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Angels in America by Tony Kushner

Article  in  Theatre Journal · January 2020

DOI: 10.1353/tj.2020.0102

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 Angels in America by Tony Kushner (review)
Laura Michiels

Theatre Journal, Volume 72, Number 4, December 2020, pp. 501-503 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777679

[ Access provided at 6 Jan 2021 17:07 GMT from Arizona State University ]

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
Patrick Maley, Editor
ANGELS IN AMERICA. By Tony Kushner.
Directed and adapted by Tom Dewispelaere
and Stijn Van Opstal. Olympique Drama-
tique, Toneelhuis, Bourlaschouwburg, Ant-
werp, Belgium. January 31, 2020.
Do not ever let it be said that Angels in America
is not a funny play. Attempts at summarizing Tony
Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning classic—an approxi-
mately eight-hour probe into political and judicial
corruption, the ravages of AIDS, climate change,
the contemporary significance of religion, and so
on—might suggest otherwise, but humorous mo-
ments can nevertheless be found and were very
prominent in Olympique Dramatique’s production
at the Bourlaschouwburg in Antwerp. Founded by
Tom Dewispelaere, Ben Segers, Stijn Van Opstal, and
Geert Van Rampelberg in 1999, Belgian company
Olympique Dramatique had already demonstrated
a distinct interest in American culture with its suc-
cessful 2014 production of Tracy Letts’s August:
Osage County and 2018 stage adaptation of William
Gaddis’s novel JR. The company is known for its
good cheer and anarchic humor, which sometimes
can crowd out more serious subjects. Its Titus An-
dronicus: A Comedy of Blood (2009–12, directed by
Raven Ruëll) was, for instance, not to everyone’s
taste, because the actors’ desire to entertain at all
times made them turn grave issues like rape and
mutilation into laughing matters. Olympique Dra-
matique’s Angels in America suffered from similar
shortcomings.
The production made for a highly enjoyable
theatre experience thanks to the abundant comic
elements that, at the same time, created a sense
of distance and sacrificed some of the more seri-
ous messages of the play. Of course, distancing is
to be expected in the production of a play written
by Kushner, who is heavily influenced by Bertolt
Brecht. But the goal of such distancing is to allow
the audience to engage critically with the text’s poli-
tics, not at the expense of these. When the play’s
Theatre Journal 72 (2020) 501–25 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press
PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 501
AIDS-stricken protagonist Prior visits the Diorama
Room of the Mormon Visitor’s Center in the third
act of Perestroika, Angels in America’s second, more
difficult part, the scene is obviously meant to pro-
voke some laughter. The tape playing at the exhibi-
tion gets stuck and pill-addicted housewife Harper
pokes fun at the relation between the Mormons’
choice of name and the Angel that Joseph Smith
saw—Moroni, so why not Morons? Yet as played by
Olympique Dramatique, the scene became a thigh-
slapper. Instead of using the mannequins suggested
by the script, the directors made the choice to let
the actors mime the dolls featured in the exhibition
by moving around jerkily. The mother doll is actu-
ally a rather tragic figure, because neither she nor
the little sister are, according to Harper, allowed to
speak, which seems to indicate gender inequality
among early Mormon migrants to Salt Lake City. It
was nevertheless difficult to see her that way: she
was played by the same actor who performed the
part of Roy Cohn, Peter Van den Begin, who wore
an absurd dress and energetically imitated a string
puppet. Joe’s coming-out to his mother also turned
into a mostly comic affair due to the clingy way in
which he addressed her and the emphasis on his ine-
briated state, the result of a wild night on the town,
illustrated by a frantic dance scene not included in
Kushner’s text. I found myself mesmerized when
Tiny Bertels (Ethel Rosenberg) in Angels in
America. (Photo: Kurt Van der Elst.)
502 / Theatre Journal
Lukas De Wolf (Louis Ironson), Tijmen Govaerts (Joe Pitt), Darryl E. Woods (Belize), and Sanne Samina
Hanssen (Harper Pitt) in Angels in America. (Photo: Kurt Van der Elst.)
Ethel Rosenberg (Tiny Bertels) and Louis Ironson
(Lukas De Wolf) say Kaddish for Roy, thanks to
Bertels’s truly gorgeous singing during the scene.
However, the magic was again quickly dispelled
when both characters finished their prayer by yell-
ing “klootzak” (“asshole”) at Roy’s corpse. While this
is part of Kushner’s script, it seemed symptomatic
here of a production in which every moment of se-
riousness was undercut and excessive comedy kept
the audience at arm’s length.
Distance characterized the production in a spatial
sense also. A long, narrow thrust stage divided the
audience into two groups. It reached all the way
to a backstage area on one side, and on the other a
doorway sometimes used by the actors for surprise
entrances. This cross-like construction was added
to the Bourla’s traditional nineteenth-century pro-
scenium stage and enhanced the play’s religious
imagery. Standing on the proscenium part, Roy first
beheld Ethel while peering into the distance, into the
audience. The entire length of the house separated
Roy from Ethel’s smoke-enshrouded presence. Joe
(Tijmen Govaerts) stood at the far end of the cat-
walk when Harper (Sanne Samina Hanssen) raised
questions about his sexuality, suggesting that he was
beyond her reach at that point. Joe actually ended
up spending quite a bit of time on the far side of
the thrust stage, but this was fitting considering
how much the character struggles to make true con-
nections to anyone. The Angel (Evelien Bosmans)
tried to lead Prior (Lukas Smolders) up the ramp
and take him to heaven, but he stalled and ended
up lingering on the proscenium stage with Hannah
(Tiny Bertels).
Prior decided to stay on earth, rejecting his role
as prophet, and did not want Louis to return. That
is where his story ended in the current production.
The last character to address us was Harper. Wearing
a tinfoil-colored parka somehow suggestive of the
cold war space race, she told us that nothing is lost
forever. Of course, this production’s running time
was three and half hours and scenes from Millen-
nium Approaches as well as Perestroika were included,
which meant that a lot was cut. But that final scene of
Perestroika, when Prior blesses the audience and asks
for more life is nothing short of iconic and I sorely
missed the beautiful sense of completion it leaves
us with. The production’s program included a text
by dramaturg Ellen Stynen suggesting that the time
for the epilogue’s polite optimism has come and
gone. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper De
Standaard, director Stijn Van Opstal confirmed that
the hopeful feelings of the epilogue are a product
of the early 1990s and that these make the play feel
slightly dated. Suddenly adopting a jarringly seri-
ous tone, the Angel instead gave a long apocalyptic

