If the Millennium has approached, can Perestroika be far behind?

Set in the eighties during the Reagan presidency, playwright Tony Kushner made theater history with his multiple prize-winning Angels in America, an epic two-part play. Rec Room Arts Artistic Director and Co-Founder Matt Hune and Associate Artistic Director Sophia Watt are codirecting both Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika, which dramatize the spreading of the AIDS epidemic and the struggles of those suffering from the disease, as well as the reactions of those around them.

“This is a play about change,” Hune and Watt say in their Directors’ Note. “On the surface, Angels in America deals with the identities and politics of its time: the LGBTQ+ community, the 1980s Reagan era, and the AIDS epidemic. But beneath all of that, it is about something more universal, the human process of transformation…The characters in Angels in America live in that threshold.”

Houston has not had productions of these plays in three decades.

The first part opened on November 8 focusing on conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and ex-drag queen Prior Walter, and their ways of coping in a culture that often ignores or rejects those struggling with the devastating spread of AIDS. Part two opens November 15, and both plays will run on alternate evenings through December 20.

 “I like to think of the individual shows as acts,” says actor Wesley Whitson, who plays Prior Walter in Millennium Approaches. “You’ll need to see both shows to get the full story.”

Whitson, who is from Houston, and attended HSPVA and the University of Houston, calls his character “a fabulous, resilient gay man diagnosed with AIDS.”  

“It’s so layered and rich in themes and characters. It’s an actor’s playground and a dream come true to play this part that I have revered for years,” he said.

The two-part play cycle is an ambitious undertaking for any theater. Rec Room Arts, known for high production quality in one of Houston’s smallest performing venues, makes the performance unique. “We are essentially in the audience’s lap,” Whitson explains. “Our proximity to the audience is what makes Rec such a special theatre in my opinion. There’s no hiding up there! The immediacy of what we are feeling is palpable in that theatre.”

And he believes Angels in America is not only one of the finest works of American theater, but also important.” With conservatism on the rise in our country, I think Angels serves as a battle cry,” he says. “To fight, to speak up, to demand that no one person’s rights be placed above another’s. That’s the message of the play to me: the luminosity of the human spirit, and our ability to fight past hope.” 

Angels in America will be presented in two parts on alternating evenings: Part One: Millennium Approaches, and Part Two: Perestroika will run through December 20 at Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson Street, Suite 130 C, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30p.m. Forum nights are November 21 and December 12.

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