cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2010-06-24 09:33 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2010-06-24 09:33 pm
Entry tags:
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part 1, Millennium Approaches
One of the plays I’ve seen this year was Homeland, a New Zealand drama that does an excellent job of exactly recreating a particular place and person – an old man on a farm, no longer coping but unwilling to admit it, and his family’s (local son & daughter-in-law, big city daughter with son-in-law and granddaughter) attempt to move him into residential care. The setting was amazingly familiar, the dialogue realistic, the characters recognisable, and all in all it was like spending two hours watching the equivalent period of someone else’s life – which is unfortunately not at all what I go to the theatre for. What I like about drama is that it’s shaped and selected; that it contrives to create truth and realism from the obvious artificiality of a stage, that the dialogue is sharp and polished, that the characters are unexpected and still believable; in short, what I like about drama is that it’s theatrical.
So. I recently re-read Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which is one of my favourite plays and which in no way suffers from any lack of theatricality. I’ve seen it three times on stage (two productions) and once on TV, and I’ve only seen Perestroika (the second half) on TV. Which is the only real reason I watched the TV version – it wasn’t bad (Emma Thompson was particularly good), but from the very first scene with Al Pacino as Roy Cohn it just wasn’t the same (okay, so technically the Rabbi opens the play, but it's more of a prologue. In my head, anyway). The play has a number of scenes where two groups of people are interacting separately at the same time, side by side on stage; this works brilliantly on stage, heightening the tension and making the viewer switch between them, but on film it becomes a series of cuts, diffusing the tension by putting events into a strict order. And the doubling isn't as impressive (apart from giving Meryl Streep yet another chance to display her range of accents), and the theatrical flourishes (the flaming book appearing from the floor of a hospital room, the final scene where the ceiling falls in) just not as impressive on film, but I should stop complaining and move back to the bits I love about the play (on the other hand, those interested in better expressed annoyance should check out this review, which is pretty much how I felt).
I mentioned dialogue above, and Angels has so many chunks of dialogue that have remained in my head since the first performance I saw - Louis' self-defensive, passive aggressive "Real love isn't ambivalent", and, even more so, "You can love someone and fail them,"; Harper's habit of taking benzodiazepines "in wee fistfuls" for her "emotional problems"; Belize in general ("If I have to spend my whole lonely life looking after white people I can get underpaid to do it"); and most specifcally Prior's deliberate, over-the-top melodrama when he's diagnosed with AIDS, where he calls his Kaposi's sarcoma "the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death", which is a quote that echoes through my head everytime someone mentions KS (a surprisingly frequent occurrence). And the bits I don't remember are still brilliantly on target, funny or sad or desperately angry - I began re-reading this after I pulled it off the shelf and laughed out loud after half a dozen lines (the scene where Louis picks up a guy in a park, actually, and the line "I live with my parents"), and I've just got caught up in it again checking character names for this.
I think Perestroika, the second half (which I've seen on TV and read in script, and which I could have sworn I owned but seems not to be anywhere in the house) does not quite pull off the set-up of the first half, but then I don't think that anything would have, exactly; there's a tension between the real and the fantastic in this play that makes a final resolution to one side or the other pretty much unworkable. I prefer what Angels does with it to how, say, Sarah Waters deals with supernatural/realism in her novel Affinity, but it's still the same problem of having to pick sides.
Anyway. Angels, like Homeland, is a re-creation of a specific time, with specific people; what's different is not just the theatrical tricks (doubling cast members, simultaneous scenes, staging etc) and the dialogue, but also the fact that it is examining that time and those people, critiquing them, as much as it is portraying them. I’m all for holding a mirror up to nature as long as someone is commenting on the actual reflection; although my main new local theatre is very good, they tend pick pieces within which the audience will recognise themselves without ever turning the spotlight back on them. It's a comfortable sort of theatre, but again it's not quite what I want (and I should notably except their excellent performance of Heartbreak House, a remarkably timely George Bernard Shaw play written nearly a hundred years ago, which of course did nowhere near as well as a cosy piece about overseas travel where only one of the four leads got a character arc, and it was all about shutting up and doing what your husband wanted).
