Reviews for Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Millenium Approaches

The average rating for Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Millenium Approaches based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-19 00:00:00 Bobby Chan Sometimes I turn giddy when I sense I am reading a classic. I feel impelled, as if by a great force, by an old god who could perhaps kill me, but it is a god who is ridden by genius, a genius who knows how to ride. I felt like this when I first read Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. First produced in 1991, Angels is set in 1985 in New York City, during the period when AIDS'a problem in the gay community for at least half a decade'began to be recognized by the general public. It tells the story of four men: openly gay decorator Prior Walter, who is afraid of the process of dying of AIDs, and the loneliness and enlightenment it brings; Louis Ironson, Prior's lover, who is afraid of the sordidness of death itself and the experience of watching someone die; the recently diagnosed, closeted Roy Cohn, the influential right-wing lawyer, who fears the loss of political influence stemming from the label "homosexual"; and Roy's protegee Joe Pitt, the unhappy married Mormon lawyer, who is afraid of just about everything: his melancholy wife, his cynical career, his sexual identity, his very self. From the beginning, the play bursts forth with vivid language and memorable characters, and soon, although it never loses its edge, it breaks the bounds of realism and glories in hallucinator revelation. Joe's wife Harper, in a fantasy drug haze, visits Antarctica: Roy Coen converses with the on-stage character Ethel Rosenberg, whose execution he engineered a generation before; and Prior'like a young Ebeneezer Scrooge in a gay "Christmas Carol"'receives visits from two of his ancestors (each named Prior) and The Angel of America herself. The play is a wild congeries of sensation, filled with searing confrontations, witty dialogue, ambitious expressionistic effects, and almost impossible staging. Yet never for a minute do you sense that Kushner lacks control over his materials: each character is finely etched, with a distinctive voice, and the pace and tone, though continually shifting, always seems connected to the overarching themes, the greater melody. I look forward eagerly to Angels in America, Part II. Here is an excerpt that gives a good idea of the poetry and depth of Kushner's language. Prior, diagnosed with AIDS, tells his lover Louis an old family anecdote: PRIOR: One of my ancestors was a ship's captain who made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants'Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship'La Grande Geste'but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship's only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they'd grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board. LOUIS: Jesus. PRIOR: I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-12 00:00:00 Tiffany Jennings Iconoclastic & surreal & immediate, this meditation, this fantasia on national themes, probably gets better with age. As the tragedy of HIV/AIDS at its inception in the middle of the Western world becomes more pronounced, even more beautifully terrifying--a seed that will germinate (MUST!) in all members and future members of the LGBtQIA+ community. As Part One ends in a fascinating hyperbolic HALELLUJAH! I cannot even fathom a better link to, a more fanatical search for and more angsty wait for, Part Two of the meteoric American theater God.