Threshold of Revlation

June 28, 2016 7:16 PM

An Oral History of Angels in America. Isaac Butler and Dan Kois interview Tony Kushner, Oskar Eustis, actors, and other participants in the original production of Angels in America.
posted by JustKeepSwimming (8 comments total)

To this wonderful oral history I can add the following small (i.e., tiny) items: Chicago hosted the first major post-Broadway productions, which became a limited national tour. I worked in the box office. Even here, even post-Broadway, the opening of part II, "Perestroika," was delayed, because even then Kushner kept re-writing it. [I own a copy of the first published text, from TCG press - it differs from any you'd buy now, mainly in order of some scenes. I think the copy I have reflects the Broadway version; if you buy it now you get something more like the Chicago version.]

I took advantage of my position of knowing where any empty seats were on any given day to watch each part multiple times. Came away with the conclusion that - in contrast to some epic works that can hold up to being seen all in one day (such as the RSC's "Nicholas Nickleby" and Robert LePage's "Seven Streams of the River Ota") - "Angels in America" really should be seen separately, on two nights, because each half has a very different tone and mood. And the subject matter is so huge that a breather for mental digestion is helpful.

This Chicago/touring production featured Jonathan Hadary as Roy Cohn, who also starred in the Showtime cable TV filmed version of another AIDS -themed play (that I don't think gets nearly enough attention), "As Is."

Also, over the months it played here, the actor who played Joe Pitt (the closeted Mormon) - I will be kind to him and not name him - decided that the playwright/director were wrong, and that Joe is not actually gay, but just a man lured into sin by Louis. His performance changed over the run as a result, becoming a bit too overwrought after a while. The cast, so I heard, started to dislike him. Last I heard of him he has a regular gig as a clown at the yearly local Renaissance Fair.
posted by dnash at 9:19 PM on June 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

This article is fantastic! I saw Parts 1 & 2 in NYC in their first runs and will never forget them. How I happened to be in NYC at the same time the shows premiered, and was able to get tickets is still a mystery. There must have been some divine intervention involved because I couldn't have pulled it off on my own. When I saw Perestroika it ran 4.5 hours and I was riveted the entire time. The HBO version doesn't hold a candle to the original Broadway production. Or probably any theatrical production. For me seeing Angels in America was equivalent to being present at the fall of the Berlin Wall or in Tiananmen Square. You knew you were present at a cultural and historical crossroads. I felt honored to be in that audience and bear witness. I am sure I felt particularly moved by the story because when I saw it one of my favorite college professors was dying of AIDs. He was so kind, so talented, and now I realize looking back, so young.
posted by pjsky at 6:27 AM on June 29, 2016

I was doing community theater in southern NM with my first boyfriend. We did a lot of theater together over our few years together. I can't remember exactly what show we were doing, it might have been The Sound Of Music or One Upon A Mattress, but I do remember this: one older actor in our production went to LA and saw Millennium Approaches at the Mark Taper and came back entirely ON FIRE about the possibilities of theater.

He wasn't gay, but he was VERY into theater. And he knew that the men running this production at his community theater were gay. He came back and gave me a souvenir t-shirt from the production and a photocopy of the first maybe one third of the script for MA photocopied out of a magazine? I had no idea what I was reading or anything about this production, really. But it woke up something in me about the power of theater to affect queer politics.

A couple of years later, I directed a production of Prelude To A Kiss, which to this day remains the best-reviewed (and ironically lowest-attended) production that particular theater has produced. It was a daring thing, to put on this exploration of love and gender in a backwater of the country, but it felt important to me.

I still have the t-shirt and that photocopy of the beginning of the script, even 25 years later.
posted by hippybear at 7:53 AM on June 29, 2016

Also, this article is an amazing thing to read. Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 7:53 AM on June 29, 2016

I have stories about hearing Kushner as one of the keynote speakers at OutWrite, the gay and lesbian writers' conference that used to happen every year in Boston, and about deciding to see Part 1 when I was in New Orleans alone for a few days on a very tight budget when I was a young person, but when I start to write them down I realize neither story is very interesting, so I'll just say that this is relevant to my interests and I wouldn't have seen it except for it being posted here, so thank you very much.
posted by not that girl at 8:00 AM on June 29, 2016

Angels in America has always been tremendously meaningful to me and this oral history is fantastic--moving and funny and wild. Thank you for posting!
posted by merriment at 8:49 AM on June 29, 2016

Finally was able to see both Millennium and Perestroika staged around three years ago, and it was amazing - up until that point I had only read the play and seen the movie version of it. Those were fine on their own, but they have nothing near the raw power that a live performance of this thing has.

Kinda related...the first thing that rang through my mind when I read this article about the influence of Roy Cohn on he-who-shall-not-be-named were these lines from delivered by the former in Angels in America:

Roy Cohn: Was it legal? Fuck legal! Am I a nice man? Fuck nice! They say terrible things about me in The Nation? Fuck The Nation! You want to be nice or you want to be effective?! You want to make the law, or be subject to it? Choose!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:56 PM on June 29, 2016

OH - other thing about working the box office during that first Chicago production.

Around that time in the 1990s, there was a major New Age fad for all things angels. Like, bookstores filled with books about guardian angels, and believing in angels, and on and on. People going on Oprah talking about angels.

So, yeah, we frequently had to deal with very angry customers who bought very expensive tickets solely on the basis of "oh, it has Angels in the title," so they'd expected, I guess, choirs of harp-playing performers on wires singing about peace or something, and were very much NOT interested in a bunch of foul language and, y'know, gay people. When taking phone orders, we started learning to pick up on how clueless the caller might be so we could find a way to steer the conversation toward the actual story of the play, to fend them off if possible.

(This has me thinking about the upcoming opening of Hamilton here in Chicago, and wondering if things have changed much or if that theater will have to deal with the occasional customer storming out, bitching about "all this rap music.")
posted by dnash at 2:01 PM on June 29, 2016 [2 favorites]