The Love That Will Not Lower It's Voice
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE LOVE THAT WILL NOT LOWER ITS VOICE BY STEFAN KANFER wV Then Angels in America received the Pulitzer Prize before its New York debut, the results were inevitable. Ever since...
...Lies (Jeffrey Wright), who entices her to Antarctica...
...In the right ring is Roy Cohn (Ron Leibman), one of the most execrated power brokers of his time...
...At the same time Cohn, suffering from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome he refuses to acknowledge, has his own hallucinations...
...For Cohn had outlived his mentor, Senator Joe McCarthy, to become the friend of mayors, congressmen and cardinals...
...Harper's apparitions include a black travel agent, Mr...
...Jerome Sirlin's set, a juxtaposition of jail bars and spider web, is canny yet obvious...
...repelled, the macho Valentin sings of his girlfriend (Kirsli Carnahan) and La Revolution...
...It is also one of the most imaginative productions in Broadway history...
...Although Angels could have used an editor, its principal weakness lies not in the writing but in the playing...
...Why, he was the one who bullied the judge into giving Ethel and her husband Julius the death penalty for treason...
...We are in the police-state Argentina of the 1970s...
...But perhaps the volume could be turned down a notch or two...
...Joe's mother (Kathleen Chalfant) decides to pull up stakes in Utah to save her son from the fleshpots of New York...
...The same could be said for Florence Klotz' costumes, Vincent Paterson's choreography and, most important, for Hal Prince's direction...
...On more than one occasion Joe runs into Louis, with suggestive results...
...When it is employed as the centerpiece of a pretentious musical, as in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the project seems to have been perversely concocted by Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly...
...In a variety of lesser roles (everybody except Spinella plays at least two parts) Grant and Wright are alternately sympathetic, irritating or funny, as the script demands...
...The odd couple settle down to a war of attrition...
...Unhappily, the women range from adequate to ineffective...
...When homosexuality is Used in a work of art like Angels in America its voice seldom seems shrill or defensive...
...and Fred Ebb's lyrics amount to a collage of banalities...
...At the funeral of an old woman, a rabbi lectures his parishioners about "The lest of the Mohicens," the generation that trekked from the Pale to the New World...
...But Harper is too catatonic to leave New York, and Joe is too confused and frightened to leave his wife...
...Essentially, what takes place at the Walter Kerr Theater is a tragic circus, unfurling in '80s New York...
...John Kander's music borrows from South American antecedents but pays no interest...
...The long file of aids plays (Falsettos, The Destiny of Me, Jeffrey, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, etc...
...Outfitted with a helmet hairdo and a series of glitzy costumes, she has no trouble kicking her legs high over her head or belting out a number...
...The mere mention of aids is enough to chill his Jewish lover, Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello...
...Yet it is the flamboyant Prior who turns out to be the stoic: "I am a gay man, and I am used to pressure...
...He offers to get the young man a big job in Ed Meese's Justice Department...
...Leibman, in the role of a lifetime, catches every nuance and hypocrisy of Citizen Cohn...
...Joe is cold and remote...
...The second half, Perestroika, is to be presented next season...
...The collaborators' low point occurs in "Morphine Tango," when a hospital bed is used for one of those old "South America, take it away" numbers...
...Mantello is Spinella's psychological mirror image, matching him laugh for laugh, tear for tear...
...Lacking a strong "through line...
...A champion of denial, he once denounced homosexuality at a Republican fund-raiser while a male prostitute sat waiting for him in a limousine...
...At first Valentin shuts his ears to Molina's fantasies...
...But even if he turns out to be more of a scenewright than a playwright, he has shaken the New York theater to its foundations...
...suddenly seems to be covered with dust...
...Terrence McNally's book is of no help...
...No nobility here, no long-lasting loyal gay marriage...
...Then, gradually, he succumbs to the storyteller's magic...
...in the process, they redefine the immigrant experience...
...She coolly accepts his boast, dials 911 and gets Roy an ambulance...
...He sees himself as a "straight man who happens to sleep with men...
...Through, around and outside the rings a tumultuous side show goes on...
...At 60, Rivera is a remarkable instance of preservation...
...It brings down the house...
...Harden, who has enough trouble establishing the character of a pill freak, is wholly at sea impersonating a harrumphing Reaganite...
...The Latina queen of the silver screen is continually recalled in her greatest role: the fatally seductive Spider Woman...
...In the center ring, a four-year relationship is about to dissolve...
...except for homosexuality in and out of the closet—Angels in America relies on Kushner's vivid expressionistic scenes, and director George C. Wolfe's extraordinary use of space and personae...
...They are her response to a suspicion she simply cannot confront: The righteous lawyer who shares her bed may not be as straight as he seems...
...Then again, few would want to...
...Readers of the Manuel Puig novel, and viewers of Hector Babenco's film adaptation, know the plot...
...Argentinian politics are reduced to a single number, "The Day After That," in which the chorus holds aloft a few photographs, and chants with grave, insincere voices about The Disappeared...
