Yvonne Rainer | RoS Indexical and Spiraling Down / 2009

ritualizing the rite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valery Gergiev (director), with the cast of the Marinsky Theatre Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes: The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and The Wedding.

Yvonne Rainer (choreographer, after Millicent Hodson), with Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers RoS Indexical and Spiraling Down / RedCat (Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater, at the Disney Music Center, Los Angeles / the performance I attended was the Los Angeles premiere, Thursday, June 25, 2009

 

By intentional coincidence, a few weeks before attending Yvonne Rainer's RoS Indexical and Spiraling Down, Howard and I attended a high definition showing of Emerging Pictures's Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes at the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills. That film included performances of three Stravinsky ballets by the Marinsky Ballet Company with the Marinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra, restaged in 2003 from the original choreography and danced in the original costumes. The three ballets included The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and The Wedding, all of which were high engaging reconstructions of the originals.

     Of particular importance for me, however, was seeing The Rite of Spring just previous to Rainer's homage, dissection, and spoof of that great work. The day after seeing the Rainer piece, moreover, I watched the tape of the first reconstruction of Nijinsky's original, performed in 1987 by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.

     From a corps de ballet of several dozens of dancers, Rainer slimmed down her company to four dancers, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sally Silvers, and Pat Catterson, the last of whom was replaced in the production I saw by Rainer herself, now age 75.

      The tone of Rainer's version was established almost immediately by the four sitting around a card table, listening to something on head phones. They begin by humming and thrumming the overture to The Rite of Spring, droned so out of tune it is barely recognizable.

       As the First Act, L'adoration de la Terre, begins, three of the women (in the original, many of the group dances were split by Nijinsky into groups of three) gather, as the old men do in Nijinsky's version, to celebrate the spring with the heavy stamp of their booted feet. Here, in spritely colored work-out clothing, the woman start by imitating but quickly move to other positions as, sometimes working in unison, but more often splitting apart into ones or twos, they reiterate some of the hand, arm, and head-gestures of the Nijinsky choreography. To her "indexing" of the original, Rainer adds often hilarious and touching riffs from Groucho Marx's daffy backward shuffles (remember his incredible dancing in the movies?) and Robin Williams (presumably from his Bob Fosse imitations in The Birdcage) to Sarah Bernhardt's melodramatic gestures. Every so often, the exhausted dancers—they are, after all, performing all the various chorus numbers—retire to a couch, where they temporarily rest, change from shoes to Kleenex boxes (suggesting, I gather, the various different tribal outfits of the original dancers) and appear to be deciding what to do with the dreadful audience response.

     For Rainer has layered her performance to include the riots of the original. Early in their dances, various placards fall from the ceiling dangling like posters in the sky, announcing possible responses to the work. From the soundtrack of the BBC rendition, Riot at the Rite, we hear various shouts and hateful remarks, Nijinsky counting loudly to his performers so that they, unable any longer to hear the music, might continue the dance. At one point a mob of planted actors, a couple in the costumes of the original designer Nicholas Roerich, rush to the stage, demanding the company return to TriBeCa, where Rainer's New York home is located.

     Certainly this historical intervention adds further dimension to the work. But the high British accents declaring their dismissal and outrage made the reactions seem arch and absurd; French must have been more to the point, and, like others in the audience, I wish we might have had the "riot" performed in the original language.

    The unflappable dancers, however, ultimately maintain their demeanors, bending down occasionally to return, in mime, some of the missiles presumably hurled their way. As the performers began the memorable "Dance of the Virgins," those terrifying figures who ultimately decide which of their member is to be sacrificed, Sally Silvers falls to the floor in a faint, referencing the original fall of the young woman selected to die.  Throughout, Silvers humorously huffs and puffs her way through these dances, sometimes in Marx brothers style, leaving everything out that the others do except for the final position (the other two dancers are younger by at least two decades), lending her highly satiric dancing style (Silvers, like the others with whom she dances, is also a noted choreographer) to the whole. Not to be outdone, however, the other two later fall, and in lieu of the final end of the sacrificial victim—raised in her death above the heads of the original male chorus—each of Rainer's women take turns at demonstrating their dramatic skills in dying by falling upon the couch, Silvers most riotously clumsy, with Rainer almost unable, it appears, to climb over its arms.

