Theater Review: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches

Tony Kushner makes people want to pursue theater.  In my grad school program in theater, it was not uncommon or surprising to hear someone say that after reading Angels in America they knew they wanted to go into theater, whether as a playwright, director, or otherwise.  I admit that I fell into the same camp and once wrote Mr. Kushner a letter expressing that my desire to pursue theater was largely in response to his plays.  So entering the Signature Theatre last night to see the revival of Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, I was filled with excitement but also uncertainty about whether a revival could fill the shoes of such a magnificent, large scale play. The Signature production exceeded all expectations. (At least Millennium Approaches did; I see Perestroika in a few weeks.)  In the intimate space, the work took on epic dimensions as director Michael Greif deftly created a multi-faceted world of New York City apartments, hospital rooms, courthouses, and public parks. The Signature Theatre is devoting the 2010-2011 season to Kushner’s work and Angels in America has already received three extensions.  Whether it will transfer to Broadway is still unknown but this production has proven that the large-scale work can be just as vibrant in a smaller theater.

The cast – from seasoned stage veteran Billy Porter to TV and movie star Zachary Quinto – brought a rich honesty to their roles and never shied away from exploring the dark and flawed attributes of their characters.  This isn’t a play about pleasant people.  But at its core are weathered souls desperate for connection, marked most poignantly by two central couples: one openly gay and the other ostensibly straight.  As Frank Rich remarked in his 1993 review of the original production, “Angels in America becomes a wounding fugue of misunderstanding and recrimination committed in the name of love.”

The lighting design and set were phenomenal aids to this portrayal and created the wide breadth of starkly real environments and fantastical imaginings that the play demands.  We feel the chill of Prior’s hospital room, the serenity of the courthouse steps, and the tension of Joe and Harper’s Brooklyn apartment.

Seventeen years after the play’s stage debut, its exploration of AIDS, faith, gay culture, and politics during the Reagan years now feel removed enough to be a true revival. Where AIDS is now a largely livable condition provided that one can afford adequate health care, in the universe of Angels, it was altogether new and so severely stigmatized that President Reagan famously never uttered the name of the disease until 1987, six years after the first cases of AIDS were reported.

The revival successfully transports us to that time: to the pervasive fear incurred by a mysterious epidemic and to the dark underbelly of America during a presidency marked by nationalism and prosperity.

Kushner has never feared tackling political movements.  If anything, he embraces the most complex and unlikely of relationships that underscore the scope and polarization of America’s most volatile eras.  And he does so with poetry and pathos that lift each story out of its historical milieu and achieve an unlikely timelessness.  It’s unsurprising that he’s the playwright who launched a thousand artists.

Movie Review: Blue Valentine

A wise person once told me that falling in love isn’t the endpoint; it’s where the relationship begins.  Romantic love doesn’t last if the couple doesn’t ultimately work well together.  And yet, couples at the early stages of relationships are often so smitten with chemistry and insatiable physical activity that the question of whether they’re built to last seems like a buzz kill to rosy-cheeked romance. In Derek Cianfrance’s film about sweet love left out to curdle, a couple portrays the ways in which good people fall in and out of love.  The fact that the couple in question is delineated by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling who are touchingly real and nuanced only adds to our wish that their young love last forever, no matter the circumstances.

The film’s scenes oscillate between present (the near dismantling of their marriage) and past (the heartfelt development of their relationship six years earlier). That Cianfrance deliberately avoids any scenes from the years in between may be disorienting or even grating on some audience members.  But the approach offers the viewer a more active vantage point than escapist movie-watching.  He also cleverly drops subtle details that he only explains later, like the song played in the hotel room or the good-looking jock in the liquor store.  They’re crucially important to the couple, and Cianfrance engages our curiosity as he reveals their significance.

