Gamm Theatre offers a transcendent telling of Tony Kushner's ‘Angels in America: Part One'
The story revolves around his diagnosis and illness, but Prior's life serves as a launching pad for weighty discussions about liberalism, conservatism, and race relations during the Reagan years. And there is no shortage of philosophizing about how the past shapes the present. The play also finds parallels between Judaism and homosexuality, reminding us about how swiftly a fearful and divided nation marginalizes, stigmatizes, and ostracizes 'others.'
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It is no wonder that the play is long — seven-and-a-half-hours in total — and told over two separate performances: 'Part One: Millennium Approaches,' which runs through June 15, and 'Part Two: Perestroika,' which runs from Sept. 25 to Oct. 12. Both are directed by Brian McEleney, who knows his way around this work having played the pivotal role of Prior Walter in Trinity Repertory Company's acclaimed 1996 production.
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What is brilliant about this audaciously ambitious work is that it is at once imaginative and unpretentious, uncompromising and affable, and hard to watch but impossible to look away. What is particularly maddening is Kushner's constant intertwining of diatribes with dialogue, reality with drug- and disease-induced fantasy, and horror with humor.
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Also, most actors play multiple roles to demonstrate the elasticity of gender, social and cultural identities, as well as the implicitly theatrical nature of this work. And as our nation once again gravitates toward ignorance and intolerance regarding LGBTQ+ communities, this play is — as Hilton Als duly noted — necessary.
Director McEleney and his designers fully embrace the necessary nature of this work by having it drive the show's production values. The permanent set that dominates the Gamm Theatre stage, courtesy of Patrick Lynch, resembles the kind of filthy public restrooms in New York City's Central Park that hosted clandestine homosexual encounters in the mid-1980s, complete with sterile gray tiling tagged with profane graffiti and hate speech. The introduction of simple furnishings — in line with the playwright's call for a 'pared-down style of presentation' to make the show an 'actor-driven event' — serve to establish the various locations in which this three-act play takes place, but with the reminder of the illicitly and risk of homosexuality always in the background.
These scene-changing chairs and tables are brought onto and off of the stage while the previous scene is still taking place, which accentuates the intersecting lives of characters who have been touched by AIDS or by those infected by it. These include Prior's politically committed but not personally disconnected lover, Louis Ironson (Ben Steinfeld, whose powerful depiction of this guilt-ridden man is masterful); Roy Cohn, a toxic, high-profile prosecuting attorney and powerbroker who refuses to admit he is gay (a mesmerizing Tony Estrella); a closeted Mormon legal clerk (a superb Jeff Church, whose stiff posture and tailored suit (courtesy of designer David T. Howard) attempts but cannot contain this character's abundance of internal conflict); his emotionally unstable and Valium-addicted wife (Gabrielle McCauley, whose ability to phase in and out of her character's drug-induced revelations and humorous delusions (courtesy of lighting designer Jeff Adelberg) is dazzling); and an ex-drag queen named Belize (an always intriguing Rodney Witherspoon II).
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Some of the best and most truthful acting moments occur on the periphery of these scenes, as characters linger before leaving the stage. There we find McCauley's Harper paralyzed and in tears, Church's Joe lost in his personal pain, and Regen's Prior and Steinfeld's Louis reflecting on their respective futures. Even after the play's opening scene, in which a eulogy of an old woman is presented, the incredible Phyllis Kay as Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz stands frozen for a moment, overwhelmed by her own words.
Just when you think that the acting on the Gamm Theatre stage could not get any better than that recently on display in '
A sign by the theater box office offers a warning about the play's profanity, brief nudity, and disturbing subject matter. Missing is mention of how 'Angels in America' is a cautionary tale that has come to fruition, which may very well be why this play's production is a late add to the already completed 2024/2025 season.
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ANGELS IN AMERICA: PART ONE
Play by Tony Kushner. Directed by Brian McEleney. At the Gamm Theatre, 1245 Jefferson Blvd., Warwick, R.I. Runs through June 15. Tickets $70-$80, plus fees. 401-723-4266,
Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who formerly wrote for the Austin Chronicle. Connect with him
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NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room is Empty,' has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. 'A Boy's Own Story' was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' and Henry Green's 'Nothing.' 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' 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But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. 'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009. 'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.' In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. 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As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel 'Caracole.' 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote. Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.' A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal's 'The City and the Pillar' and James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room.' Classics such as William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' had 'rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,' according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others. White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' With 'A Boy's Own Story,' published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' and 'The Farewell Symphony,' some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in 'The Farewell Symphony,' could 'afford elusiveness.' But gays, 'easily spooked,' could not 'risk feigning rejection.' His other works included 'Skinned Alive: Stories' and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published 'City Boy,' a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and 'Our Young Man' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
Yahoo
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Edmund White, queer literature trailblazer, dead at 85
Trailblazing author Edmund White — a pioneer in queer literature — has died at age 85. Sign up for the to keep up with what's new in LGBTQ+ culture and entertainment — delivered three times a week straight (well…) to your inbox! On Wednesday, White's husband, Michael Carroll, said the author had suffered a "vicious stomach bug" that caused him to collapse, although the exact cause of his death is not clear, The New York Times reports. White was considered a courageous trailblazer for being candid about topics that were considered taboo at the time (and unfortunately still are, even today). Notably, he was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when its historic uprising took place. In April 2019, White recalled those experiences at Stonewall in his foreword to 2019's The Stonewall Reader. White had been in an open relationship with Carroll since 1995 (CNN), and they married in 2013. White had once opposed marriage for same-sex couples because he considered it assimilationist, but in 2012 he wrote that he became pro-marriage equality once he realized "how opposed to it the Christian right is in our country." White also was open about being a person living with HIV — even in the 1980s, when the taboo surrounding the virus was at an all-time high. In 1982, he helped found Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the first organizations addressing the AIDS epidemic. Over the years, he survived two strokes and a heart attack. Related: He was hailed as "the godfather of queer lit" by the Chicago Tribune, and the author's impact on gay literature was evident in his 1973 debut novel, Forgetting Elena, and the career-defining 1977 book The Joy of Gay Sex. He had just released a new book — The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir — in January. White's best-known works also included 1978's Nocturnes for the King of Naples, 1980's States of Desire, 1982's A Boy's Own Story, 1988's The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and 1997's The Farewell Symphony, to name a few. Beyond his work in fiction and self-referential nonfiction, White authored high-profile biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. The Genet biography was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, White received accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1983) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1993). Filmmaker Tiziano Sossi released a documentary in 2007, Edmund White: A Conversation in New York, in which the author was seen recalling legendary encounters with people like writer Truman Capote and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Related: White was born in Cincinnati and lived in Michigan, Illinois, and Texas after his parents divorced when he was 7. He attended the University of Michigan and moved to New York City after graduating in 1962, taking a job at Time-Life Books. The experience of observing Stonewall was life-changing, he recalled. 'Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda,' he wrote in the memoir City Boy. Shortly afterward, he quit Time-Life and devoted himself to writing and teaching. He was a member of the gay writers' salon known as the Violet Quill, along with Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, and others. In 1980-1981, the group would meet to read and critique one another's work. Picano died in March at age 81. White collaborated with Charles Silverstein on the original edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, and Picano joined Silverstein in writing subsequent editions. "While some of his peers tried to separate their sexuality from their work, Mr. White embraced the term 'gay writer,'' the Times notes. 'If I'd been straight, I would have been an entirely different person," he wrote in City Boy. "I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.' Additional reporting by Trudy Ring
