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Descending Angels: Visitation of a Gay Fantasia
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10153 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1993 |
2,129 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
In April of this year the Pulitzer Prize committee made a historic decision. It awarded its prize for Best Play to Tony Kushner for Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part I, Millennium Approaches, thereby marking the first time in the seventy-five years of the prize's existence that the award has ever been accorded to an overtly homosexual play. The play, which opened on Broadway in May and went on to win four Tony Awards (including Best Play), was received with rapturous critical and popular applause.
Prior to its New York opening and the winning of the Pulitzer, Angels had already received ecstatic, almost hysterically enthusiastic, reviews from critics in Los Angeles and London (where it played for a year at the Royal National Theater and won the Evening Standard's award for the best play of the year). The New York Times' Frank Rich called it "dazzling, not merely mind-bending; at times it is mind-exploding." He also found Kushner's writing fabulous, "verdant with 'unspeakable beauty.'"
His March 1992 review in the New York Times of the London production compared Kushner with John Dos Passes. "Mr. Kushner has created an original theatrical world of his own, poetic and churning, that, once entered by an open-minded viewer of any political or sexual persuasion, simply cannot be ignored."
Jason Steven Cohen, the producing director of the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Greenwich Village, where the play was originally scheduled to play in New York, deemed Angels "perhaps the most important theatrical event of the latter part of the century." Celebrated movie director Robert Altman will direct two separate films based on the two-part play. And playwright Kushner has attained the ultimate celebrity status: He has appeared in a GAP ad in national magazines.
What about the play itself merits this kind of attention? Angels is in two parts, a seven-hour epic. The first half, "Millennium Approaches," runs for nearly four hours. "Perestroika," the second half, has been extensively rewritten over the last year and a half, perhaps in response to all that has gone on in the former Soviet Union since Kushner initially wrote the play in 1989. "Perestroika" will be playing together with "Millenium Approaches" this fall on Broadway.
The ambitions of the playwright are very high indeed. Angels, say its admirers, can be viewed as considering AIDS the defining metaphor for a national spiritual decline during the 1980s, and as a
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