Angels in America
A couple of paragraphs on Kushner.
SF Weekly
January 2001
If Tony Kushner’s epic fantasia really is the greatest play of its generation, we’re in a lot of trouble. It hasn’t aged well. The Actors’ Theater of Santa Rosa has revived its 1999 production of both parts, “Millenium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” and what most of the scenes reveal are the playwright’s self-satisfied, shallow view of his country. Kushner can’t write straight or gay relationships without being smug. Roy Cohn’s death by AIDS, after a public career as arch-conservative shithead and a simultaneous secret life with men, still holds interest, and Joe Winkler’s fierce performance as Cohn may redeem the show. Jessica Powell in all her roles, but especially Hannah Porter Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg, is also excellent; she gives a powerful speech at Cohn’s bedside as Rosenberg’s ghost. (Cohn prosecuted the Rosenbergs in the fifties, and sent them to the electric chair.) Bronwen Shears is also a good Angel, with fishing nets for wings a Chevy bumper strapped to her waist, and Danielle Cain is charming as Harper Amaty Pitt, the Mormon guy’s batty wife.
However: Kushner’s alignment of left-vs.-right as a cosmic good-vs.-evil pattern is a blinkered, superficial pose that belongs to those desperate days under the first President Bush, when the play was written. Peter Downey, Steven Abbott, Armond Dorsey, and John Shillington can’t get out from under their tendentious lines; the romantic relationships are sentimental and false. Kushner surpasses himself only when he lets his embodiment of evil, Roy Cohn, run free. Like Milton’s devil, he’s the best part of the show. “You’re up in the clouds, Joe!” he hollers at a Mormon, Joe Pitt. “Plant a foot, goddammit, and stay a while.” Yeah. Sometimes you wish Kushner had taken his own devil’s advice.
Michael Scott Moore
