December 10, 1999


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'Angels': ecstasy, desperation and AIDS

By Catherine Osborne | For The Phoenix

"Millennium Approaches," Part One of Tony Kushner's massive theatrical diptych "Angels in America," is not a small undertaking by anyone's count. Clocking in at just under three hours, in three acts, with three directors, eight actors playing twenty roles and with an emotional range running the gamut from ecstasy to the quiet desperation of unsullied hopelessness, it ought to overwhelm the resources of a college production. But the 1999 Senior Company's carefully modulated production skillfully leads its audience through the wrenching minefield that was New York in the early years of the age of AIDS.

The plot revolves around two disintegrating marriages. In October 1985 Louis Ironson (a tightly-wound Jon Stancato '02) learns that his lover Prior Walter (Andrew Breitenberg '01) has a full-blown case of AIDS. Neurotic and terrified, Louis is caught between his inability to cope with Prior's illness and the insurmountable monolithic guilt which dogs his every step from the moment he understands that he will have to abandon his partner. Meanwhile, Prior, trapped in the hospital from the middle of the second act, transmutes his mental and physical pain into hallucinations (or visions?) of the Messenger, the Angel (shaven-headed, delicately tough Beth Bonacci '00). Breitenberg is heartrendingly convincing as a sensuous and unflinchingly honest man who seeks hope in a world that isn't offering him any.

Andrew Breitenberg as Prior Walter, stricken by AIDS in "Angels."
In Brooklyn, Mormons Joe and Harper Pitt (Damon McMahon '02 and Kate Hurster '03) struggle to hide from each other. Joe, gay and self-hating, comes home late every night to a wife addicted to Valium and longing for release to a better world. Now Joe has been offered a job in Washington by the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn (Rafael Luna '00), and the arguments about whether to move bring their deepest secrets to the fore.

Joe and Louis meet each other at work, and Louis gradually draws Joe out of the closet and into his life. Their partners meet, not in real life, but in a literally through-the-looking-glass world where, each deeply depressed, Harper and Prior can see straight through each other. Hurster is an otherworldly presence in the role of the childlike Harper, whose escapist fantasies eventually lead her all the way to Antarctica. As her isolated husband, McMahon's self-questioning Joe is affecting. It's painful to watch as he calls his mother (Sarah Yardney '02) in Utah from Central Park at 4 a.m. to finally come out to her - and, one senses, to himself. Later, confronting the frighteningly intense Luna over ethics and politics, we feel for him again as he tries to navigate a path between love and morality. As his mother Hannah, Yardney exerts a solid, practical presence (she's also very funny in several smaller roles, including a rabbi and - yes, really - Ethel Rosenberg). Chy Spain '00 wends his way through the entire plot as ex-ex-drag queen Belize, bitchily comic confidant to Prior.

Directors Lars Jan, Seth Olshfski, and David Ryan, assisted by dramaturg Jessica Sonnenschein, revel in both the sensuous unreality of the "Angels" dream world and the corrosive nature of a real world imploding, filled with men and women dead and dying. Together with Luna they make up the Theatre Department's Senior Company. All theatre majors participate in the company, which spends the fall semester preparing for a production.

Kushner means the end of the last act as a cliffhanger for Part 2, "Perestroika." But the directors alchemize the final minutes, giving Breitenberg a transcendent moment in the dark, which is as cathartic for the audience as a true ending. Feathers flutter down from heaven. The Angel descends. The millennium is upon us.