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Mar. 10--Sean Graney, the talented young artistic director of the Chicago theater troupe known as The Hypocrites, likes to anchor his shows around physical metaphors. Graney's brilliant version of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" was dominated by doors. His typically bold revival of "Millennium Approaches," the first part of Tony Kushner's incomparable "Angels in America," is consumed by coffins.
Characters emerge from them. Scenes take place in them. Graney even sets drinks on top of them to create a functional-if-macabre cocktail bar.
You can understand Graney's impulse. A mix of American history and contemporary urban angst, Kushner's colossal play needs an aesthetic and physical grounding, lest it snake away from director and audience. And since this work was penned at the painful height of the AIDS crisis, death (of many different varieties) surely makes up one of its major themes.
But coffins? It just seems too sedentary and prosaic a metaphor.
The main thing that separates "Angels" from the contemporary British leftist dramatic tradition, to which Kushner has acknowledged his debt, is its embrace of spirituality. Before AIDS, playwrights such as Caryl Churchill or David Hare could offer secular political answers to the world's political dilemmas. Once young people started dying, democratic socialism suddenly looked inadequate. Who really wants to be an agnostic at the deathbed of a loved one?
Too many funerals. That's why the playwrights of the 1990s suddenly found so many angels. This play -- inarguably the definitive dramatic work of its time -- is about the difficulty of dying or bereaved New York rationalists, especially gay New York rationalists, embracing organized religions and political systems that, to paraphrase the Mormon character Harper, don't entirely believe in homosexuals. Or rationalists.
So where is the spiritually hungry progressive to go? Part Two of "Angels" (which Graney is opening next month, also at the Bailiwick Arts Center, his co-producers on this huge project) has some answers. Part One has mainly questions. And pain.
There's another difficult issue in play here. It's one thing to newly explode a period realistic play such as "Salesman" with an arresting and telling theatrical metaphor. It's entirely another to try and re-orient a post-modern polyglot such as "Angels," which already was far removed from realism in its initial conception. Frankly, we'd all have been better off if Graney and his team had worried a bit more about squeezing every last note of truth from some of the best scenes ever written about the intersection of personal sexuality and political power.
Graney's "Angels," is by no means a bust. On the contrary, it's a smart, ambitious, earnest and richly theatrical production with several arresting scenes, ideas aplenty and plenty of directorial integrity. And the famous, climactic arrival of The Angel (Jennifer Grace) is spectacular indeed.
The cast is competent. On occasion -- especially in some of the scenes with Mechelle Moe's poignant Harper and JB Waterman's nicely self-loathing Joe Pitt -- things go beyond competent.
But on opening weekend, this was a jumpy show that wasn't yet all the way there. The scenes between Scott Bradley's Prior and Steve Wilson's Louis got so overwrought so fast, they lost veracity. Louis might be a self-absorbed whiner, but he's still supposed to make us wonder whether we'd stick around to see our lover die. And while one could consistently enjoy the colorful theatricality of Kurt Ehrmann's Roy Cohn, it was tougher to believe that the man also was functioning -- thriving -- in the real world, which was the actual case.
"Angels" is a fascinating play to see right now because it's just getting a new context. One now sees the Reagan era through the prism of George W. Bush. The one, of course, begat the other. And from the one can we better understand the other. That's what needs to be understood. No coffins required.
"Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches"
When: Through May 7
Where: Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $25 at 773-883-1090
cjones5@tribune.com
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