Angels in America by Tony Kushner (review)

“Very Steven Spielberg,” Prior whispers in awe just before the Angel’s arrival in the play often referred to as Tony Kushner’s masterwork. In director

Fedja van Huêt (Louis Ironson), Marwan Kenzari (Joe Pitt), and Eelco Smits (Prior Walter) in Angels in America. (Photo: Richard Termine.)

Fedja van Huêt (Louis Ironson), Alwin Pulinckx (Nurse/Angel), and Eelco Smits (Prior Walter) in Angels in America. (Photo: Richard Termine.)

Ivo van Hove’s provocative reimagining of Angels in America such an observation resonated with humorous irony. Due in part to the star-studded HBO miniseries, Angels is often associated with a spectacular winged angel crashing through a ceiling, an image that has become an indelible icon in US theatre history. More than twenty years after itpremiered, Angels in America appears in many major anthologies of drama, suggesting its theatrical landmark status. Each new production is “haunted,” to draw on Marvin Carlson’s useful analysis, by audience familiarity with the play’s text, previous productions, and the challenges associated with depicting the sprawling real and metaphysical spaces marking Kushner’s epic, seven-hour play.

Perhaps this is what made van Hove’s production for Toneelgroep Amsterdam so remarkable: performed in Dutch with English supertitles on the nearly bare stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, this Angels was stripped down, even essentialized to the human relationships at its core; 1980s rock music replaced spectacle with another kind of sensory experience, one of audible nostalgia and clarity. Van Hove’s production ran a “mere” five hours; the cuts were notable though intriguing, their felt absence only lending significance to the scenes that remained intact. Kushner himself was in the audience the night I attended the performance, providing tacit approval for those who might be concerned about the sanctity of the text and such radical re-envisioning.

Initial plans for van Hove’s production included just the kind of spectacle that often accompanies productions of Angels. In an interview on WNYC he describes a breakthrough that came as his production team revisited the diorama scene in Perestroika: “Perhaps [the play] is just about what’s in our minds. We imagine things to be. And actually, that’s what the theatre always should do. . . . Why not have the total illusion, the total freedom for the audience to think of where we are and to imagine everything yourself?” Longtime production designer Jan Versweyveld embraced these ideas, presenting a vast, open space with only a desk bearing two turntables and a speaker stage right from which David Bowie’s music punctuated key scenes. As Prior, Eelco Smits’s body writhed to “Let’s Dance” at the beginning of the second act of Millennium Approaches in grotesque choreography marking his physical decline. The music resonated within this vast emptiness, leaving plenty of room for the imagination to engage with the bodies that crossed our line of vision.

Kushner’s staging notes recommend rapid scene shifts when he calls for Angels to be “an actor-driven event.” Van Hove’s production heightened its fluidity by removing many props and set pieces. For example, there was no coffin at Sarah Ironson’s funeral and actors lay on the floor instead of hospital beds; even character-defining objects like Roy’s buzzing telephone were mimed by the actor (Hans Kesting). At the performance I attended audience members gasped when Belize transformed into Mr. Lies as Roeland Fernhout put on a sweater and rolled his shoulders back. Through such simple yet powerful storytelling, one delighted at the clashing of expectation and execution in such a well-known play.

Within this stark, even desolate theatrical landscape, absence (of text, objects, and spectacle) functioned as a defining component of the production, resonating as commentary on lives and memories lost. Van Hove’s invitation to the collective imagination called forth ghosts of other, spectacle-based productions, as...