At least one of the pair is featured in every frame of the film, and usually both.  They are the only ones we care about, along with their adorable daughter, and because of that, whether their relationship prevails or fails is integral to our emotional experience.  But the problem is, it’s clear - despite the warm, passionate, and love-abundant scenes of their early stages  - that their relationship is built with twigs instead of bricks.  Cindy (Michelle Wiliams) has a history with asshole men from her father to her previous boyfriend.  When sweet, endearing Dean (Ryan Gosling) enters her life, he’s a breath of fresh chivalry.  And he’s so taken by Cindy that he accepts the challenges of a relationship that escalates too quickly into marriage and parenthood.

I have to confess that the scene where Cindy and Dean stand outside a dimly lit store entrance at night and he croons along with his mandolin as she tap dances was so affective on my pliable heartstrings that I fell in love with them together and knew that their deterioration would be heartbreaking.  But it didn’t undermine the awareness of how utterly mismatched they were:  his ambition-free life and childishness to her determination and maturity.

Much of the pleasure of this film is in watching Michelle Williams who is heartbreaking in nearly every scene.  She melts seamlessly into her character, whether fragile and wide-eyed as a young woman or weathered and compromised as a mother.  Ryan Gosling’s Dean is emotionally charged as well, though he presents a less believable juxtaposition between an earnest young man and a frequently drunk father prone to hostile outbursts.

The beginnings of relationships are naturally sweet, and the ends are unsurprisingly painful or bittersweet.  The reason romantic comedies end when the couple finally falls in love is so that we don’t have to question whether or not they’ll last.

Theater Review: Time Stands Still

For a photojournalist, the persistent goal at work is to capture reality.  Not to shape it, change it, or improve it, even when it means ignoring the danger of harmful situations for the sake of getting that iconic image. This occupational hazard paints the backdrop of Time Stands Still, now on Broadway at the Cort Theatre.  Centering on an accomplished and doggedly ambitious war photographer, playwright Donald Margulies offers a new and compelling lens through which to view the images of the Iraq war.  He portrays Sarah Goodwin, the unflinching journalist who understands that to distill the complexities of war into pictures is to willingly disengage from its brutality and pain, to focus on the image, and continue shooting. Laura Linney powerfully fills the role of Sarah and imbues her with iron-willed determination.  Her sharp tongue and rough edge are not the result of her experience but, one suspects, inextricably linked to who she is.  The play begins with her return home to Brooklyn following two weeks in a coma, the result of a roadside bomb that exploded while she was on assignment.  Her boyfriend Jamie (the excellent Brian d’Arcy James), a writer who also covers war torn countries, is an unlikely rehabilitator.  Though supportive and loving, he bears psychological bruises from his own time abroad and approaches Sarah with the same protectiveness he likely needs himself.  It becomes evident that while Sarah’s bones are broken, her resolve is still intact, yearning to get back overseas and behind the camera.

The play’s action occurs entirely in their Williamsburg apartment, but their stories transport us to the Middle East and back.  To the secrets kept and finally revealed.  To the uncomfortable readjustment to living in comfort after months of living amidst poverty and violence.  And to the delicate relationship of Sarah and Jamie, both weathered and grasping to find points of entry back to one another.

Margulies’ set up in Time Stands Still is reminiscent of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Set in one couple’s living room, the play explores their complications, tensions, and secrets which are brought to the surface by the presence of a second, more frivolous couple.  Close friend Richard (Eric Bogosian) is Jamie and Sarah’s editor who visits with his new and much younger girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci).  Richard’s sophistication is an odd match for Mandy’s naiveté, and her all too frequent conversational gaffes produce knee-jerk winces from her boyfriend.  But the two are surprisingly solid as a couple, and if they appear simplistic, it serves as a vehicle for comparison to Sarah and Jamie’s complexity.

Daniel Sullivan’s production achieves a painful poignancy in its realism and honesty.  While some moments accidentally slip into melodrama, the overall work is powerful and timely, due in large part to four extraordinary actors.  The play is testament to the vast discrepancy that exists between visualizing war from a distance and experiencing it on the ground.  For those who capture it on film, the heartrending reality is to do both at the same time.