Student produced 'Angels' makes powerful debut in Hepburn Zoo

Author: Josh Axelrod

There can be no question, this past weekend's staging of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" was an impressive and delightful effort on the part of first-time director Brian Siegele '07 and his young cast.

Throughout its three hour running time, the play follows the disintegration of two couples' lives as they deal with the onset of AIDS, their religious beliefs, love, homosexuality and the social climate near the millennium's end. The first couple, Joe Pitt (MacLeod Andrews '07.5) and Harper Pitt (Stephanie Strohm '08), do not relate to each other except through their Mormon beliefs. Contrasted with them is the life of the homosexual relationship between Prior Walter (Bill Army '08) and Louis Ironson (Rishabh Kashyap '08), men separated by religion and their abilities to love, but somehow more coherent as a single unit than the Pitts.

Harper suffers from depression and delusions, from guilt and from the oppression of knowing that her husband isn't attracted to her. Joe, an overworked clerk, wants to leave New York for a better job and hopes to take his unraveling wife with him. But there is no intimacy between the two - Harper's offer to try giving her husband a blowjob appals him - and we eventually find out that Joe is gay. This tense situation, full of the nuances and technicalities of adult relationships, was performed with a great deal of subtlety by Andrews and Strohm. While Strohm's character walked in and out of delusions, meeting the mysterious travel agent Mr. Lies (Vinson Cunningham '06) or coming into contact with the flamboyant Prior Walter, she remained, nevertheless, understated and believable. Even as Andrews walked out on her and we were left to expect an outburst of heightened anger, the play turned deftly to her numbing dream of fleeing to Antarctica.

Likewise, Army's performance as Prior Walter was one to remember. Flamboyant, loving and intense, he waltzed through the scenes with a kind of ease that no other actor was quite capable of conveying. Even on his deathbed, confronted with the coming of the Angel (Laura Harris '07), Prior Walter's swings from intense mania to calm suffering never felt overdone or overacted.

And because subtlety seemed the key for the night, we should certainly applaud Kashyap's efforts as Louis Ironson, the play's central character, whose part is so subtle and large and complicated that it is impossible to imagine a perfect performance. And yet, as Army's guilt-ridden lover, he was, in the very least, convincing. Dealing with his own problems when facing death, his conflicted feelings on love and the complexities faced by Andrews in his relationship with Strohm, Kashyap was called upon to bear witness to nearly all of the play's unravelings until, in the end, he finds his new beginning with Andrews.

On the fringes of all of these relationships is what might be called the play's older foundation. Roy Cohn (Alec Strum '08), is a lawyer dying of AIDS who has been a mentor for Andrews and has finally come to his end, begging Andrews to take a job in Washington to save him from being disbarred. Like the other relationships in the play, the complexity of the situation cannot be lost. Strum has become the father Andrews never had, but he's Jewish, a closet homosexual and dishonest. The intense respect and love between the two men is tragic and poignant, and Strum's performance is another that should be noted for its heart-wrenching exploration of a man paying for a life full of bold and bad decisions.

Taking on more roles than anyone else in the play, we cannot forget Meg Young '07 who was brilliant as the Rabbi, Hannah Pitt, Henry and Ethel Rosenburg. Not only was she responsible for playing two male parts, but she existed on two opposite sides of the religious spectrum with her portrayals of the good Mormon Hannah Pitt and the cynical Rabbi who opens the play with the depressing outlook that as the older generation dies, all the connections between America and the old world are being lost and forgotten.

Though the ZOO space limited the play's grandiose aims at times - the 40 scene changes were sometimes mind-boggling and distracting - Siegle's ambitious production made for one of the better Zoo shows performed this year, combining elements of tragedy and comedy so flawlessly that it often evoked the true problems of our American lives.