Angels in America Makes Its Triumphant Return to Broadway

Every once in a great while comes along a piece of American-born theater, large of scope and ambition, that is both a genuine work of art and a commercial blockbuster—something that not only taps into the Zeitgeist but reveals and defines it, illuminating who we are as a country and a people. Such a supernova was Tony Kushner’s magnificent two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which opened on Broadway in 1993 and went on to become the signal cultural event of the decade. My father took me to see George C. Wolfe’s production of part one, Millennium Approaches, soon after it opened, and I was bowled over—I’d never realized that one play could contain so many ideas and feelings, so much invention and humanity. After the curtain came down, my father, a writer of musical comedies of an earlier era, turned to me in excitement and said, “It’s so fucking theatrical. And it’s about everything.” It’s hard to convey the fervor that attended Angels at the time—the critical acclaim, the box-office mayhem, the Pulitzer and seven Tonys—though, as Nathan Lane puts it, “it was the Hamilton of its day.”

As it happens, Lane is one of the stars of Marianne Elliott’s stunning new production of Angels in America, which, after a rapturously received run at London’s National Theatre last summer, comes to Broadway this month after 25 years with a knockout cast led by Andrew Garfield and Denise Gough. (The anniversary is also being marked by the publication of a fascinating oral history of the play, The World Only Spins Forward, by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois.) Set in New York against the AIDS crisis at the height of the Reagan era, Angels is a work that demands to be revisited again and again, and has —from Mike Nichols’s superb 2003 miniseries for HBO to Ivo van Hove’s radically stripped-down 2014 production in Dutch translation.

Garfield, who portrays an AIDS-afflicted young gay man named Prior Walter in the play, chalks up its enduring power in large part to its universality. “It feels like a story as old as time,” Garfield says, “with a group of human beings in a spiritual emergency, fighting for their lives. Toward the end, Prior tells the angels that he can’t explain why he wants to keep living—all he knows is that he does. There’s nothing more universal than that: to face death and then, despite all the suffering and ugliness, choose life—choose the possibility of hope and connection and joy, anyway.”

Kushner’s play was hardly the first to depict homosexuality on the stage. Mart Crowley’s acid comedy The Boys in the Band paved the way in 1968 (a revival is coming to New York this spring, directed by Joe Mantello, one of the original stars of Angels), and in 1981 Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (recently revived at Second Stage) brought the travails of a drag queen to Broadway audiences. Nor was it the first to take on the AIDS crisis—Larry Kramer’s scorching The Normal Heart and William M. Hoffman’s As Is brought it to the stage in the mid-eighties, as did Paul Rudnick’s comedy Jeffrey and William Finn’s musical Falsettos in the early nineties.

What made (and makes) Angels revolutionary is its Whitmanesque breadth—it is large, it contains multitudes—along with its refusal to distinguish between the political and the personal, the mundane and the mystical; its audacity in placing the dark years of the Reagan revolution and the AIDS epidemic in the stream of American history, from the Mormon migration to the McCarthy hearings; and its wild humor, extravagant theatrical imagination, fierce moral outrage, and boundless compassion. Though it echoes both Brecht and George Bernard Shaw, it stands in its distinct Americanness alongside the best of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. “It’s an actual masterpiece by a living playwright that transcends its time and subject matter,” Elliott says. “Hamlet is not really about being a Danish prince, but that’s the context in which it grows, and you could say the same about Angels in America.”

Kushner got the first spark of inspiration for the play in 1985 or 1986, after learning that an old friend of his named Bill had died of AIDS. “I went to bed that night and had a dream of Bill,” he says, “in his pajamas on his bed, alive and sort of cowering while the ceiling fell in and an angel floated into his room, and that was sort of the beginning of the whole process.” Oskar Eustis, then the head of San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company (currently the artistic director of the Public Theater), who had directed Kushner’s first big play, A Bright Room Called Day, commissioned him to write a new one. As Kushner and Eustis developed it, Kushner’s work about AIDS and angels and being gay in New York in the 1980s also became about Mormons and democracy and the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn.

Eustis applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his company to develop and stage the play and, to everyone’s surprise, got it. Kushner remembers getting his first check from the NEA and noticing a federal watermark on it. “When I saw that watermark, I had some feeling like: This play has literally been commissioned by the people of the United States of America, and I have to give them their money’s worth,” he says. “It turned into a very big play, in part because of that. Oskar had gotten me to sign a contract saying that I would make the play only two hours long, and I failed miserably in that regard.”

At seven and a half hours spread over two plays—the second is called Perestroika—Angels may be a wide-ranging epic, but it’s also an intimate portrayal of isolated people struggling to change and grow and connect. At its heart is the drama of two unhappy couples. First up are Prior Walter (Garfield), a smart, sarcastic, sensitive, and flamboyant 30-year-old New Yorker of high WASP lineage who learns early on that he has AIDS, and his longtime lover Louis Ironson (James McArdle), a selfish, guilt-ridden Jewish clerical worker who flaunts the courage of his left-wing convictions but can’t handle Prior’s suffering and abandons him to face it alone. Then there’s Harper Pitt (Gough), a Mormon housewife living in Brooklyn who pops Valium to blunt the pain of being emotionally and sexually deserted by her husband, Joe (Lee Pace), a hunky Republican law clerk with a secret longing for other men and a powerful mentor—the closeted right-wing political hit man Roy Cohn (Lane). Soon Joe and Louis fall into a tortured affair; Harper starts hallucinating that she’s visiting the North Pole; Roy finds out that he has AIDS and is attended to in the hospital by Prior’s best friend, a former drag queen named Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Susan Brown, also excellent as Joe’s mother, Hannah); and the feverish and terrified Prior is visited in his bedroom by an angel (Amanda Lawrence) who declares him a prophet. Then things get surreal.

