(Photo by Danisha Crosby)
Round House Theatre and Olney Theatre Center’s 25th anniversary production of Angels in America continues with Part II: Perestroika, where things get a little more messy and a little more mystical. The result is a flawlessly acted, emotionally affecting production.
This tale of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s picks up abruptly where Millennium Approaches left off: Pryor (Tom Story) has been visited by an angel (Dawn Urusla), who calls him to be a prophet (and produces quite the orgasmic entrance and exit to boot). Pryor’s reluctance to take on this role culminates in a final face-off in heaven, and provides the play’s most mythological and fantastical storyline. Kushner can get too metaphysical for his own good, but it’s a great opportunity for Story to demonstrate his character’s inner strength and stamina while still generating laughs along the way.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Pryor’s ex Louis (Jonathan Bock) is in the midst of a messy affair with closeted Mormon law clerk Joe (Thomas Keegan). The couple has no easy way out from their complicated, guilt-ridden lives, and neither character gets left off the hook. Joe’s mentally ill wife Harper (Kimberly Gilbert) is left to fend for herself, but Joe’s mother (Sarah Marshall) has made her way from Salt Lake City to try to do what she can with her.
Harper, with Pryor as an audience, has one of the production’s most unique scenes: an educational video in the New York Mormon temple, filled with stock characters, comes to life with characters that begin to resemble the people in Harper’s own life. It’s an impressive trick, and one of the production’s many interesting uses of multimedia. But Perestroika‘s less flashy moments are just as heartening, like seeing Gilbert give her character the quiet strength to finally move on from her shattered past.
Marshall’s take on Joe’s mother produces one of the show’s most nuanced and surprisingly intriguing characters. On the showier front, Mitchell Hebert continues to mesmerize as the unredeemable Roy Cohn, now in the thick of suffering from AIDS and poised to die under the watchful gaze of his vision of Ethel Rosenberg (Marshall again, creepy and luminous) here to haunt him. He’s well-matched by Jon Hudson Odom as the unsympathetic nurse Belize, who serves as friend and voice of reason to Pryor (as well as foil to the often insufferable Louis) throughout Perestroika.
Perestroika runs even longer than Millennium Approaches, and even if it isn’t as dramatically tidy, it’s no less moving; its performances are compelling enough to keep audience members from checking their watches. Kushner’s closing epilogue is preachy but poignant: these characters will be heard, and 25 years later, they still have plenty to say to a contemporary audience.
Angels in America Part II: Perestroika runs through October 30 at Round House. Tickets are available here.