...He becomes a taker of long, ruminative walks on the city streets...
...Spinella's bone-thin appearance gives him the aspect of a gothic Christ, yet his comic timing is impeccable...
...His cellmate turns out to be Valentin (Anthony Crivello), a Marxist firebrand who keeps flapping his Left wing and denouncing the government...
...In that case, Kushner's career will take wing without any special effects, except for the ones he creates on his typewriter...
...In this swirl of events and figments, one vital ingredient is missing: coherence...
...Every man in the cast is distinctive and memorable...
...A wasp drag queen, Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), has not been feeling well...
...Portraying a nurse in one act and a homeless woman in another, Ellen McLaughlin is brassy and unconvincing...
...They reminded me of a graffiti exchange I once saw in London: "My mother made me a homosexual...
...the plaster that came down when the angel burst through Prior's ceiling...
...If I gave her the wool would she make me one too...
...A spot has developed on his arm—the first sign of Kaposi's sarcoma...
...In middle age, the unrepentant Redhunter amused himself by making reputations and destroying careers...
...At present, it is The Love That Will Not Lower Its Voice...
...That, however, is due to Toni-Leslie James' costuming and Jules Fisher's lighting, both brilliant in every sense of the word...
...In one of them Ethel Rosenberg materializes...
...Playwright and director have points to make about gender, and from time to time Chalfant and Harden are required to double as men...
...Using the phone as a flame-thrower or a firehose, slipping easily from plaintiff to defendant, from bully to charmer, he brings dimension to a character who might easily have been a caricature...
...unless Perestroika makes good on Millennium's promises...
...In his death throes, Prior stares at one of his elaborate visions and remarks, "Very Steven Spielberg...
...It was always said sotto voce, though...
...Harper has become addicted to Valium and fantasies...
...Prior's visions are even more bizarre: As his malady advances, he is attended by three distant ancestors dressed in medieval and Georgian costumes...
...Save for its principals, the show at the Broadhurst Theater has virtually no redeeming features...
...As it happens, both groups are mistaken...
...Ever since opening night, a majority of ticketholders have obediently greeted the finale with standing ovations...
...The prison fades away and a colorful dreamscape rises before their eyes, starring Aurora (Chita Rivera...
...The rabbi and the Mormon mother take journeys—one physical, to the West, one emotional, to the East...
...But a handful of people stomping up the aisles can be heard muttering that they paid good money to see The Emperor's New Play...
...He also amused himself by sleeping with young men, something no one dared to mention—including Cohn...
...At opportune moments, the brutal jailers attempt to break their prisoners' resolves with poisoned food, beatings and bribes...
...She does make a smashing angel, ingeniously suspended from the flies...
...Cohn, for example, regards gays as men with "zero clout...
...Only then will we know whether Kushner can relate his disparate themes...
...Shakespeare's line, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," was invoked by Cohn's enemies almost every time he appeared in court...
...Few women half her age could play the dual roles of sex goddess and death's head...
...There has been nothing like it before, and there may be nothing like it again...
...The prisoners suffer from dysentery, beatings and general intimidation, yet their distress seems no worse than a hangnail...
...Wonderful...
...Cohn snaps at her...
...The relation of religion, power, sex, and politics has never been so audaciously displayed...
...Topping all this is the celebrated wide-winged seraph of the title, bursting through the roof as Prior breathes his last...
...These are supposed to be the show's defining moments, at once poignant and illuminating...
...In the third ring there is an early thirtysomething Mormon couple, Joe Pitt (David Marshall Grant) and his wife Harper (Marcia Gay Harden...
...As the evening progresses, these rings become concentric circles...
...Tony Kushner's work, subtitled Millennium Approaches, has indeed been overhyped: Angels is pocked with flaws and disfigured with excesses...
...Chalfant manages her upright Christian roles, but cannot bring off the rabbi's Yiddish accent or Ethel Rosenberg's urban intonations...
...Lest anyone miss the point that sex is irrelevant and love is everything, Molina's mother (Merle Louise) is brought on to sing "You Could Never Shame Me...
...The flat, stale dialogue seems to have been created to set up one epic moment: the time when Valentin gives Molina the greatest present of all, himself...
...If they never add up to a well-made play, that may be because Millennium is the first half of a theatrical statement...
...A few bad scenes of illness and Louis is out the door, afflicted with guilt but unable to return...
...How dare this woman enter his precincts...
...A few more seasons of this, and the only result will be deafness—to the lobbyists and to their Cause...
...1 realize the futility of asking for a moratorium on what the Victorians called The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name...
...Molina swishes around, recalling his favorite movies in intimate detail...
...By the time we meet them their marriage is in extremis...
...Cohn, in the course of business, takes an avuncular liking to Joe...
...Molina (Brent Carver), a limp-wristed window dresser, is locked up for soliciting a minor...
...Still, the play remains a true original...
Vol. 76 • June 1993 • No. 8