      Yet, throughout this exhausting dance, these four women stomp, march, float through the air, twist, turn, and gesture with arms, hands, and fingers along with Stravinsky's raw, barbarously rhythmic, and often blaringly atonal chords, with an incredible energy and beauty that might almost be said to have outdo any large corps de ballets. Rainer declared at the beginning of the work that her performance might be seen as "geriatric," but if her graceful movements represent the consequences of old age, bring it on! We should all be so beautifully lithe. 

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2009).

Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave | La Traviata / 2012

count down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (music), Francesco Maria Piave (libretto, after the play La dame aux camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils), La Traviata / the production I saw was the Met Opera HD Live broadcast on April 14, 2012

 

In this Willy Decker / Wolfgang Gussman production of Verdi’s standard, there is no consumptive coughing, no overdressed man and women attending the red-plumaged Violetta. Bringing the story into a more contemporary period, the director and designer have established from the outset—through the presence of a gigantic, surrealist-like clock, that the consumptive courtesan’s time is short. The entire set, in fact, appears as a giant waiting room with a long, curving cement-like embankment and an elliptical mezzanine where the choruses, a bit like observing doctors, can look down upon the theater of operation, Violetta’s “apartment,” wherein she plays out the short life she has yet to live.

     In some respects, this expressionistic set overstates everything, and certainly does not allow any dramatic tension about the inevitability of the plot. But it does free up the characters to symbolically enact a ritual which, after all, is not about story in the first place, but centered on the intense musical relationships of the three major characters: Violetta (Natalie Dessay), Alfredo (Matthew Polenzani), and his father Giorgio (Dimitri Hvorostovsky).

     Dessay, a trained actress, begins the opera as a performer about to go on stage, the way many have described Judy Garland offstage just before her entry, her small frame suddenly rising into a figure slightly larger than life. Violetta, having recovered from a recent consumptive attack, is weak, not at all sure she might be able to attend the party she is throwing that night. But bit by bit she pulls together, transforming herself into the party girl in short red dress her guests—men and women all dressed in black and white suits—have come to expect. This “bacchanal,” however, is closer to a mined performance of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge than it is to Verdi’s original salon party. The champagne they drink is from empty glasses, the camellia obviously a silk flower. Dessay has not only to sing of “Sempre libera degg’io,” but, raised and lowered, on a red couch, must balance herself and dance upon the prop. She is, in short, less a consumptive woman confined to a couch than a jumping, singing acrobat. And any joys she may have in her party-life seem those that come from a successful theatrical performance than a lust for life. If Dessay was contrite, during the intermission, for having missed one of her high notes, it was easy for her appreciative audience to forgive her given her otherwise beautiful singing during her energetic apologia to the “good life.”

     It is little wonder that we find her, in the second act, having capitulated, escaping with Alfredo to the country. In the flower laden landscape of Alfredo’s world, Violetta becomes almost young again, wrapped in a flower-laden housecoat, playing hide-and-seek among the flower-covered couches. Indeed, she becomes one with the couches, becomes herself something and someone other than her former self. In this production it is immediately apparent why Violetta has given up her Parisian life; even the dreadful clock, ticking down the hours left to her, is half-covered in the same pattern, and the elliptical has become a kind of garden. The snake creeps into this paradisiacal world with her servant’s revelation that Violetta is selling her Paris belongings to support her country life. Alfred is determined to rectify the situation, rushing off to Paris, allowing the more horrific Satan, Alfredo’s bourgeois father Giorgio, time to destroy her momentary joy in life.

