Boston Theatre Works is extraordinarily ambitious in presenting this play. Tony Kushner's Angels in America is a seven-hour play in two parts, and this is the first staging of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work in over a decade, aside from the 2003 HBO miniseries. To produce this play, with its many complex themes and evolving characters, requires extraordinary directorial talent.
Boston Theatre Works has that talent in Jason Southerland, their Artistic Director who, along with Nancy Curran Willis, directs both parts of Angels in America with staggering success, staying true to the script, and leaving the most obscene parts unaltered. Even though it takes place in the 1980s, the play's themes - mainly human frailty, moral choices, political corruption, and human prejudices - all stand the test of time to this day.
Angels in America follows several complex characters as they deal with the AIDS crisis, political unrest, and their own various prejudices during the Reagan Administration. Joe (Sean Hopkins) is a Mormon legal clerk whose Valium-addicted wife Harper (Bree Elrod) has hallucinations and paranoid delusions. Joe's mentor, the McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn (Richard McElvain), encourages him to take a job in Washington, which may mean abandoning Harper. Meanwhile, Prior Walter (Tyler Reilly) informs his lover, Louis (Christopher Webb), that he is dying from AIDS.
The play centers around the degeneration of the two relationships. The characters are presented in such a way as to give us a good understanding of the complexities and the pain of their choices. We are given a rare glimpse, beyond the dialog among characters, to the inside of their minds - a look into the processes that are leading them to the choices they will end up making. These conflicts and the way they are presented are what make the drama so effective, and the comedy, which is plentiful, so necessary.
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