It’s hard to imagine a better director to bring Angels to a new generation than Elliott, who, with War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, has shown an unparalleled gift for poetic stage magic that creates both epic sweep and psychological illumination. She spent more than a year immersing herself in the text, studying the history of the time, and trying to find a way “to merge the reality and the magic and the ghosts and heaven and hell—how can we show that actually everybody is interlinked, eventually?”

With set designer Ian MacNeil and lighting designer Paule Constable, Elliott locates the action in an abstract urban dreamscape, with scenes blending into each other as the neon-framed locations glide on and off. The effect is both fluidly cinematic and resolutely of the stage. (And the way that costume designer Nicky Gillibrand and the puppet designers Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes bring the Angel to life is both fabulous and terrifying.) “We strip away more and more, until the characters end up in a sort of empty, magical, spooky place,” Elliott says. “By the epilogue, nobody can deny we’re in a theater—we’re concentrated on this one person talking to us down center about the light that is shining through the leaves in Central Park, and we’re transported there.”

Any production of Angels, of course, rises or falls with the actors inhabiting its achingly human characters. Garfield, best known as the big-screen Spider-Man 2.0, was last seen on the New York stage six years ago opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman. In Angels he gives a blazing performance that captures Prior’s lonely heart and quicksilver mind, his fear and fury, degradation and dignity. It’s a performance of crushing honesty and flashing-eyed camp—an expert drag queen’s take on a tragic 1940s leading lady. “There’s something about going from girl to woman,” Garfield says. “He steps into womanhood, and this mature, feminine energy comes through, and finally he becomes almost the mother of us all.”

Gough became a star, in England and here, with her volcanic portrayal of a recovering drug addict in People, Places & Things. As the depressed, agoraphobic Harper Pitt, she’s playing another woman who turns to drugs to escape a reality—in this case, the fact that her straight-arrow husband is homosexual—that has become too painful to bear. Over the course of the play, Harper goes from a dazed, frightened girl to a kind of ghost wandering the streets of New York in her nightgown to an independent woman who heads to San Francisco alone to forge a new identity. Gough captures her bruised fragility and confusion, and her growing self-awareness, with heartbreaking acuity. “She lives in a world where she’s expected to put up with what she’s been given because of her religion and her sex, and she feels trapped,” Gough says. “It’s just so brave that she really goes to all the scary places she needs to go to and comes through the struggle bigger and bolder and stronger and free.”

Lane, of course, has long been established as one of the great comic actors of our time, but in 2012 he decided that he had more to offer and tackled the titanic role of Hickey in Robert Falls’s production of The Iceman Cometh with Brian Dennehy. He considers taking on Roy Cohn the apotheosis of that decision, and though he was initially reluctant to spend seven months in London away from his husband, he realized, he says, “it’s one of the greatest roles ever written—just one of those mountains you really want to climb.” Lane prepared by studying the life of the real Cohn, the weaselly sidekick to Joseph McCarthy (and prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) who went on to become a right-wing power broker in a transparent closet and insisted that he had liver cancer until the day he died of AIDS. Lane gives a ferocious performance, capturing Cohn’s black fury and warped humor but also his puckish charm, fierce intelligence, and desperate loneliness. “Roy Cohn was a vile human being,” Lane says. “But he was a human being, and that’s what you have to get to. As awful a person as he is, you can’t help but be moved, because he’s terrified and he’s fucking fighting to hold on to his life, and there’s something kind of admirable about his refusal to die.”

As the mentor of a brash young real estate developer from Queens, Cohn, of course, was the man who in many ways gave us Donald Trump (“That was his one last Fuck you on the way out,” Lane says). It’s a cruel irony that gives Angels a particular connection to today. Though HIV is no longer a death sentence (at least in the United States) and same-sex marriage is the law of the land, the play speaks urgently to the moment in which we live—not least in its warnings about climate change and the angels’ anti-immigration rhetoric. The play is also passionate about the promise of democracy—an idea that seems particularly fragile these days. “The history of this country—although it’s full of a lot of bad things—is full of astonishing moments of transformation and advances in human civilization,” Kushner says. “We are at a moment in this republic—I never imagined I would see it in my lifetime—where the question of whether or not we believe in democracy at all is on the table.”

Angels in America ends on a note of hope and defiance—a benediction and a call to arms. Prior has journeyed to Heaven, where he finds a group of dispirited angels, abandoned by God, who preach a gospel of stasis and inaction, hoping that if they can get Prior to convince mankind to stop progressing God will return. Prior rejects the offer and returns to earth to keep living, even if it is without hope of a divine intervention. As the play comes to a close, he addresses the audience:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all . . .

and we are not going away.

We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward.

We will be citizens. The time has come.

Bye now.

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.

“It’s a call to waking up to the fact that we need each other very deeply,” Garfield says. “You are me, and I am you. If I hurt you, I’m only hurting myself. That’s the awful beauty of what Tony’s written. There is no one watching over us. We have to watch over ourselves. What a beautiful, heady responsibility.”

In this story:
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
Hair: Thom Priano for R+Co Haircare; Makeup: Yumi Lee; Tailor: Cha Cha Zuctic.
Set Design: Mary Howard; Puppet/Wing design: Finn Caldwell & Nick Barnes.
Costumes from the National Theatre and Broadway production of Angels in America designed by Nicky Gillibrand.