Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes - University of Adelaide Theatre Guild Review

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Thu 02 May 2024 - Tue 21 May 2024

Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes challenged quite a few perceptions when it first appeared on Broadway in the eighties. Its themes of gay men in conservative America and the rise of the hard right challenged and provoked audience sensibilities and sensitivities like few others before it. The very length of it - almost six hours, in two parts, each part divided into three acts - sets it within a select tiny club of mega-works that succeed when the audience attention span for theatre is on the wane.

Hayley Horton’s ambitious Adelaide Uni Theatre Guild production has picked up on the global trend to revive the work. Within the strictures and intimate space that is the Adelaide Uni Little Theatre, she and her ensemble cast of Kate Anolak, Lee Cook, Rachel Dalton, Brant Eustice, Matt Houston, Casmira Lorien, Eric McDowell and Lindsay Prodea have succeeded brilliantly. Each actor plays a primary character and one or more secondary characters,

As the designer, Horton utilises the Little Theatre’s mezzanine floor to its fullest, with an impressionist set featuring a large set of angel wings on the back wall and ladders leading metaphorically up to where several surreal heavenly sequences occur, their otherworldliness in contrast to the stark human drama on the floor. At one point, clad in all-white, the young pill-popping Harper (Lorien) thinks she is in Antarctica. The floor set is very spare, with minimal set and prop changes and swift shifts in focus which maintain the momentum of Kushner’s superbly witty and profound words.



In Part One, Millennium Approaches, Prior Walter (Houston) is HIV positive. The initial sequence establishing his character is a tour de force. Houston drives his character through angst, horror at his diagnosis, denial, fear and self-loathing at himself and what he has become. His Jewish boyfriend Lou (a gangly, expressive Cook) leaves him for seemingly straight Mormon Joe (Prodea, a thoughtful and restrained characterisation) and he gets a hospital visit from an angel who says it is up to him to save humanity.



The plot seethes with eighties gay angst as Joe battles his latent homosexuality in the face of his attractive young wife, who feels ever more alone and takes refuge in pill-popping to escape the reality of her passionless marriage. Roy, the divorce lawyer (Eustace) establishes himself as arrogant and self-centred with a great phone monologue, whose bombast hides his own homosexual leanings and his diagnosis with AIDS.

The clever use of historical Prior Walters in hallucinatory scenes experienced by AIDS-ridden actual Prior Walter is inspired. The medieval Walters acknowledges that while this modern plague is bad, it is nothing like the plague back in his day. Luxury, he might have observed, if he were part of a small group of old men discussing the plagues they used to have in the good old days, as in the famous Monty Python sketch. Prodea and Eustace are wonderful in their realisations of the two historical Walter characters.

Kushner’s prescient script might have been written for the current decade, as the reality of Trump is even more frightening than the hard right Republican politics espoused by the Ronnie Reagan-worshipping Republican characters, while for AIDS we now have COVID. At its release, in the leadup to the Millenium, it was edgy and provocative all at once, encouraging projections as to what the future might bring. As Part One reaches its climax, we are left with a cliffhanger, when the angel (Dalton) appears to Prior and tells of his destiny (see the play to know more!) which might work in and of itself, leaving the audience to decide down what road it all heads from here, but it is only the end of a very extended Act One.



In Part Two, Perestroika, ex-boyfriend Lou and his Mormon lover Joe, the pill-popping Harper, Joe’s conservative mother, Roy, the rabid Republican lawyer, Belize (McDowell), a drag queen and dead activist Ethel Rosenberg are gathered. Prior has the future of the world in his hands, as the angel informs him. The title word is Russian for ‘restructuring’, in particular the way the Soviet Union became somewhat more socially progressive. It is a hint at homosexual acceptance, of the kind that has now happened in many places in relation to gay marriage, in particular.



The sheer stamina of the eight actors in maintaining the energy over three plays’ worth of material in two nights is truly remarkable. Roy’s suffering deepens and Prior embarks on something of a self-discovery odyssey, to find answers for humanity in a world where the oppressors hold sway and the plague takes the gay, thematic echoes that persist today. Even if gay marriage is acceptable and we have managed AIDS - now we have COVID and other as-yet un-named horrors - out in the real world, mental illness and the black dog of depression have never been so prevalent as now. It is as if all the angst of the 21st century has been piled upon Prior Walter and we confront it through his pain.



Prior must wrestle with an angel: make of that what you will, or better, see the play. Joe seeks redemption with Harper, but not all endings are happy. There is a heavenly denouement, where Prior sees other angels and confronts his mortality and chooses life. It is in this moment that we are reminded for a final time that the primary theme of this play is hope; we can survive, we will find a way through the pandemics, the wars, the inhumanity imposed upon the helpless by the greedy, self-obsessed political hard right.

This is a play that deserves a mighty audience, one that includes some of those who govern us and make the rules that define our lives.



To book click here.
Location: Little Theatre
Cost: $20-25

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