UMass put on the first half of "Angels," "Millennium Approaches," from April 7-16. The main ensemble featured UMass students Evan Fuller, Ed Ahern, Courtney Roy, Michael Marceline, Thomas Patrick Naughton, Katherine Scarborough, Julie-Marie Sundal and New WORLD Theater staff member Wesley Montgomery. UMass graduate student M. Honatke Miller directed.
"Angels in America" is difficult to summarize. Set in New York City in 1985, "Angels" is a play about AIDS, but it's really about much more than that. It's about race, sexuality, spirituality, identity politics, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Mormonism, disease, progress and the rise of neo-conservatism. The cast and crew engaged in a variety of creative processes, on display in the lobby, to help theatregoers understand the enormity of the show. They drew maps to follow the play's progression. Some were merely technical diagrams of each scene, while others chose key words and impressions, like "Fucked/Fathered" and "Distort the Truth."
The entire production centered around this desire to understand Tony Kushner's big ideas. The set was minimal-each scene centered around a piece of furniture set against an arc of video panels hanging from the ceiling. The abstract images projected on the screens were interesting without being obtrusive. The set also included 2,000 feet of steel cable covered in red vinyl, diagonally stretched across the stage to represent the "connective tissue that holds our society together," according to the production guide. Like the rest of the set, the cables were unobtrusive, placing complete focus on the actors, their characters and the play's big ideas.
The acting was on the whole extremely well done. The actors faced the challenge of tackling a play that some of the best actors in the world all but perfected in the HBO production. Some of the strongest performances were those that didn't try to live up to the standards of Al Pacino and Emma Thompson. My personal favorite was Fuller as Roy Cohn, a real New York lawyer and "unofficial power broker" who died of AIDS in 1986 and worked strenuously against gay rights. Fuller, naturally youthful, was faced with the prospect of playing a bitter, nasty 60-year-old man. He chose to play up Roy's power rather than his age or experience, and the result was a Roy Cohn who was dangerous, threatening and powerful. Other standout performances were the Angel, played by Sundal and Scarborough's multiple characters, specifically Hannah Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg.
All of the actors gave fantastic performances at some point in the show, but the consistency of these performances posed a slight problem. For the most part, these performers were on, but when they weren't, the production seemed a little fragmented. The lack of complex sets, audio and visual additions and costumes put all the weight on the actors' performances, and in those rare moments when things weren't coming together, they had little on which they could fall back.
Ultimately, however, the cast made the most of Kushner's characterizations, and the result was extremely moving. In the lobby, a wall was covered in paper for people to leave their initial reactions, and most seemed overwhelmed by the production. But what was perhaps just as powerful as the show itself hung in the main lobby of the Fine Arts Center: a piece of the AIDS quilt, the memorial project that began in 1987, whose center square contained the words "Roy Cohn: Bully, Coward, Victim." The quilt was an extraordinary addition to the experience, but Roy Cohn's square made it particularly striking.
The creative touches-onstage and in the lobby-made "Angels" seem more of an event than a play. There were detailed timelines about AIDS and American culture across from the box office. The dramaturge's program notes included quotations from a recent interview conducted with Oskar Eustis, the dramaturge/director who originally commissioned "Angels." Onstage, there were living set pieces-icebergs made from additional actors crouched under white tarps-and scenes made more intimate by their centering around a single chair. But the play's biggest successes were its performances-they cut to the heart of Kushner's characters and struck a nerve with their honesty. They took a play that seems to be about everything and made it understandable, and the result was an incredibly stirring experience.