American Drama in the Age of Film

12. Stairway to Heaven

12 Stairway to Heaven SMUKOV: People, I think, would rather die than change. UPGOBKIN: Do you really think so? I believe precisely the opposite. We would rather change than die. We have been ordered into motion by History herself, Vashka. When the sun comes out, the sky cracks open, the silent flowers twist and sway . . . —Tony Kushner, SLAVS! The most cinematic moments of HBO’s Angels in America happen in the opening credits before the film actually begins. Timed to Thomas Newman’s haunting musical score, the viewer swoops and swerves through the clouds on a winged flight across America, dipping below them intermittently to check out monuments of manifest destiny along the way: the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco ; the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City; the Gateway Arch in St. Louis; the Hancock tower in Chicago; the Empire State Building in New York. The camera finally perches under the gaze of the angel at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, which is also the site to which the action returns in the last scene. As if responding to the proximity of the viewer, the statue groans and averts its head. The Angel has landed. Even though Angels in America has been around for more than a decade, even though it won Tony Awards for best play in 1993 and 1994 (one for each part), Drama Desk Awards, a host of other awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993, most people now know Tony Kushner’s play as a 2003 film by Mike Nichols. Part One: Millennium Approaches debuted 7 December 2003, and Part Two: Perestroika premiered the following week. In advance of the opening, Alex Abramovich reported in the New York Times that the film “will be broadcast and rebroadcast to more than 30 million homes, and the number of people who see it the very first night should easily outnumber those who have seen the play in the several hundred North American stage productions since it opened 10 years ago” (1). The play is still produced today regularly by regional professional theaters, amateur groups, and college and university players, but the number of people who actually see such productions is minuscule compared to the potential television audience. Meryl Streep, one of the stars of the film, made the analogy to Abramovich that “‘It’s almost as if HBO had decided that the Stairway to Heaven / 157 Wooster Group [avant-garde theater artists who work in the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York City] was going to go straight across America’” (6). Indeed, Nielsen Media Research reported that 4.2 million viewers saw the first installment of the miniseries, making it the most-watched made-for-cable movie of the year. Not to get too carried away, it should not be overlooked that 22.2 million people saw Survivor, the reality show on CBS, that same week. Still, an HBO spokeswoman said at the time, “This is only the beginning of what we hope is an enormous audience when this plays out over an aggressive schedule” (Bauder). Trimming the seven-hour play to six hours, HBO broke each of the two parts into three equal chunks of about one hour each and reprised the six individual sections, called chapters, in the days following each premiere episode. It even presented one six-hour marathon of the entire project. All in all, in one thirty-day period it was possible to see at least one chapter of Angels in America on any given night. The pedigree of the film lies beyond reproach. Kushner himself wrote the screenplay, and Nichols, who has earned the respect of both the theater and film communities, directed an all-star cast featuring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright (the only actor to have appeared in the original Broadway production), and with cameo appearances by James Cromwell, Michael Gambon, and Simon Callow. Ben Shenkman and Justin Kirk play the roles of Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, the main couple, wonderfully and sympathetically. It’s hard to imagine a better cast for any production , and it’s easy to understand how the film, digitally processed and preserved , will supplant the play as an introduction to Kushner and his work. The DVD will provide an accessible teaching tool for the increasingly anthologized play. So is anything to be gained by seeing Angels in America in the theater for which it was initially conceived? In his “Playwright’s Notes...