    For Giorgio, Violetta is, at first, nothing more than a selfish courtesan out to steal his son’s money and affections. Gradually, however, when that vision proves difficult to sustain, he employs the usual tricks of men who cannot escape the petty limitations of a societally controlled life: his beautiful daughter will lose her fiancé if Alberto does not return home. Crueler yet, Giorgio tells Violetta of her own destiny, her loss of beauty and betrayal, perhaps, by Alfredo himself. As Violetta notes, the punishment for her libertine lifestyle comes not from God but from man. Even Giorgio, however, finally comes to recognize Violetta’s sacrifice, singing in a beautiful aria (Hvorostovsky at the top of his form) of her love and generosity.

     So pure is Violetta’s love that she agrees, most reluctantly, to give up Alfredo and return to Paris, knowing now that her fate will be an early death. Accepting an invitation to her friend Flora’s costume ball, she pretends to take up once more with her former protector Baron Bouphol.

     While in Verdi’s original, the costume ball was replete with gypsies and bullfighters, the new Met version has mixed these with costumed performers from the partygoers, along with a male dressed as Violetta in mockery of her return to their world. If the whole scene is a kind of confusing mish-mash at times, it still makes more sense than the presence of these “types” at the grand ball, and their taunting tales only reiterate what we know, Violetta’s life as a grand courtesan is over. The clock itself is now transformed into a gambling table where Alfredo, who in revenge has rushed back to Paris, wins, tossing his winnings at and stuffing them into Violetta’s orifices in what is clearly a kind of capitalist rape. Even Giorgio, having followed his son to the party, is shocked by Alfredo’s behavior, but then propriety is at the heart of his torturous demands.

     The party-goers, now carnival celebrants, reenter this cold waiting room once again, this time with another women, clad in red dress, strapped to the clock. Violetta is no longer the life of the party; she has almost been drained of life.

     Sick and suffering, with just a few hours to live, she awaits the return of Alfredo who, having survived his duel with the Baron, has discovered the truth of Violetta’s abandonment and has written of her determination to see her once again. As in any grand opera, the lovers reunite to imagine the possibility of life as they once lived it, a reunification that the audience has known is impossible from the start. For a second, just before her death, the courtesan is relieved of all pain and age, until she faints away, both Alfredo and Giorgio left to face their own failures of faith in her love.

     Some of the subtlety of this opera may have been lost in the symbolic posturings of Decker’s and Gussman’s vision, but the overall dramatic impact, particularly in Dessay’s powerful performance, remains, and La Traviata seldom wavers in its musical splendor as this grand courtesan had in her past.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2012

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2012).

 

Rajiv Joseph | Gruesome Playground Injuries / 2016

damaged goods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rajiv Joseph Gruesome Playground Injuries / Los Angeles, Hudson Theatres, the production I saw with Howard Fox was on June 5, 2016

 

Last performed in Los Angeles at Rogue Machine Theatre in 2014, Gruesome Playground Injuries has been revived in the current Hudson Theatre performance, staring Sara Rae Foster and Jeff Ward, which again demonstrates the power and limitations of Joseph’s writing.

      Unlike his excellent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (see My Year 2010), with its international scope of war and general madness, Gruesome Playground Injuries is a small play that turns inward, focusing on just two figures, Kayleen and Doug, over a period of 30 years.

      As classmates in a Catholic school they first appear to actually communicate with one another at the age of 8, when Doug, a daredevil child has split open his face after riding his bike, Evil Knievel-like off the school roof.

     Like many children after playground injuries, Doug brags about his bloody encounter to Kayleen, claiming it doesn’t much hurt, etc. It is an almost insignificant encounter, except for the fact that he asks her to touch the wound which seems to help relieve his pain and begins a kind of gentle relationship between the two.

        At age 23, however, when we next see them together, the accident-prone Doug has blown-out his eye which will force him to wear an eye-patch for the rest of his life. Once more the two talk insignificantly, but the very meeting seems almost to rejuvenate the suffering young man.

