Angels in America Weaves Real and Divine

The final weekend of “Gaypril,” a month devoted to creating more visibility for LGBTQ groups on campus, was celebrated by the timely premiere of Millennium Approaches, Part I of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Written by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play explores the struggles of gay men living in New York City during the 1980s, when intolerance, shameful denial or an impending sense of doom hovered over many people’s heads. The student-produced show ran in the Hepburn Zoo from April 31 to May 2, bringing to light questions of religion, race, gender and sexual orientation that once sparked ethical scandals and continue to bear relevance in the modern era.

The burdens of everyday life become magnified and exacerbated in this dramatic tale as three groups of people grapple with different but interlinking sets of problems. Mormon chief clerk Joe, played by Max Lieblich ’18, and his agoraphobic, emotionally unstable and sex-starved wife Harper, played by Katie Mayopoulos ’18, fight to establish a sense of trust, communication and constancy in their relationship as Joe contemplates accepting a job offer in Washington and Harper wrestles with her suspicion that Joe is gay. Successful lawyer and deeply closeted homosexual Roy, portrayed by Phil Brand ’18.5, refuses to come to terms with his recent AIDS diagnosis, proclaiming that “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.” Meanwhile, clerical worker and gay Jewish man Louis, played by Lee Michael Garcia Jimenez ’18, is struck by the devastating news that his boyfriend, Prior, portrayed by Christian Lange ’17.5, has contracted AIDS. Throughout the play, these heavy plot points manifest themselves in intensely emotional confrontations behind closed doors, with Harper shouting impassionedly at Joe as he arrives home late, Louis and Prior discussing Prior’s prognosis whilst embracing intimately in bed and Roy confronting his medical fate within the confidential confines of his doctor’s office. Over the course of the play, the lives of these troubled characters slowly and unexpectedly begin to intersect.

Life in New York City moves at an unforgivingly breakneck speed, but amidst paperwork piles, hospital appointments and burnt dinners, the days drag on. The actors portray this existential slog with a careful mixture of exhaustion, misery, frustration and apathy, their words casting a heavy silence over the audience at some points and provoking laughter at others.

“The audience might find it strange the way the play switches between funny and deadly serious and back again very quickly,” Lange said. “It’s a weird play, and if you don’t walk into it with an open mind it has the potential to be very difficult to process.”

Within one dream sequence, Prior commiserates to his makeup-adorned face in the mirror, “I look like a corpse. A … corpsette! Oh my queen; you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.” As Prior’s condition declines, his chest marred by dark purple scars and his face increasingly pale and gaunt, Lange’s delivery of these candid moments hovered between humor and heartbreak, poetry and pain. With each broken scream and moment of bloody, writhing agony, a sense of empathy tore through the audience, bringing to light the utter torment of the times.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought with it intolerance, ignorance and fear toward the gay movement, as the virus became stigmatized as “gay cancer” and “gay-related immune disorder.” Angels in America provides a cross-sampling of voices within this messy, confusing and tragic era. Roy is symbolic of all the closeted gays who refused to admit who they were for fear of being associated with the queer image, which was generally viewed as weak and insignificant. Joe, trapped in his church-sanctioned Mormon marriage, will never gain acceptance for an identity deemed wrong for religious reasons. Belize, Prior’s voodoo cream-using, magic-loving nurse and black drag queen,  portrayed artfully by Rubby Paulino ’18, embodies a particular subculture of the gay image. Louis’s poor coping mechanisms in light of Prior’s tragedy are a call to those unable to face the harshness of reality – whereas Prior, in his quiet resilience, represents those who can.

In this sense, Angels in America serves as a window into the past, a stark reminder of all that society has seen and overcome.

“It connects us to a generation of gay people that lived through a part of gay history that I didn’t. I was raised with education around sex being that HIV and AIDs were an ‘everyone’ thing,” Garcia Jimenez said. “A lot of old people still see it as a ‘gay person’ thing. I didn’t grow up seeing my gay friends die of a disease that no one really understood.”

Sadly, Prior’s suffering is further compounded when the emotional strife of the situation causes Louis, his lover of four years, to abandon him. Similarly, the deterioration of Harper and Joe’s marriage pushes Harper to a state of panicked pill-popping and frequent hallucinations. Traveling on parallel paths toward destruction, the anguish within both relationships reaches a point of full, explosive expression in a joint break-up scene near the end of the play. At last, Louis confronts the limits of his own love, while Joe recognizes his homosexuality.

“Characterized by Harper’s short phrases, Louis’s apathy, Prior’s hurt and Joe’s overflowing realizations, this scene beats out a rhythm that is difficult for actors to keep up with, and splices together two stories in a challenging way for the audience,” Mayopoulos stated. “Nevertheless, watching two very different couples break apart at the same moment because of the same basic reasons – trying to save oneself and one’s identity – is emotionally overwhelming and extremely powerful.”

Ultimately, in leaving their respective relationships, Louis and Joe stumble into each other. In a moment of bittersweet clarity, their feelings culminate in an intimate, lingering kiss that left the audience in an awed sort of silence. Within this scene, Garcia Jimenez portrayed the multiple facets of Louis’s complicated, even paradoxical, personality – apathy, selfishness and above all, self-loathing – with delicate emotional precision.

“If you touch me, your hand might fall off or something,” Louis tells Joe in a sad, matter-of-fact tone. “Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”

Some critics of the play argue that it delves far too much into a story rather than a political thesis about the approaching millennium and its implications on the gay movement. But perhaps it works better as art rather than as a political campaign speech. Angels in America is more than merely a tragic tale: beyond the harsh realism of the play lies a distinct sense of mysticism, which eventually gives way to hope. A mysterious, almost harassing voice beckons periodically to the ailing Prior, telling him to “look up” and “prepare the way.” The stunningly illuminated angel that embodies these haunting messages in the final scene, as portrayed by Nadine Nasr ’17.5, is a sign from the universe that society is on the brink of change. “Greetings, Prophet,” she announces. “The Great Work begins. The Messenger has arrived.”

“The mysticism makes it an undeniable, divine fact of fate. There’s a certain point in society where something is obviously going to happen, so we need to let it happen,” Garcia Jimenez explained. Pointing to modern times, he said, “It’s not about whether gay marriage is going to be passed; it’s about which state is going to be the last to pass it.”

This weekend’s performance of Angels in America, a work deemed by the New York Times as “the most influential American play of the last two decades,” was a momentous labor of love for the 12-member team. There were no stage hands, leaving the full responsibility of physical labor and onstage logistics to the cast and crew. Additionally, within the entirely student-run production, some actors multitasked as producer, director and assistant director. Mayopoulos, who acted brilliantly as Harper, was inspired to produce the play after performing a scene alongside Lieblich for her Acting I final.

“I went to a socially conservative high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, where doing a piece of theatre as daring, liberal and free as Angels in America would never have happened – there would literally be protests,” Mayopoulos said. “For me, this play exemplifies the tragedies that occur when a society is not accepting and the extent of the strain it puts on all members of that community, which I witnessed firsthand in my hometown.”

A tale of many faces, Angels in America touches on everything from drag queens to disillusioned wives, from fatality to potential pregnancies and from divine forces to awkward sex between strangers in the park. Through tears, laughter and moments of poignant discomfort, the actors within this production carved to life a story of momentous proportions, evoking an era marred by hatred and neglect. Handled with care, the characters’ devastating narratives became a reflection of a powerful, collective hope that perhaps the world is not coming to an end after all. As millennium approaches, a better future is surely underway.