speech from Perestroika’s fifth act during which she
attempted to convince Prior that the worst is yet to
come and he asked her for more life, not including
us in the conversation. For a production that takes
pride in being the first Flemish adaptation of Kush-
ner’s play, I believed it unfortunate to deprive any
first-time audiences of that final sparkle of hope,
when Prior meets us alongside his new family, the
family he chose. It would have provided the perfect
opportunity to draw us closer at last.
LAURA MICHIELS
Erasmus Brussels University of
Applied Sciences and Arts
TIMON OF ATHENS. By William Shakespeare
and Thomas Middleton. Edited by Emily
Burns and Simon Godwin. Directed by Si-
mon Godwin. Theatre for a New Audience
and Shakespeare Theatre Company, in as-
sociation with the Royal Shakespeare Com-
pany. Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Samuel
H. Scripps Mainstage, Brooklyn, New York.
January 18, 2020.
Although trimming occasional lines from Renais-
sance-era plays is not unusual, this production of
Timon of Athens not only removed, interspliced, and
repurposed sections of scenes, but also invented
lines and borrowed others from scripts like Coriola-
nus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen from Verona,
and Henry V. In addition, multiple male characters
were reimagined as women, including the title role,
played by Kathryn Hunter, and the soldier Alcibi-
ades, played by Elia Monte-Brown. These changes,
plus moving the setting to what the program labeled
“the near future,” upended the gender dynamics
within the original material and helped turn this
production into a tragicomic indictment of contem-
porary capitalism.
As originally scripted, Timon’s money-obsessed
society seems like an old boys’ network. The only
female characters are the act 1 dancers and two pros-
titutes accompanying Alcibiades in act 4. The script
features myriad sexist comments. As such, reimag-
ining multiple characters as women required edit-
ing involving more than just changing pronouns or
“Lord” to “Lady” Timon. Cutting some sexist lines
seemed necessary; sections of Timon’s act 4 diatribe
suggesting that all women are whores, for example,
would have been perplexing spoken by a woman.
Some word-change edits, however, produced shifts
in emphasis or meaning. Instead of referencing “a
woman’s eyes” in act 5, for example, and implying
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PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 503
that crying is unmanly, Timon said, “Lend me a
fool’s heart and a young girl’s eyes / And I’ll be-
weep these comforts.” This rewording suggested
Timon’s desire to return to more innocent times,
before her supposed friends’ selfishness proved so
disheartening, thus turning an originally sexist self-
debasement into a moment of surprising pathos.
Transforming Timon and other characters span-
ning the play’s economic and class strata into
women foregrounded the intersection of gender,
economic, and power issues. Having Lady Timon
host a more diverse gathering, for example, ini-
tially suggested that this society was relatively
progressive in terms of opportunities for women.
Left uncut, however, was an exchange challeng-
ing that notion whereby Timon and a male guest
discussed the man’s assumed right to arrange a fi-
nancially advantageous marriage for his daughter,
even though she wanted to marry one of Timon’s
servants. When Lady Timon intervened—essentially
purchasing this man’s approval of his daughter’s
spousal choice—Timon’s gender added new reso-
nances because, as a woman, Timon’s concerns for
this unseen daughter’s fate now appeared to matter
on a personal level. Additionally, this conversation
highlighted the still-precarious position of women
within this capitalist near future, especially if men
considered daughters as property. The intersection
of these issues arose as well after generous-to-a-
fault Timon went bankrupt and then sent servants
to ask her influential so-called friends for loans.
Each offered flimsy excuses for refusing, but one
rejection proved most disturbing because it came
from a woman. The survival-of-the-fittest mindset
pervading this society seemed to trump any gender
solidarity that might have benefited Timon.
The substantial reinvention of Alcibiades as a
woman also underscored the intersection of these
The Cast of Timon of Athens.
(Photo: Henry Grossman.)