        Throughout the rest of the play, the two meet at various ages, toggling back and forth in time, as each of them fall prey to accidents and, in Kayleen’s case, intense stomach problems, self-loathing, and body-cutting. Both seem so victimized—both by others and themselves—that they vomit over the slightest of causes. Doug loses a tooth in a fight with another student over Kayleen, is struck by lightning and almost dies, and ends up in a wheel chair after having returned to the empty-school after it was mostly destroyed in an explosion. Kayleen continues with her stomach problems, self-cutting, and, finally, her attempt to rip out her own stomach. Each time, after a period of years, they find themselves on each other’s doorsteps, offering strange healing powers to one another, without being able to truly express their own love.

       We can understand some of Kayleen’s difficulties: her mother has left home early in her life, and her father clearly detests his daughter. Yet Doug’s slow self-immolation is a bit more difficult to explain. His mother seems like a typically kind Midwesterner who, upon the death of a loved one or another emergency, immediately brings “over a casserole.” Perhaps it is the very ordinariness and unimaginativeness of his home life that leads him to take such reckless actions.

        In the end, however, neither of them can truly break down the walls they have built for themselves, as director John Hindman writes, to keep out the rest the world. Only in their final encounter, a playlet titled “Zamboni,” when both are 38, do we see any possibility that they might have finally learned how to live together; but even then, by that time they have been so damaged that we are not certain that they can truly heal each other, since both have winnowed down the possibilities of their lives.

        If nothing else, they have shared a sporadic relationship, entering in and out of their lives—despite other boyfriends and fiancées—to offer some solace to one another, even if the brevity of their visits cannot sustain them for long.

        One can imagine, in other hands that a kind of sentimentality, such as that of Arthur Laurent’s film The Way We Were, might have easily crept into the script. But Joseph, although using a similar, “the years go by” kind of structure, while resisting a chronological pattern, allows the audience to gradually begin to comprehend their odd relationship without becoming deeply invested in any romantic intentions.

      Yet that is also one of the problems of the play. We find it difficult to truly care about these fragile and somewhat crazed figures: Doug is a “retard,” Kayleen is a kind of “skate”—names they throw at one another. This is reinforced by the fact that the character of Kayleen is passive, and Foster plays her more as she were reciting her lines rather than acting them. Ward, a far more theatrical performer is almost recklessly assertive, as is his character. And it is just these radical differences between the two that make us wonder why they are so continually drawn to one another. Perhaps it is only because they are so broken, Kayleen spiritually and Doug physically, that forces them forward to their temporary healing sessions.

      If Gruesome Playground Injuries, accordingly is not a great play, is an interesting one, demonstrating some of Joseph’s many writing talents in presenting characters trying to survive in a world so ready to destroy them.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2016).

Philip Glass and Constance DeJong | Satyagraha / 2011

separating language from meaning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip Glass (music), Constance DeJong (vocal text), Constance DeJong and Philip Glass (libretto) Satyagraha / the production I saw was an HD, live production broadcast from The Metropolitan Opera in New York, on November 19, 2011

 

In many respects Philip Glass' pageant opera, Satyagraha, is one of the most frustrating of all opera experiences. It is not that the work isn't, at times, musically splendiferous and even powerful—at least in the MET high-definition live broadcast I saw in 2011. But Glass takes away so much of what opera is really about drama, language, and, at times, musical comprehension—that it is difficult to get one's bearings.

     I don't mean that the opera, itself, is difficult. The plot, if it can be said to have one, is quite apparent if you have a program. The seven scenes in three acts of the work represent significant moments in the early career of M. K. Gandhi, as he transformed himself in South Africa from a Western-dressed lawyer to a political advocate for the poor and suffering. Beginning with an imagined scene from the battle field of Bhagavad Gita (The Kuru Field of Justice), Glass and his co-librettist, Constance DeJong, take us from 1910 to 1913 in Gandhi's life, exploring his attempts at collective farming on his Tolstoy Farm (named after the great author and social experimenter), through the "vows" of South African Indians to resist registration, to Gandhi's return to South Africa greeted with violence, from a view of his newspaper activities on Indian Opinion in which he first expressed his concepts of "satyagraha" ("insistence on truth"), to the 1908 protest against the Black Act, in which his supporters burned their government certificates, and through to his final strike march to the Transavaal border, where many were arrested.

