably reshape our reactions. But in this exemplary Stray Cat Theatre production, its radiance remains undimmed.