Angels In America
 Now this is why I have a home theater. Angels In
America is a cultural watershed -- a sprawling epic of a play that's as immediate as a
howl from the street and as timeless as anything by Euripides.
Euripides? Will it last 2000 years? Who knows? But
that's the league it's playing in.
No, Angels In America is not perfect. Yes, at nearly
six hours, it's probably too long (although I'm not sure I could trim more than 15 minutes
from it without sawing off a limb I liked). And yes, in its attempt to deal with
"big" themes, it may strike some as overly ambitious. These are all quibbles, if
you ask me -- ways of keeping this immense, moving piece of magic from making us feel too
much pain.
That's what my internal critic attempted to do, and it
failed miserably. Angels In America will break your heart and make you mad. Which
is exactly what playwright Tony Kushner set out to do.
Angels was presented on Broadway in two parts -- The
Millennium Approaches, in 1993, and Perestroika, in 1994 -- winning the Tony
award for Best Play for both halves, and the Pulitzer Prize for TMA. This
double-disc DVD presents HBO's multipart miniseries, which also dominated the television
awards, taking home encomia from the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild, and
just about anyone else who hands out such things.
The HBO series was directed by Mike Nichols and features a
phenomenal cast, frequently in multiple roles (as was the case on Broadway). The most
flamboyant performance is that of Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, the attack-dog, right-wing power
broker who refused to acknowledge his homosexuality (much less his AIDS). Meryl Streep
plays three characters: a rabbi, a Mormon matron confronting her married son's emerging
homosexuality, and the shade of Ethel Rosenberg (one of Cohn's victims). Emma Thompson is
also featured in three roles: the Angel of America (yes, Angels In America really
does have angels), a kindly nurse, and a prophetic bag lady. Jeffrey Wright recapitulates
his Broadway roles: as a wonderful drag queen/nurse and an angel/imaginary friend for the
Valium-addicted wife of Meryl Streep's Mormon momma's troubled son (played by Mary-Louise
Parker).
And those are just the most impressive performances --
there are star-caliber cameos all over the place (Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak join
Streep's rabbi on a park bench, for example).
I won't recite the three major plotlines and all their
twists and turns -- after all, it took Kushner two plays to create them -- but the
playwright’s purpose was to create a huge canvas depicting the AIDS crisis in America
as a reflection of huge historical forces shaping, or perhaps distorting, American
society.
That was pretty ambitious, and for the most part, I think,
Kushner succeeded. Your reaction will depend on your tolerance for theatricality and
magical realism -- buy the premise, buy the bit, as comedians like to say. I found it easy
to buy the angelic visitations and the slightly stagy juxtapositions. If you’re put
off by such things, Angels may be too much of a good thing -- or not-so-good
things.
Even so, you might want to check out Angels for Mike
Nichols' arresting visual style. Filmed for TV in 1.78:1 widescreen, Angels looks
glorious. Nichols, who began his directing career by filming Edward Albee’s play Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?, has preserved much of Angels’ staginess while
freeing it from the stage’s confines. Some of his set-pieces are spectacular, but all
of Angels glows on the screen.
It sounds pretty good, too, in Dolby Digital 5.1. Deep-bass
freaks need not apply, but the sound is definitely not locked in to the center channel.
Yes, surround is probably the final frontier for "made for TV" extravaganzas,
but the sound of Angels works.
But Angels In America is ultimately about its words.
Kushner has an ear for language and dialogue that is extraordinary. It's difficult to pick
a favorite line or exchange out of the thousands that flash by (and the dialogue is very
fast-paced), but an offhand remark from Jeffrey Wright's bitter Belize sticks with me:
"I hate this country -- nothing but ideas and stories and people dying. The white
cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free
on a note so high no one could reach it. That was deliberate."
Just about everything about Angels In America is
that deliberate -- your reaction to that singularity of purpose will determine whether
that's its best feature or its biggest flaw. I rate it a tremendous success, but whether
or not you do, you should experience it. Thanks to this HBO DVD release, now we all can do
that.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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