Yahoo News Angels in America: Everything you need to know about the theatrical event of the season
London theatre has assumed Herculean proportions. The highest-profile plays are bombastic, hours-long affairs, that sell out online in hours with the same frenzy reserved for Glastonbury.
The latest example is Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s pioneering play about the Aids crisis in Eighties America. Previews have been running for weeks and now the play opens officially on Thursday. This is what you need to know.
Long story short
The play, which has the full title Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, received its world premiere in San Francisco in 1991. It’s a devastating meditation on the Aids crisis. Throughout, characters return as “angels” or “ghosts”, and it handles political questions about experimental drug treatment and the ostracisation of the homosexual community amid the repressive conservatism of Reagan-era America. Initially it focuses on a gay couple, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, in Manhattan, though it weaves in the storylines of other characters — a device that expresses the closeness of the gay scene in New York in the Eighties, a situation which charged the terror about the spread of Aids.
The play is set in two parts which can be performed separately: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. It was adapted for HBO in 2003, and has also been turned into an opera by Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös. Part one was first performed at the National Theatre in 1992, directed by Declan Donnellan, and transferred to Broadway the following year. Perestroika had its London premiere in 1993 at the National, in rep with Millennium Approaches.
The National stage
This round of performances officially opens next Thursday, though previews have been running for a few weeks, during which period Millennium Approaches and Perestroika have been staged on different evenings. The first preview showing them together will be tomorrow: the parts will begin at 1pm and 7pm respectively.
Marathon effort
This is full-bodied theatre: the first half is 285 minutes long (excluding two 15-minute intervals), or four hours and 45 minutes in total. The second is barely more digestible: 210 minutes long (or three and a half hours). The theatre has said it will negotiate the competing considerations of offering “wonderful audience experience” and not “trying” their patience. So far audiences have been weary but effusive. “Never be over #angelsinamerica,” tweeted one. “One of the most soul-shattering pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. 8.5 hours of genius.” “Part 2 of #AngelsinAmerica might be four hours long but it has the best ending of anything I’ve ever seen, and I’m still crying about it,” tweeted another.
Who’s who
The cast for this new production is gilded with stars: Oscar-nominee Andrew Garfield, playing Prior Walter, Russell Tovey (as lawyer Joe Pitt) and Olivier-minted Denise Gough, alumna of Duncan Macmillan’s People Places and Things, also at the National, in 2015. James McArdle plays Walter’s boyfriend, Louis Ironson. The play is directed by Marianne Elliott, the high-profile talent who directed both War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Angels in America typically recruits stars and ascendants: Daniel Craig appeared as Joe Pitt (a closeted gay Mormon, married unhappily to an agoraphobic wife) in the 1993 production of Millennium Approaches at the National. Cynthia Nixon appeared in the Nineties Broadway production.
The writer
Tony Kushner, 60, is an American playwright and screenwriter, born in Manhattan in 1956, though he grew up in Louisiana. He studied at Columbia University, and then attended New York’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he directed new pieces and Shakespeare. Angels in America is his triumph — he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 — though he also, notably wrote the screenplay for the film Munich, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was also decorated with a National Medal of Arts for his work by President Obama in 2013.
Kushner has compared the writing of Angels in America to the Beatles’ White Album, a 93-minute opus. “You discipline yourself to write something that’s tight,” he told Slate in June. “And then you just let your brain splatter all over the page.”
The story is personal. “Around November 1985, the first person that I knew personally died of Aids. A dancer I had a huge crush on, a very sweet man. I got an NEA directing fellowship at the repertory theater in St. Louis, and right before I left New York I heard through the grapevine that he had gotten sick. And then, in November, he died.
“And I had this dream: Bill dying — I don’t know if he was actually dying, but he was in his pyjamas and sick on his bed — and the ceiling collapsed and this angel comes into the room. And then I wrote a poem. I’m not a poet, but I wrote this thing. It was many pages long. After I finished it, I put it away. No one will ever see it. Its title was Angels in America.”
Kushner is (in)famously involved in high-profile productions of the play, giving directors direction on their directing; according to lore, Declan Donnellan only agreed to direct the National’s 1993 run if Kushner did not attend rehearsals. He is reportedly working closely with Elliott this time, on tweaks that will shorten the running time.
Gong buster
As well as Kushner’s Pulitzer, the play’s parts have won other awards, including the 1992 Evening Standard Award for Best Play (for Millennium Approaches). Both parts have won Tonys — the highest drama award in America — and Perestroika won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play in 1992.
Ticketmaster
Angels in America is the Hamilton of this season: when the tickets went on pre-sale for those who had registered for advanced access in January, the play trended on Twitter and sold out in a few hours. There are now a handful of remaining tickets, and accessing booking websites requires you sit in an exasperating online queue as the servers struggle under the weight of the demand.
If you get through the gates you’ll pay handsomely — though you might end up buying a standing ticket, which considering the duration of the performance will demand even more stamina than usual.
The National is holding a series of five democratic ballots, where tickets are available for £20. There are two remaining — today’s was the third — held on May 26 and June 30. Admittedly, the online queue will be just as exasperating. If you get through, you can buy two tickets max.
Your other option is an NT Live screening: the theatre will be broadcasting the two parts at cinemas, including the Curzon Aldgate and the Barbican, on June 20 and 27.
Angels in America is at the National’s Lyttelton, SE1 until August 19; nationaltheatre.org.uk
