Review: (Toronto) Angels in America Part I and II

Raquel Duffy and Damien Atkins

The Gay Fantasia takes flight at Soulpepper

Epic theatre that delivers on its promises

by Christian Baines

(photos by Cylla von Tiedemann)

It’s 1985, and Prior, a young gay man afflicted with AIDS has just begun to show visible symptoms. His lover Louis must decide if that ordeal is more than he’s prepared to face. Meanwhile, up-and-coming Mormon legal clerk Joe is caught between his deeply unhappy pill-popping wife Harper, his sociopathic conservative attorney mentor Roy Cohn, his distraught, yet no-nonsense mother Hannah, and the lure of other men’s beds. All while Prior is receiving strange visitations from an angel, calling upon him to stop humanity’s perpetual and seeming destructive march towards progress and change.

All told over two plays, running a total of just over six hours, and it changed the way theatregoers and theatre makers thought about gay stories, AIDS stories and depictions of America forever. What kind of a mind produces such a work? Tony Kushner, who subtitled his phenomenal play “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. Applied to any other work, it might seem pretentious. Here, it seems an only fair description.

Sunday Feature: Angels in America, an appreciation by Christian Baines

Raquel Duffy and Damien Atkins; photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

CELESTIAL PLAYWRITING
Why over 20 years on, Angels still has wings.
by Christian Baines

Angels in America seems to have become the go-to play in talking about so many benchmarks. A turning point for Gay theatre. A turning point for the way the AIDS epidemic could be depicted in entertainment. 

Not forgetting the endless cracks about the show’s sheer length. No, really. When considering taking in Angels, “I’m not doing anything that weekend” had better mean “I’m not doing ANYTHING that weekend.” Saturday for the 6+ hour play, and Sunday to recover.

Its tagline ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’ speaks not only to Tony Kushner’s love of long, needlessly drawn out titles (Anyone try to spit out ‘The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures’ at TKTS?), but to the incredible scope of the work itself. Gay theatre, even addressing AIDS, was nothing new to Broadway audiences in 1991 – La Cage aux Folles and Falsettos had both come before, collecting a nice fistful of Tony Awards between them.