![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Angels in America
Oct. 11th, 2020 11:52 amIn a time when hospitals are overflowing, our government is failing, and we do not know how to process these events… we reach back to 1986.
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is possibly my favourite play, certainly one that’s most influenced my experience with theatre as an adult. It’s simultaneously the play I’ve seen the most productions of (Millennium Approaches: twice at the Court, once at Circa, another Chch production, and once at Silo, as well as the HBO movie), and the play I have not ever made it to a live production of but desperately want to see (Perestroika: I did, optimistically, have tickets to the Silo’s production but then had twins one day earlier). It’s also one of the three plays I’ve walked out of halfway through due to a terrible production in which everyone was miscast except Prior, and I was in a five minute parking zone.
So on Friday afternoon I shut my office door and surreptitiously watched amfAR’s The Great Work Begins fundraiser for COVID19 research, forty-five minutes of scenes from Angels in America performed by a collage of actors, recorded all on their own and then stitched together like a quilt. There are multiple versions of Harper, Belize and Prior; the Angel is played by four women, and Roy Cohn by Glenn Close. It is about a pandemic stalking the streets while a right-wing government refuses to act (watching Roy Cohn dying from a disease he refuses to admit to and demanding experimental drugs that others have no hope of accessing is perhaps almost too on the nose). In terms of the play, the angels and the humans are of equal focus, with Prior, Harper, Belize and Roy’s storylines all encountered, while Joe drops out and Louis is sidelined; like turning to highlight new facets of the jewel. I liked it a lot. It’s still available to see online here.
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is possibly my favourite play, certainly one that’s most influenced my experience with theatre as an adult. It’s simultaneously the play I’ve seen the most productions of (Millennium Approaches: twice at the Court, once at Circa, another Chch production, and once at Silo, as well as the HBO movie), and the play I have not ever made it to a live production of but desperately want to see (Perestroika: I did, optimistically, have tickets to the Silo’s production but then had twins one day earlier). It’s also one of the three plays I’ve walked out of halfway through due to a terrible production in which everyone was miscast except Prior, and I was in a five minute parking zone.
So on Friday afternoon I shut my office door and surreptitiously watched amfAR’s The Great Work Begins fundraiser for COVID19 research, forty-five minutes of scenes from Angels in America performed by a collage of actors, recorded all on their own and then stitched together like a quilt. There are multiple versions of Harper, Belize and Prior; the Angel is played by four women, and Roy Cohn by Glenn Close. It is about a pandemic stalking the streets while a right-wing government refuses to act (watching Roy Cohn dying from a disease he refuses to admit to and demanding experimental drugs that others have no hope of accessing is perhaps almost too on the nose). In terms of the play, the angels and the humans are of equal focus, with Prior, Harper, Belize and Roy’s storylines all encountered, while Joe drops out and Louis is sidelined; like turning to highlight new facets of the jewel. I liked it a lot. It’s still available to see online here.