The actor playing the big city daughter in Homeland was Harper in Angels in America, the first time I saw it; she lists it in the program as her favourite role. One of the other things I like about theatre is that each performance or production is distinct, unrecreatable; but I'd still love to see them try it again.
So. I recently re-read Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which is one of my favourite plays and which in no way suffers from any lack of theatricality. I’ve seen it three times on stage (two productions) and once on TV, and I’ve only seen Perestroika (the second half) on TV. Which is the only real reason I watched the TV version – it wasn’t bad (Emma Thompson was particularly good), but from the very first scene with Al Pacino as Roy Cohn it just wasn’t the same (okay, so technically the Rabbi opens the play, but it's more of a prologue. In my head, anyway). The play has a number of scenes where two groups of people are interacting separately at the same time, side by side on stage; this works brilliantly on stage, heightening the tension and making the viewer switch between them, but on film it becomes a series of cuts, diffusing the tension by putting events into a strict order. And the doubling isn't as impressive (apart from giving Meryl Streep yet another chance to display her range of accents), and the theatrical flourishes (the flaming book appearing from the floor of a hospital room, the final scene where the ceiling falls in) just not as impressive on film, but I should stop complaining and move back to the bits I love about the play (on the other hand, those interested in better expressed annoyance should check out this review, which is pretty much how I felt).
I mentioned dialogue above, and Angels has so many chunks of dialogue that have remained in my head since the first performance I saw - Louis' self-defensive, passive aggressive "Real love isn't ambivalent", and, even more so, "You can love someone and fail them,"; Harper's habit of taking benzodiazepines "in wee fistfuls" for her "emotional problems"; Belize in general ("If I have to spend my whole lonely life looking after white people I can get underpaid to do it"); and most specifcally Prior's deliberate, over-the-top melodrama when he's diagnosed with AIDS, where he calls his Kaposi's sarcoma "the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death", which is a quote that echoes through my head everytime someone mentions KS (a surprisingly frequent occurrence). And the bits I don't remember are still brilliantly on target, funny or sad or desperately angry - I began re-reading this after I pulled it off the shelf and laughed out loud after half a dozen lines (the scene where Louis picks up a guy in a park, actually, and the line "I live with my parents"), and I've just got caught up in it again checking character names for this.
I think Perestroika, the second half (which I've seen on TV and read in script, and which I could have sworn I owned but seems not to be anywhere in the house) does not quite pull off the set-up of the first half, but then I don't think that anything would have, exactly; there's a tension between the real and the fantastic in this play that makes a final resolution to one side or the other pretty much unworkable. I prefer what Angels does with it to how, say, Sarah Waters deals with supernatural/realism in her novel Affinity, but it's still the same problem of having to pick sides.
Anyway. Angels, like Homeland, is a re-creation of a specific time, with specific people; what's different is not just the theatrical tricks (doubling cast members, simultaneous scenes, staging etc) and the dialogue, but also the fact that it is examining that time and those people, critiquing them, as much as it is portraying them. I’m all for holding a mirror up to nature as long as someone is commenting on the actual reflection; although my main new local theatre is very good, they tend pick pieces within which the audience will recognise themselves without ever turning the spotlight back on them. It's a comfortable sort of theatre, but again it's not quite what I want (and I should notably except their excellent performance of Heartbreak House, a remarkably timely George Bernard Shaw play written nearly a hundred years ago, which of course did nowhere near as well as a cosy piece about overseas travel where only one of the four leads got a character arc, and it was all about shutting up and doing what your husband wanted).
The actor playing the big city daughter in Homeland was Harper in Angels in America, the first time I saw it; she lists it in the program as her favourite role. One of the other things I like about theatre is that each performance or production is distinct, unrecreatable; but I'd still love to see them try it again.