Angels We Have Heard On High

Playwright Tony Kushner won two Tony Awards for Best Play (1993 and 1994) for Parts I and II of Angels in America (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika), and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Millennium, among numerous theater awards in New York and London. The exact title of this duo is Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Kushner likes words. Lots of them.

They are heard in abundance during Rec Room’s inventive production of Part I. (Part II opens Saturday, November 15. And the two plays run concurrently until December 20.)

In Millennium, Kushner writes deep, almost eschatologically, on themes about love, lost love, gay love, tradition, finding oneself, politics during the Reagan era, and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the ‘80s and its catastrophic effect on everybody who knew someone with the disease. But death and dying are the regents of change. Suffering leads to renewal; renewal to the “great work” that lies ahead.  

Prophets, angels, and hallucinations are part of this process, especially to those most hurting. That would be gay Prior (a dramatic Wesley Whitson); Joe, a closeted married Morman (a sympathetic Nathan Wilson); Harper, Joe’s pill-popping wife unmoored in a loveless marriage (a phenomenal Meg Rodgers); and Roy Cohn, the foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, sleazy lawyer (a volcanic Greg Dean). Blustery Cohn refuses to accept that he’s dying of AIDS; Prior’s lover Louis (Matthew Jamison) runs from Prior’s illness into the arms of Joe, out looking for another trick; Harper retreats into Valium-induced fantasies; and Prior remains in the throes of death. Everyone is infected by this insidious disease, gay or straight.

Except for Prior’s character, all the other seven actors play multiple roles: Susan Koozin as Rabbi,  Prior’s mother, and railroaded spy Ethel Rosenberg; Elizabeth Black as hospital nurse Emily, Mormon real estate agent Sister Ella, and the Angel; slow-burning Avery Vonn Kenyatta as snippy ex-drag queen Belize, Prior’s former lover, and Mr. Lies, Harper’s imaginary travel agent; Wilson as the ghost of a medieval Prior; Dean as the cheerful 17th-century specter of a bewigged former Prior who visits his modern relative on his death bed to comically inform him of the forthcoming annunciation.

The play is structured like a movie. Smoothly edited by Kushner, and with the slick co-direction by Rec Room’s Co-Founder and Artistic Director Matt Hune and Associate Artistic Director Sophia Watt, the play, though it drags at times through Kushner’s inability to shut up and let the drama play out, rolls evenly through its two-hour-and-30-minute running time. There are two intermissions.

Kushner loves Bertold Brecht and his patented breaking of the fourth wall, and Rec Room obliges most magnificently. There’s a dressing room far upstage with costume racks and makeup mirror where actors sometimes get ready to appear on stage; and there’s an open backstage space stage-left with a refrigerator, shelves, and assorted clutter to complete the ambiance. We watch the actors move the scenery pieces, as if we, too, are part of the production. The illusion of being in a theater is upheld, while Kushner works his magic with his high-falutin’ dialogue that at times feels a bit like preaching to the choir. But at other times, his magic words flow and we become immersed in the twisty tale that sometimes combines two scenes into one (perhaps a Hune/Watt sleight-of-hand to move this behemoth along).

Stefän Azizi’s set is simple – an iron scaffolding with ballet barres that circle the floor, lit by Paige Seber in various colors, depending upon the emotion of the scene at hand. It’s all quite plain yet extremely effective. Prior’s hospital bed is rolled out, and at the end of the scene, is rolled off stage through the scaffolding into the side space, awaiting its next entrance. Robert Leslie Meek’s sound design verges on horror movie tropes in its musical cues, but the ambient sound track of city noise, electronic thrum, or Antarctic chill is eerily portrayed. Leah Smith’s costumes are spot-on, from Cohn’s ratty hospital robe to Belize’s East Village grunge.

Unfortunately, the play’s finale, with Kushner’s astonishing – and now legendary – coup de theatre is bungled and its power sorely dissipated. And what’s with that Annunciation costume? Are we in a heavenly McDonald’s?

Not quite as angelic as when it first premiered, Kushner’s mighty gay epic spans centuries in its dreams and nightmares. Houston hasn’t seen this in nearly 30 years. (The Alley Theatre produced it in March, 1995.) Whatever you may think of its stuffiness or pretension, Millennium Approaches still packs a wallop, especially under Rec Room’s stage wizards and this indelible cast. And then, next week, go, see how these Mormons, reprobates, and former drag queens survive into the ‘90s. Angels in America, Part I, Millennium Approaches. Through December 20. Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson Street. Both parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, will be presented on alternating evenings at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays; and 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, call 713-588-9403 or visit recroomarts.org. $20 to $45.

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