As staged at Court Theatre, the two parts of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America take seven hours to unwind. That means lots of intermissions, which in turn means lots of lobby conversations on the subject of what the person standing next to you thinks of the show so far. I was surprised at how many of the people standing next to me said something like, “Well, it’s really a period piece now, isn’t it?”
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They had a point, of course. It’s over 20 years—i.e., a generation—since part one of Angels in America premiered with the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco. And some of the events covered in the play go back further still, to the mid-1980s. What’s more, the psychic distance is enormous for many of us, and growing. Angels references Cold War figures like Roy Cohn, the lawyer/fixer who made his bones doing dirty work for Joe McCarthy, and Ethel Rosenberg, the American communist who went to the electric chair along with her husband, Julius, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Kushner is old enough to remember, and maybe feel, the passions that were aroused once by names like these. But, hell, the Berlin Wall fell at around the same time that Angels premiered. The Soviet Union is no more. The memory grows dim.
But they couldn’t get the old fire back, and Charles Newell‘s staging wasn’t helping. The first part’s signature moment—when an angel from on high crashes through the ceiling of Prior’s bedroom to hail him as a prophet—is muted, even subverted here: no fallen chunks of plaster, no outstretched white wings, and definitely no Spielbergian mix of awe and delight. Instead, the dominant visual element is the set of shiny steel wires that keeps Mary Beth Fisher’s angel hanging in midair. Fisher looks uncomfortable, and the mechanics of her comings and goings are clunky. A huge effort of will is required to maintain the necessary pretense of majesty.
Through 6/3: Tue-Sun, check with theater for repertory schedule, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $35-$65.