     Each of Glass' acts are overseen, furthermore, by an historical figure who influenced Gandhi or over whom he would have an influence. From the past, we see Leo Tolstoy, from the present, Gandhi's close friend, the Nobel-prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, and from the future, Martin Luther King.

   The program notes explain in some detail what we are experiencing. However, that experience itself is much less lucid. As Richard Croft (playing Gandhi) explained in an intermission interview, it is difficult to act because what is occurring is happening inside, not in the actual drama on the stage. The chorus, and more important, the Skills Ensemble, often play out—in a highly imaginative use of masks, puppets, and through staged acts—what is symbolically occurring, but the actors, somewhat like those of Wagner, are allowed little movement. Yet, unlike Wagner's figures, the major actors here are not even communicating with the audience in a language they can comprehend, since they sing the entire opera in Sanskrit, quoting spiritual fragments of the Bhagavad Gita.

     I am sure that when he first got the idea to use the language and images from a book which Gandhi knew intimately, it must have seemed a brilliant concept to separate language from meaning, but it ultimately cuts us off from true communication and, more importantly, given Glass' minimalist repetitions, presents us with long passages in which we only have a vague idea what is happening—not that it would help to know, at any moment, that Gandhi, for example, is reaffirming his ideals...or whatever. We sense the emotional impact, and Glass' simmering music often seduces us, but, nonetheless, it is sometimes a long endurance test, particularly in the last act, when Glass almost sentimentally links Gandhi with the future American racial revolutionary King—over and over again, so that eventually we must ask whether Gandhi or what he has wrought.    

     The most successful act of this opera is Act II, when puppets, chorus, and major singers all come together to create the horror of the wealthy Dutch landowners and the busy industry of putting together the newspaper, and the dramatic bonfire of government issued certificates.

     The cast, including Croft, Rachelle Durkin as his secretary, Miss Schlesen, Kim Josephson as a supporter, Mr. Kennenbach, and Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji were all quite adept, and the Met chorus was absolutely stunning in its ability to learn the Sanskrit score while counting Glass' tricky rhythms. The costumes and settings by Julian Crouch and Kevin Pollard, as well as the stage direction of Phelim McDermott and conducting of Dante Anzolini were all spectacular.

     The Met audience seemed thoroughly charmed by the opera, remaining through the entire series of applauses. Yet, for me, that was just the problem: long on charm, the opera was too short on substance, despite focusing on such a substantial historical figure. But then it is difficult, if not impossible, to think without language.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2011).

Dan Guerrero | ¡Gaytino! / 2012

mariachi to merman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Guerrero (writer and performer) ¡Gaytino! / East Los Angeles College, October 4, 2012

 

On my companion Howard’s 66th birthday, we attended a performance of ¡Gaytino! performer and producer Dan Guerrero. The performance, which recounts much of Guerrero’s life was presented in conjunction with a show at the East Los Angeles College museum of the Chicano artist, Carlos Almaraz, who, as a close childhood friend of Guerrero’s, played a large role in Guerrero’s memories.

      The two grew up together in East Los Angeles and moved, temporarily in Almaraz’s case, to New York together, sharing for a while a small flat. Guerrero was gay and Almaraz, at least later in his life, was bisexual.

