Angels in America

Signature Theatre Company

New York, (212) 244-7529

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The power of Tony Kushner’s seven-hour magnum opus “hasn’t dimmed,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. Kushner’s “riotous, almost operatic work” struck a raw nerve in the early 1990s, when the devastation of the AIDS epidemic was at its peak. A play whose two parts zoom “from Brooklyn to heaven to Antarctica to Salt Lake City to the Kremlin and back again” might not seem suited for a stripped-down revival. But the Signature Theatre Company has managed it, thanks to “fevered” pacing and “a Rubik’s cube of a set.” At heart, the attraction is still an astonishing script that weaves together the stories of a gay couple’s implosion, a Mormon couple’s dissolution, and the secret illness of a powerful Republican lawyer. The play is a diamond, and “the great thing about a diamond is that it cannot be tarnished by age.”

Angels, in revival, is “less startling than you may remember,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. That’s largely because it has never gone away, having entered regular rotation at schools and local theaters. But this time, its familiarity allows us to “savor the individual details,” particularly “the vitality of Kushner’s character portraits.” Even the characters who aren’t visited by ghosts or angels seem to feel they bear personal responsibility for the catastrophes of their historical moment. Kushner goes so far as to make us feel for the closeted lawyer Roy Cohn, even though the onetime Joseph McCarthy henchman is the story’s devil made flesh.

The play has always been “a glorious mess,” said Scott Brown in New York. It’s thus fitting that director Michael Greif has “assembled a fantastically mismatched array of actors” who collide “like charged particles” on the stage. Zachary Quinto, as the conflicted lover Louis, starts slow before “coming alive,” while the “fearsome, fantastic Frank Wood” creates an unforgettable Cohn. “I’d strongly recommend” taking in this two-part epic across two nights, because it sometimes seems reluctant to end. But this “lusty, lumpy, lovably imperfect remount” is proof enough that Angels in America “can still change your world.”