Angels in America: Perestroika I wasnt that keen on part one of Intimans Angels, but part two is where things really take off.
  • Chris Bennion
  • Angels in America: Perestroika I wasn't that keen on part one of Intiman's Angels, but part two is where things really take off.

I know, I know, comparisons are odious. But if Millennium Approaches was a fever dream, Perestroika is a kaleidoscopic seizure.

Part one of Tony Kushner's late-'80s epic Angels in America, titled Millennium Approaches, begins with a single death. A rabbi, played by a woman (at Intiman, the deft and shape-shifting Anne Allgood), introduces himself, saying he's come to bury a woman from the Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews. He admits he didn't know her, but knows what kind of person she was—a representative molecule from the wave of immigrant Jews who washed ashore in 20th-century America. The play, starting with that anonymous death, moves on to other personal catastrophes: Young ex-drag queen Prior loses his lover Louis when he reveals he has AIDS; Roy Cohn, the vicious, closeted, archconservative attorney who distinguished himself at the McCarthy hearings, discovers he has AIDS; the marriage of a young Mormon couple (Joe is a closeted Cohn protégé, and Harper is an agoraphobic Valium addict obsessed with the hole in the ozone layer) wrenches itself apart. It ends with an angel bursting through Prior's ceiling.

Part two of Angels in America, titled Perestroika, begins with catastrophe on a grander scale. Allgood enters as the world's oldest living Bolshevik, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov (Kushner is a master of plainspoken dialogue but he's not above pyrotechnic puns), who rails against the grandchildren of the Soviet Revolution, calling them "pygmy children of a gigantic race," and asks whether the world is capable of progress when it's mired in indulgence and chaos. The scale keeps growing: The characters of part one begin to merge consciousnesses (there were hints of this before, but they could be chalked up to drug- or disease-induced delirium), the angel becomes a majestic and occasionally peevish visitor who holds forth about celestial sex and the cluelessness of humanity in whom "the virus of time began," and the audience takes a trip to a well-meaning but blundering heaven. (Costume designer Mark Mitchell has set the vivid fashion of eternity as a scarlet harlequin/patchwork quilt/hoopskirt affair.)

If part one of Angels in America is a fever dream, part two is a kaleidoscopic seizure: Millennium Approaches sets us up, Perestroika knocks us down. Intiman's ambitious summer production, directed by Andrew Russell, fulfills the play's two-part rhythm. Millennium Approaches, which opened August 12, felt well-intentioned but a little anemic. (To be fair, it has lots of fans, both among the critics and in theater lobbies and bars. I'm just not one of them.) But things get wrinkly and weird in Perestroika, where the painful but not unique problems of Millennium's characters take on elaborate dimensions—in this world and the next—and the text allows far more bandwidth for its director, actors, and designers to play around and explore the limits of their abilities.

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