TT: Seven ways of looking at Angels in America

I have a lot to say about the off-Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, some of it good, some of it not so good, though the production itself is exemplary. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Angels” is not one but three plays loosely woven together into a two-installment structure….
Roy Cohn (Frank Wood) is by far the most compelling character in “Angels.” Each time he leaves the stage, the dramatic tension slackens. Herbert von Karajan is supposed to have said that had he written Puccini’s “Tosca,” he would have called it “Scarpia” (who is the opera’s villain). By the same token, my guess is that a fair number of viewers of “Angels in America” would rather be watching a play called “Cohn.”
For that matter, any of the three plays that make up “Angels” might well have been more effective had it been presented on its own–but if Mr. Kushner had done that, then the original 1993 Broadway production wouldn’t have been touted by the press as a Major Theatrical Event. To say this, though, is not to cast doubt on the purity of Mr. Kushner’s artistic intentions. Indeed, what is most impressive about “Angels” is precisely that it tries to do so much, that its author was willing to take chances instead of sticking to off-the-rack how-to-do-it theatrical models. That’s why “Angels,” for all its flaws, has been so influential.
Here as elsewhere in his work, the problem is not that Mr. Kushner is overly ambitious, but that he lets his ambitions run roughshod over his sense of proportion. Taken together, the two installments of “Angels” add up to a seven-hour span, which is at least two hours too long….
As for the present production, I think it’s more than enough to note that Michael Greif’s staging is fierce and exact, that Mark Wendland’s compact double-turntable set is a miraculously efficient piece of design, that Wendall K. Harrington’s digital projections add immeasurably to the set’s spatial richness and that the cast is uniformly splendid, with Zachary Quinto, Mr. Wood (who looks eerily like Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of Roy Cohn in middle age) and the ever-amazing Zoe Kazan taking top honors….
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Read the whole thing here.
To hear a 1968 radio interview with Roy Cohn, go here.
To see Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Roy Cohn, go here.
Al Pacino and James Cromwell play Roy Cohn and his doctor in an excerpt from Mike Nichols’ 2003 TV version of Angels in America: