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'Angels' flies into FLC
November 8, 2005
By Patricia Miller
Arts & Entertainment Editor

The Fort Lewis College Department of Theatre presents "Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches," the Pulitzer-Prize and Tony Award winning play by Tony Kushner. The play will be preformed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $10/$5, Main Stage, Theatre Building, 247-7089.

init(); First catch your play, a director's handbook might advise before it said anything else. Because no matter what creativity, acting, music and sets you lavish on your production, if the play's a dud, camouflage or distraction is the best you can hope for.

FLC director Ginny A. Davis has caught a beauty in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches," which opened Thursday to a three-quarters full house.

Beside the Broadway production, which came out two weeks after President Clinton was inaugurated, many people saw the HBO version directed by Mike Nichols with Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson and Al Pacino.

It's 1985 in the first of Kushner's two plays (FLC has plans to mount the second in the spring); the first victims are getting AIDS and the country's run by the Reagans.
The play centers around two couples who share the same problem: Is it all right to leave your lover when you no longer fancy him or her, even if the abandoned lover may be sickening for death?

The smart, likable Prior Walter - a character who would have been plausible as the sixth lead in "Friends"- is one of the first AIDS victims. Josh Martin, a FLC drama veteran, plays him with style, anguish and comic lines spitting through his sorrow.
Prior like many of the characters in "Angels," is only a few years older than the students who play them which adds to the convincing performances.

Prior is left by his lover, Louis - Stephen Juhl, another experienced college actor who makes the most of a beautifully written part. In his anguish, Walter meets his ancestors and angels.

Geoff Johnson shines as a standup comic of an ancestor and in another part as a rigidly closeted Mormon who, with part of him, wants to leave his agoraphobic, Valium-addicted wife Harper, played touchingly by Desiree Henderson. Most of the players undertake two or three roles.

Ben Cooper delights in the part of Roy Cohn, based on the real political figure, a hateful powerbroker who stays in the closet because "Homosexuals are men who have zero clout." Cohn brags that he's the reason Ethel Rosenberg was executed. And who pops up by the ghost of Rosenberg, (Jill Lee Davis) who may or may not have called the ambulance for Cohn when he collapses with AIDS.

Joseph Martinez doubles as a taunting angel on roller skates who's always offering Harper another bottle of pills and Belize, a black gay nurse, the most compassionate person in the play.

Nathan Lee, who is new to FLC, has designed his set simply, going for a theme of whirling. Harper twirls in her LaZboy, the seat of her misery, Prior and Louis's bed whirls on and off stage, broken ladders descend from the ceiling. It all takes place before a vibrant background that's most often blue and the angel voices vibrate mysteriously from the roof.

The most disappointing part of the production is the opening.
The action begins as a rabbi bewails America's function as a melting pot. She, as played by Jill Lee Davis, wants her people to remain a cohesive group - thoroughly unmelted. Her accent makes her hard to understand, and her relation to the rest of the play remains foggy in this production. The same goes for the bag woman on the streets of New York (Allison Wiest), but because Davis has caught her cast, and us, such a beauty of a play, minor perplexities don't matter.

Catch this play while it's in town