Theater Review: Gamm Theatre’s ‘Angels in America’ lives up to its reputation

The play earned its own boatload of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. The Gamm’s iteration deserves just as many accolades.

Well acted and insightfully directed, this “Angels” brings out the best in Kushner’s ambitious work. And this is just “Part I: Millennium Approaches.” “Part II: Perestroika” will be staged in September as The Gamm begins its 41st season.

Set in 1985 during the Reagan era, when the Moral Majority was speaking up and the AIDS epidemic was a gathering storm, the story centers on two troubled couples. Prior Walter is a gay man diagnosed with AIDS, whose lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him. Joe Pitt is a closeted Mormon, married to an anxious, over medicated woman, Harper.

Their interactions with one another and with supporting characters bring up a host of existential, philosophical, religious, moral and political topics. There is a lot going on, a plethora of ideas held together by relatively linear storytelling and director Brian McEleney’s intentional pacing. 

That grounding, however, is imaginatively and often hilariously enhanced by fever dreams and hallucinations. One of the wildest is Prior Walter’s encounter with two ancestors in his centuries-old family tree: One a fierce warrior who died from the Plague, and the other an effete aristocrat afflicted by cholera during London’s drinking-water-related outbreak. Both are well played for dark comedy. 

Adapted from real life is lawyer Roy Cohn, whose resume included serving as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy and lawyer for and mentor to Donald Trump. He is full of himself, an unabashed bully, and afflicted with AIDS, which he calls liver cancer, and his homosexuality, fearing it labels him as weak. 

Joe and Harper Pitt also are in denial, but differently. Their Mormon upbringing doesn’t allow homosexuality, so Joe fights to overcome his feelings, and Harper takes drugs to escape. Neither works.

All the characters are multi-dimensional. Louis is wracked with guilt. Cohn is unlikeable but pitiable. Their struggles and those of other characters engender our ambivalent emotions, which add to the richness of Kushner’s observations.

McEleney’s direction encourages compassion, but he is well aware of opportunities for laughter, which he handles deftly. Louis, for example, has some wordy monologues, delivered with perfect timing by actor Ben Steinfeld. A scene in which Prior is visited by two ancestral Priors is hilarious, but not without meaning.