Something beautiful is happening in the upstairs Studio Theatre of the Long Beach Playhouse (LBPH). Ryan Holihan directs a talented cast and crew that rises to the challenge of staging Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.” Subtitled, “a gay fantasia on national themes,” the play is not for the faint of heart, not least because of its three-hour run time with two intermissions. But it is heart-felt and also evocative in its sweeping exploration of sexual, religious and political identities.
Set in 1985 New York, the play features multiple intersecting characters navigating the complexities of being gay during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, along with issues of religion, race and politics. Kushner’s play infuses the mundane with the metaphysical, often with winks of humor. The audience is asked to go along with characters experiencing hallucinations, Dickensian ghostly visits, spontaneous Hebrew speaking and mysterious voices hinting at end-of-times revelations. The result is transporting, like being in a waking dream, aided by lighting (Donny Jackson) and sound design (Andrew Wilcox).
Roy Cohn—sublimely embodied by LBPH veteran Noah Wagner—is a hilariously tough-talking and very successful lawyer who closets his gayness, referring to his HIV diagnosis as liver cancer. He takes under his wing the young Joe Pitt (Brian Patrick Williams), a Mormon in deep denial about his own homosexuality. Joe is married to the sensitive Harper (Allison Lynn Adams), who seems to have suffered trauma and is addicted to Valium, fueling her real-seeming hallucinations.
One of her hallucinations is of another character, Prior Walter (Christian Jordan Skinner), in elegant drag after being diagnosed with AIDS. Walter’s partner Louis (Michael Mullen), for reasons unclear, wants nothing to do with Prior’s extreme sickness and potential death, abandoning Prior to undergo medical treatment alone. Prior also experiences visual and aural hallucinations and is visited by two amusing ghosts from his long line of ancestors also named Prior Walter. “The world has gotten so terribly, terribly old,” one of them forebodingly observes.
All the actors handle the play’s dense and riveting dialogue excellently, owning their characters’ fears, doubts and anxieties. Williams brings fresh-faced energy to Joe, looking like the potential Washington, D.C. political lawyer Cohn wants him to become. Williams also hams it up as one of Prior’s ancestors from medieval England, carrying a sickle and boasting of 12 children. Wagner plays the other ghost—reminiscent of a wigged Louis XIV—with delightful relish.
Skinner fully portrays Prior’s range of emotions at his potentially fatal diagnosis while embracing his character’s girlishness. Mullen captures Louis’s cerebral humor, and Adams’s quivering voice heightens Harper’s vulnerability. Lisa J. Salas is stellar as both Joe’s mother Hannah and a rabbi at the start of the play speaking at the funeral of a Jewish immigrant who infused her children with both the grounded “dirt” of her homeland and forward momentum of her journey—an apt metaphor for the dual lives of most of the characters.
Alison Boole is naturally sympathetic as Prior’s nurse, and Richard Martinez is vivacious as Belize, a friend of both Prior and Louis. As the only person of color in the cast, Belize challenges Louis’s statements about politics and race late in the play during an extended café scene—one of only a couple that seem longer than necessary.
First staged in 1991, “Angels in America” laments the absence of gay political clout in 1985. While a lot has changed since then, the play still resonates now. Roy and Joe extol Republican Reaganism while Louis espouses leftist ideals—a dichotomy only further entrenched today. And the HIV/AIDS specter echoes our current coronavirus pandemic. Though director Holihan pointedly calls both viruses “unforgiving,” Prior’s ghost ancestors remind us that such epidemics are nothing new—another way this ambitious play seeks to broaden our point of view.
The play’s ending offers a striking and portentous tableau, though it leaves many questions about the characters hanging. Whether those will be answered in “Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika,” which LBPH is planning to stage at this time next year, remains to be seen. For now, thanks to LBPH’s invested cast, this first part succeeds in altering our perspective.
“Angels in America: Part One” continues at the Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., through Oct. 30, with shows Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $14 to $24. For tickets and information, visit LBPlayhouse.org or call the box office at (562) 494-1014.
