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REVIEW: "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches"
Published: 9/9/2011 9:52 AM
Last Modified: 9/9/2011 9:52 AM

If ambition were all, Actors Company of Tulsa’s production of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” could be considered a success.

There is little that isn’t ambitious about this theatrical undertaking. First, there is the play itself. Tony Kushner’s play is a three-act, three-hour epic drama that uses the AIDS crisis of the 1980s as a metaphor for what Kushner saw as the personal and political corruption and hypocrisy of American society.

And this is only Part One.

Second, this is the first year that ACT is eligible for the Tulsa Awards for Theatre Excellence, and “Angels in America” is its first submission for the $10,000 top prize.

Third, there’s the place where ACT is staging this play: The main stage of the VanTrease PACE at Tulsa Community College. It’s a hall that seats around 1,500 people — which might be a larger number than all the people who have attended shows by the Actors Company of Tulsa in the past.

But ambition is simply the fuel for an endeavor. And fuel can either be funneled into a vehicle that a skilled operator can use to great effectiveness — or it can blow up in your face.

Nothing exploded at Thursday’s opening night performance of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.” And that is both good — no actors or crew members harmed in the course of the evening’s entertainment — and disappointing, because “Angels in America” is supposed to be an incendiary work of theater.

Yes, it is dated to the point of being a period piece in many ways. Medical advances have reached the point that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, and the New York of is quite a different place than it was in 1985, when the play’s action begins.

But “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” is in essence a play about fear and rage — two seemingly different but in fact closely related responses to the ideas with which the play deals: abandonment, power, shame, disease, sex, death, faith, love.

Every speech, every conversation in “Angels in America” is, for the characters, a matter of life and death. And that sense of urgency, that high emotional pitch, that headlong rush of energy that comes when life starts spinning completely out of control — that is what, sadly, is missing from much of this version of “Angels in America.”

When it does show up — in the scenes between Prior (Philip Green), who is dying from AIDS, and his lover Louis (John Thomason), who cannot the physical and emotional messiness of disease and death — it’s galvanizing.

Neither character is all that likable: Prior is a profoundly self-absorbed creature, whose illness almost exacerbates the quality, while Louis tries to mask his self-loathing with streams of talk (which, fortunately, are played almost for laughs) and reckless behavior.

Yet Thomason and Green’s commitment to portraying these characters with all their psychological warts on display is electrifying. You may not like these characters, but Thomason and Green make you care about their fates.

Equally good is Freddie Tate as Belize, a nurse by day, drag queen by night, who is friends with Louis and Prior. Tate creates a perfect blend of flamboyance and level-headed grace, and his scene with Thomason at the start of Act Three, as Louis rambles on and on about various kinds of prejudice, is a marvel of understated comedy and penetrating character work.

Dave Garcia has the major role of Roy Cohn, the pathologically ambitious lawyer, obsessed with obtaining and using “clout.” Garcia makes no attempt to look like Cohn — which isn’t a criticism — but he also does not portray the intensity and drive you expect of this character. Everything Cohn does should be a seduction — he’s the beguiling serpent in Kushner’s asphalt garden. Garcia’s Roy Cohn is an avuncular fellow, dispensing advice, profanity and Faustian bargains with equal emphasis.

James Frazier and Hanna Nobles, as the extremely unhappy Mormon couple Joe and Harper, play their characters almost as automatons, their voices in monotone for much of the night. It is probably a way to make palpable all the things this couple is repressing, but it drains all the life and drama out of their scenes and you get the sense that nothing is at stake when they argue over the state of their crumbling marriage.
Putting this show on the VanTrease main stage means that there is a whole lot of room to fill — maybe too much. “Angels in America” doesn’t need a great deal of scenery (the painted backdrops, designed to evoke the New York skyline, add nothing), and Kushner’s own request that there be no blackouts between the scenes would have allowed for the action to be more concentrated, the pace of the show more accelerated.

Instead, director Tabitha Taylor spread the action widely across the stage and focused attention on making each scene a self-contained vignette rather than part of a whole. That is why at Thursday night’s performance the final moment, when the angel appears to tell Prior that things for him are just beginning, lacked the power it should have had. Instead of an “Oh, wow” moment it was more of an “Oh…kay” moment.

And exactly what the angel portends, we won’t find out until October, when the University of Tulsa presents the second part of “Angels in America: Perestroika.”

“Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” continues with performaces 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday at the VanTrease PACE, 10300 E. 81st St. For tickets: 918-595-7777, tulsaworld.com/mytix.




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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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