Rome, Teatro Valle, 20 February 2025
Review by Sergio Lo Gatto
ANGELS (NOT JUST) IN AMERICA. A MASTERPIECE ON CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Contemporary theater got used us to long duration (e.g. Nekrosius, Brook etc.), and yet you have rarely have been spending over seven hours seeing such an intense and dense show. During two parts, eight acts and numberless space-time segments Tony Kushner’s masterpiece Angels in America embodies a whole humanity in eight key-characters. Such a density is challenging to translate into a review. Because this is not just a show, it’s an epic journey.
The story is divided into two complex parts: Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, which reference a quickly dispersing imagery. Kushner employs the smart strategy of allegory; each character is related to a conceptual abstraction, so “signifier” and “signified” are represented so sharply they are impossible to separate.
1986. The 30 year-old gay Prior Walter finds himself ill with AIDS; his boyfriend, insecure and neurotic Louis Ironson, unable to deal with Prior’s disease, ultimately abandons him. He meets and dates Joe Pitt, a closeted gay Mormon lawyer struggling with his own sexuality and ruining his marriage with psychological unstable Harper. Joe works for Roy Cohn, a character inspired by the real American attorney involved in investigating US communist activity during the McCarthy era. Cohn is a closeted gay lawyer haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (suspected communist executed during McCarthy’s administration thanks to a Cohn’s legal action). Revealing that he has contracted AIDS, he insists it is liver cancer in order to preserve his reputation. Ultimately Belize, a black ex transvestite nurse who rescues Prior, redeems Cohn and holds Louis responsible, ending to be the ultimate solver. The story jumps freely on space-time springs, passing from reality to hallucinations, even showing divine apparition (Prior, contacted by an angel, will become a sort of prophet) and going perfectly along the play’s subheading: “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” Thus in the complete title you get everything you need.
Kushner’s play, winner of Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award in 1992, can be read from dozen different points of view. One of them, a sort of poetic “black book” in which you find names and surnames of the founders of US republican thought as a symbol of Occidental conservatism. This “American way” is told all along the play as a virus that spreads undisturbed and attacks the reality seizing the sense of justice, of freedom, of belonging to a civic society. And it does in the name of an unconceivable greed that tramples over any principle. On the opposite – and in opposition – there is a progressive, revolutionary thought, the gay-lesbian community’s dismay standing before the rising of AIDS, represented here just as a biblical plague. A massive theme covered with great and sharp irony and, moreover, with a metaphorical clearness valid both as an historical document and a poetical manifest. Kushner’s Jewish origins and their moral print are cleverly criticized all along the text, which is able to keep such a numerous themes together thanks to a really amazing dialogue style and a visionary irony that never loses (nor make lose) the rhythm.
The company Elfo/Teatridithalia, founded in 1973 by Gabriele Salvatores, Ferdinando Bruni, Elio De Capitani, Cristina Crippa, Luca Toracca, Ida Marinelli and Thalia Istikopoulou, started working on first Italian Angels in America production in 1996. Due to copyright matters the project slipped into 2003. Even before they could call such a huge production possible, directors and actors had already began to work. A relatively poor budget (rehearsals and debut could not be run in the same theatre) brought the directors, with stage designer Carlo Sala, to a smart solution: the video-projection. Every dizzying change of setting is just indicated by a simple and eloquent projection on massive white walls surrounding the stage and by an explicative subtitle (e.g. “Cohn’s office” or “Central Park, night” or even “Harper’s mind”). This is it. Everything else is strictly in the hands of a group of amazing actors. In the play’s notes, Kushner himself assigns more than a role to each actor (often both male and female characters) and specifies that the visual effects could be evident, but must be amazingly realistic; a very pure Elizabethan Theater approach which has always followed by Teatro dell’Elfo also in past productions.
This Elio De Capitani/Ferdinando Bruni’s staging, thanks to a brilliant performance offered by the actor as individuals and moreover as “ensemble”, really makes an allegory of contemporary society out of this play. De Capitani himself, in a talk with the public, said that he is ecstatic about presenting Angels in America (set in New York in the mid-80’s) in today’s Italy. The topics, that generally discuss the drift of democracy, human rights and free-thinking, are in fact valid as a warning for a desperate cultural situation such as the one Italy is been living since three years.
Sergio Lo Gatto writes theater and performing arts on Italian daily webzine Krapp’s Last Post (www.klpteatro.it)
ANGELS IN AMERICA
by Tony Kushner
cast: Elio De Capitani, Ida Marinelli, Elena Russo Arman, Cristina Crippa, Cristian Maria Giammarini, Edoardo Ribatto, Fabrizio Matteini, Umberto Petranca, Sara Borsarelli
stage designer: Carlo Sala
costumes: Ferdinando Bruni
suond: Giuseppe Marzoli
video: Francesco Frongia
light design Nando Frigerio
a show by Ferdinando Bruni and Elio De Capitani
Tagged: Guest, Italy, Teatro Valle Rome