You have to admire the ambition of Invictus Theatre Company in climbing the theatrical mountain that is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This epic and award-winning early-’90s play, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is broken up in two halves and has a running time of nearly 7 hours (which includes four 10-minute intermissions).
You can see Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika over successive days of the run or see the entirety of Angels in America as part of a marathon session on select Saturdays. It’s a sizable investment of time, but one of intense intimacy thanks to Invictus Theatre’s close confines in the Windy City Playhouse.
This proximity proves to be truly rewarding in director Charles Askenaizer’s reexamination of Angels in America, unquestionably a major landmark of LGBTQ theater. And as an artistic response to the height of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, Angels in America also serves as an important time capsule of the era’s fear, anger and loss.
Although some of the spectacle hinted at in thescript is understandably not fully realized (no flying angel on wires here), Invictus Theatre’s Angels in America does feature a strong cast of eight who all embrace the humor and drama found in their many juicy roles. And since the work has so much gender-bending casting written into it (wonderfully assisted for Invictus with the astute period and dreamworld work of costume designer Jessie Gowens and wig/makeup designer Hannah Andruss), Angels in America can feel defiant for our times when so many right-wing and authoritarian voices are openly attacking drag and the very existence of trans people.
Set mainly in New York in the mid-1980s, Angels in America tackles a sprawling number of topics on a global and a personal-is-political scale. With both fictional and factual characters, Kushner has crafted a heady mix of ideas that emphasize how interconnected we all truly are, despite the many tribal differences and identities outlined at the start.
Angels in America mainly focuses on Prior Walter (Ryan Hake), a former drag queen who shares the bad news that he’s been diagnosed with AIDS with his lover, Louis Ironson (Grant Carriker). Already grieving the recent loss of his Jewish immigrant grandmother, Louis can’t cope with more impending sickness and death in his life and soon abandons Prior.
Unlike prior AIDS-era stage works like The Normal Heart, As Is and Falsettos, this HIV-positive disclosure in Angels in America does not bring this central gay couple closer together. As Prior grieves the end of his relationship, he also starts to experience mysterious and prophetic visions.
Another Angels character dealing with AIDS is the real-life right-wing Republican/McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn (also recently dramatized in the 2024 film The Apprentice as the morally repugnant mentor of the current felon in chief). As Cohn, actor Michael D. Graham voraciously sinks his dramatic teeth into Kushner’s theatrically grandiose version of a contradictory man who angrily refuses to acknowledge his homosexuality.
Kushner’s fascination with Mormonism (officially The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) as a home-grown U.S. religion is also heavily built into the DNA of Angels in America. Plenty of drama comes with the married Mormon couple of the Cohn law clerk protege Joseph Pitt (Joe Bushell) and his agoraphobic, pill-popping wife Harper (Anne Trodden). Joseph’s Salt Lake City-based mother, Hannah (Renae Stone), also inserts herself into the drama after receiving a troubling late night phone call from her son.
There’s also crucial dramatic support from Belize (Miguel Long), who is Prior’s close friend and former drag colleague. Belize also has to endure some shocking racism in the play in his job as a nurse to Cohn.
Rounding out the cast is Nicki Rossi, whose many roles include Prior’s nurse, a Mormon diorama pioneer woman and The Angel. Rossi is both wonderfully ethereal and aggressive as The Angel, who famously appears at the end of Part One proclaiming Prior to be a prophet.
This ensemble is more than up to the challenges of Kushner’s complex political and floridly verbose script. Some might find it all a bit too much (not to mention far too coincidental at how all these characters meet and intersect). But Kushner makes it all work since so many scenes are tipped off as dreams, drug hallucinations and spiritual revelations.
It’s also touching to find parallels between divergent characters, like in moments where the emotionally abandoned Hannah and Prior both find each other on the “threshold of revelation.” Or to see the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (another of Renae Stone’s many roles) taking a conflicted interest in Cohn’s approaching death.
Director Askenaizer and the production design team crucially keep things apace. This is helped in part by the unit set of designer Kevin Rolfs, who has created an environmental space suggesting a construction site to a damaged courthouse. Sound designer PetterWahlbäck has also created an impressive aural landscape that punches up the spectral sequences.
That’s not to say that there isn’t room for improvement. With such a confined stage space, director Askenaizer often deploys cast and crew members to intrude upon the conclusions of ongoing scenes to start setting up the scenery for the next dramatic moment. Though lighting designer Brandon Wardell keeps the focus firmly on the performers who are still acting, the shadowy movement of those pulling and pushing set pieces into place can still be distracting.
There are also other staging choices that are questionable. In the opening monologues of each part, Renae Stone’s wonky accent work and screechy delivery of both a rhapsodizing rabbi and an outraged Soviet speaker billed as “the oldest living Bolshevik” come off more as moments to endure rather than to contemplate. Stone is on much more firm footing with her other roles.
Projectionist designer G. “Max” Maxin IV also does illuminating work, particularly with textual moments to establish time and place, or to delve into the fantastical with flaming Hebrew letters or the swirling cosmos. But as someone who grew up in the Salt Lake Valley, I did not understand why Maxin chose to illustrate one Millennium Approaches scene set in the metropolis of Salt Lake City with what looked like an image of Southern Utah (national parks like Bryce Canyon or Zion are 200-plus miles away).
Though now much more of a period piece that it originally was when it emerged in the early 1990s, Angels in America remains very much in a political dialogue with recent history and what is happening in the U.S. This is especially noticeable when you contrast how characters react to how AIDS personally affects them in the play, and contrasting it to the many stories that emerged amid the deadly fallout of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
It’s also very depressing to see how politically prescient Kushner was in Angels in America. A brief scene in Millennium Approaches features a Republican operative talking about the party’s long game to systematically kill off reproductive rights and dismantle affirmative action. This was clearly written as a warning by Kushner, but has now become an upsetting reality.
Angels in America ends on a hopeful note, which is not too cloying because protease inhibitors were about to become available to HIV-positive patients about three years after the play’s 1993 Broadway debut. This medical cocktail of pills would help to make HIV/AIDS into more of a manageable disease rather than its ominous reputation back then as an automatic death sentence.
But in another sense, Angels in America serves as a rallying cry for Invictus Theatre audiences to do their part to fight for a better future. The political landscape is extremely fraught in the U.S. right now, but we all need to especially take heed of Prior’s admonition that “the great work begins.”
Invictus Theatre Company’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes consisting of Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika respectively run in repertory through Sept. 20 and Sept. 21 at the Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park Road. Tickets are $30 Mondays and $45 Fridays-Sundays. Visit invictustheatreco.com for the exact show schedule and for more information.