     Guerrero’s entertaining and somewhat self-satirizing show is subtitled “Mariachi to Merman, Sondheim to Cesar Chavez,” and the rage of those extremes are, in part, his defining life experiences. To a mostly student audience of primarily Chicano students, Guerrero explained that he grew up without defining himself as anything but a second generation American; although his parents were of Mexican background, he did not define himself in the 1940s and 1950s as either Chicano or Latino. Yet, without him quite realizing it, he grew up at the very center of the Mexican-American culture in that his father, Lalo Guerrero, was the famed mariachi composer-singer. In a recent interview, Guerrero recounted what he also reveals on stage:

 

                           I was just a kid when Mom took me to see Dad perform

                         at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles,

                         one of the great movie palaces built back in 1918. By the

                         early 1950’s, changing demographics kicked in and it became

                         the cultural center for LA’s Spanish-language community.

                         You got a great black and white film from the Golden

                         Age of Mexican cinema and a live variety show with

                         the biggest names from Mexico and the biggest Mexican

                         names from this side of the border. Dad walked out on

                         that stage and, when applause broke out, I knew he was

                         special and not just a “regular” Dad like my friends’ dads.

                         He belonged to a bigger audience than just Mom and

                         me. I knew it at that moment.

     Late in his life, Lalo, who has been described as the “Father of Chicano Music,” was awarded a

NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1991, and was named a National Folk Treasure by the Smithsonian Institution in 1980. President Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts, the first Chicano to receive that award.

     Yet, for much of his life, his son tried to dissociate himself from that music and the world with which it was associated. At one of his very first Broadway performances, Ethel Merman, singing “Some People” in the music Gypsy spoke what felt was directed at him. He sings a few stanzas in his performance with great Mermanian gusto.

     In New York he took acting and dancing lessons, and tried out for dozens of roles, but as he jokes, there weren’t many roles for Latinos. Of course there was West Side Story, but, he admits he wasn’t the gang type. During these years he had to control what now describes as an “expansive” nature, resist being, what was then described as being “light in your loafers.” When Almaraz returned to Los Angeles and art school, Guerrero admits feeling utterly lonely, alone in the city he loved.

     Although he did get several acting roles in summer stock companies—groups, he jokes, so sexually charged that he even had sex with a woman—he gradually realized that his dreams of being on the Broadway stage grew fainter. Almost by accident, learning on the job, Guerrero began an actor’s agent, becoming very successful, casting numerous figures in works as different as A Chorus Line and Cats. Among his several well-known clients was a very young girl, who, however, was extremely wise as she sat in his office suggesting roles: Sarah Jessica Parker. Involved with the casting of the musical Zoot Suit, a musical about the 1940s Chicano community in Los Angeles, Guerrero’s life suddenly came full circle as he reencountered not only the music his father had created by actor friends such as Lupe Ontiveros and others he had known previously.

     That event changed reinvigorated him, encouraging him to return to Los Angeles, where he suddenly began to embrace all of the culture he had previously shunned. Working with everyone from Sondheim to Tommy Tune, Guerrero now cast mostly Chicano and Latino actors, and forged friendships with people who had known and respected his father, including the labor agitator Cesar Chavez, at whose funeral he organized the Chicano actors’ contingent. Years before Chavez had suggested to his father where to perform, based on places at which he planned to rally.

     Of course he also reforged his friendship the boy who as a child he’d known as “Charles,” the now renowned artist Carlos Almaraz, who tragically died of AIDS in 1989.

     By turns campy, vaudevillian, and historian, Guerrero tells a fantastic tale in ¡Gaytino! that results in laughter and tears.

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2012

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2012).

Tony Kushner | Angels in America: Millennium Approaches / 1993

crashing through the ceiling of despair

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tony Kushner Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Walter Kerr Theatre, New York / 1993

 

Despite all the attendant hoopla and acclaim, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is truly a great American play.* Ranging from the Plague of the Middle Ages through American history (from Ethel Rosenberg and the McCarthy hearings to the Regan days) and into the subconscious of American belief (the play begins with a Rabbi, focuses upon a Mormon couple, and ends with a Catholic angel), the play pushes out beyond the traditional Broadway fare, and explores some rather terrifying aspects of the American psyche.

