Philadelphia was a basically a simplified and homogenized awards grab that played on audience sympathy and presented mainstream America's first "gay" martyr: Tom Hanks' "gay" Andrew Beckett (who the film would have you believe was "gay," because he tenderly kissed Antonio Banderas for a few seconds and danced with Banderas in his and his Halloween costumes at some point, I guess--or maybe that was a military ball, I can't remember) from a screenplay by Ron Nyswaner (who was recognized by several awards body for the Jonathan Demme-directed script, including the AMPAS; he went on to write Soldier's Girl, a Showtime original movie about a queer military man murdered by his fellow soldiers under President Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy).
Longtime Companion was the first feature film to deal with AIDS, an ensemble piece that details the lives of several gay men and how they cope with the disease during its early years, as well as the inordinate amount of deaths in its wake (it also features a young and super hot Dermot Mulroney playing the very fey, fun loving John). HBO's Tidy Endings was one of the first specialty cable films to deal with its subject matter. Steve Buscemi appeared in Parting Glances as one of the first movie characters to have AIDS. It's My Party is an unfortunately low-budget affair with Eric Roberts as a gay man with AIDS who decides to depart his life surrounded by his friends and as good of a time as they can muster. Kids was a brash example of the carelessness regarding sex and the disease amongst a group of heterosexual teens and was one of the first movies to deal with subject matter head-on, which didn't involve homosexuality.
Naturally, American Theatre was braver and riskier dealing with the subject matter in the early stages of the disease. Most notably was cofounder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, once attached with Barbra Streisand as director, will now be made into a movie by Glee creator Ryan Murphy starring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts. Notably preceding Heart by just a hair was William M. Hoffman's As Is. Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (a much better play than movie) details sex in the nineties for a horny gay man, before advances in medicine made it a manageable disease. Terrance McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! (also a better play than that dreadful movie) was a touching and superbly written relational drama about an assortment of gay men where AIDS was only an aspect of the story, not the driving force. These plays, along with the musical Rent, are just a drop in the bucket in theatrical pieces dealing with AIDS.
But, the play that perhaps strived to put the final word on the matter, above anything else that had been said up until that point, was Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Not only does it have a subtitle (A Gay Fantasia on National Themes), but Kushner broke it up into two separate plays, part I (Millennium Approaches) and part II (Perestroika), each traditionally staged on subsequent evenings or the same weekend day, and further broken up by two intermissions each. I recently watched UCLA Theatre's production directed by Mel Shapiro, featuring two different casts for each part. The stage is minimally decorated, generously peppered with white and red stage tape like bird tracks displayed on full view from the perspective of the raked house, and many scrims are rolled out often crudely reflecting imagery denoting particular settings like cityscapes and parks.
The story revolves around Roy Cohn (played by Soren Royer-McHugh and an angry David Tucker, respectively in parts I and II), a closeted attorney and right-hand man of Joseph McCarthy, whose work led to the unjust executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as well as the wife's erred conviction. He's approaching the end of his bout with AIDS, vehemently attributing his death solely to liver cancer. An empty soul, he was an emotional failure of a man and the play spares no punches depicting him as wretched, power hungry and lacking most qualities related to human goodness. He uses his connections to score in the early trials of AZT, which results parallel Lucille Ball stealing the aorta from that kid around the same time: kind of a waste of resources.
Two of the other main story lines involve gay couple Louis Ironson (Dyson Posey and the standout Brett Donaldson) and Prior Walter (a nuanced Connor Howe and comical and emotional Cameron Kalajian), the former of which struggles with the latter's illness, as well as closeted Mormon and Cohn protege Joe Pitt and his marriage to wife Harper (Lyssa Samuel and Phoebe Singer, both blessed with well-trained voices).
The plays themselves are fantasias alright, taking all artistic licence to indulge any whim Kushner feels like exploring, whether it be copulating with an actual angel or finding solace in Antarctica. (It should be said that the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg is an elegant, haunting touch; perhaps my favorite element of the plays.) All the while, he examines the various stages of social progress and how that affects gay men, often making them a product of their times, from the ambitious and self-loathing Cohn (and film director's Clint Eastwood's recent J. Edgar may serve as a companion piece to early/mid 20th-century closeted gays) to the successful, yet questioning Joe to the out, yet loathsomely unfaithful partner of Prior. Louis is a conundrum. While Prior's ailment at an unforgivably early point in his life threatens to cut the prospects of their love short, Louis copes with his lover's gradual deterioration and difficult nature by finding sex quickly somewhere else with the first stranger who comes along, a relationally handicapped Joe with major religious baggage and a wife. If anything is clear, the play proffers that we choose our partners, based on our needs, whether they be for the short-term or long-haul, knowing full well what we're getting ourselves into. Kushner also makes continual racial, political, and religious references lining the edges of the play's main themes.
Angels is like a existential snapshot carefully orchestrated by Annie Leibovitz in the mid-to-late 1980's United States during AIDS from the perspective of a gay man. An oppressed minority, who had relatively little time to develop who they were openly in society, now had to contend with a fatal disease that was still a death sentence (with little hope in sight) and placed the very essence of male homosexuality on trial.
Being college theatre, UCLA's version doesn't set any bars in production value. And, I may be mistaken, but I swear I saw hints of Pacino and Streep mimicry. But, the play(s) themselves, gleefully abstract and pensively long, aren't the easiest to coherently and efficiently relay to audiences. The theatre department should be commended for taking on such an aloof play and making it out with few casualties. It closed yesterday after a two-week run.
0 comments:
Post a Comment