      With comic horror, Ron Leibman portrays Roy Cohn as a mad Faustian force underlying American politics. Power is the only definition of the human species in Cohn’s lonely world at the top; abusing those around him and himself, Cohn denies not only his own sexuality, but sex as anything but another form of power, a sadomasochistic act in which one is either consumer or consumed. But Cohn’s world is a deflationary one; dying of AIDS he refuses to face the implications that he has become one of the consumed, eaten up by his equally predatory cronies and closet homosexuality.

     Despite Cohn’s own definition of centrality, Kushner places Cohn at the edge of his play, balanced by a Mormon couple desperate to live out their religious convictions. Harper Pitt, as deluded as Cohn, lives in a pill-popping reality of hallucinatory eco-systems, fortunetelling drag-queens, and Eskimo lovers. Her lawyer husband Joe has attempted to scrub his existence clean of all usual feelings to deny his latent homosexuality; but as Cohn attempts to manipulate him into a father-son-holy savior relationship, Joe’s sexuality becomes apparent, creating a barrier around him and everything he supposedly respects and admires. Trapped on the outside of his own life, Joe rushes into the arms of Louis Ironson, a man who has also been unable to live according to his convictions.

     Louis and his dying lover Prior are at dead-center of Kushner’s gay anatomy. In one of the very first scenes of this 3 1/2-hour play, Prior announces to Louis that he has AIDS, and for a while it appears that Louis, a true American idealist, will succor him and help him to face his death. But Louis, like most idealists, is more in love with language than the pain and sour smells of the human body from which it emanates. He bolts, taking with him, so it would seem, all hope of salvation. We are left at the end of act two with three versions of hell.

     But Kushner refuses to allow us the sentimentality of failure; and despite occasional lapses into Boys in the Band-like dialogue and Neil Simon situations, the author undercuts any simple condemnations. No, there is something better than the condition of these poor humans; there is the vision of a Christ, so Kushner seems to argue; there is forgiveness. There is always that angel about to crash through the ceiling of one’s despair.

     Religion, forgiveness, angels in a world of corrupt politics and AIDS: these are rare concepts in our either bigoted or correct-thinking dichotomies of today. It is a bold act to write such a play, and even bolder to threaten “peace” (Perestroika) as a conclusion to this panoramic examination of the heart.

 

*I saw Angels in America on Broadway in May 1993, but was unable to attend the second section of this grand “diptych” of American sexuality and politics. The theater-going experience was a particularly emotional one, I believe, for all who sat in the Walter Kerr Theatre. The audience represented a wide mix of gay men, lesbians, heterosexual couples, and children—a much younger audience than one observes at most Broadway dramas of today. But it wasn’t just an “audience” one was observing, one sensed that one was part of a special experience shared with these clearly politicized individuals. As I have observed elsewhere, Howard and I—as a readily accepted couple in the circles of friends we encounter—have seldom felt like outsiders, and, accordingly, have little connection with the sometimes self-segregated gay community. Sitting in that theater, however, one felt truly proud to be part of that community, and there was a shared bond in the experience of the sorrows—at some points in the play I perceived the entire audience weeping—and joys in the uplifting beliefs expressed in Kushner’s work. In this sense, it was not just a play one attended but an “event,” a drama combined with an audience participating in the issues with which Kushner’s play was concerned; and if the voices of the drama’s characters were often lost in the muddle of madness and despair, the voice of the audience came through loud and clear.

    Soon after this, I met Tony Kushner, who told me he greatly admired Sun & Moon Press. He sent me, often through agents, the works of several younger playwrights; but unfortunately they were highly politicized works without the scope and dramatic writing style of his own work. When his publisher, somewhat understandably, disallowed me the rights to reprint Angels in America—Millennium Approaches in Sun & Moon’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, Kushner graciously sent me a short new work, “Reverse Transcription,” for inclusion in the volume. I must admit, however, it is not one of his most brilliant pieces for theater and misrepresents his dramatic talents.

 

 

Los Angeles, 1993

Reprinted from El-E-Phant: A Language Arts Review (August 1993).