Angels in America
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Angels in America Part One Millennium Approaches Part Two Perestroika Belvoir presents Angels in America A Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part One Millennium Approaches Part Two Perestroika By TONY KUSHNER Director EAMON FLACK This production of Angels in America opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Saturday 1 June 2013. It transferred to Theatre Royal, Sydney, on Thursday 18 July 2013. Set Designer With MICHAEL HANKIN The Angel / Emily Costume Designer PAULA ARUNDELL MEL PAGE Louis Ironson Lighting Designer MITCHELL BUTEL NIKLAS PAJANTI Roy M. Cohn Associate Lighting Designer MARCUS GRAHAM ROSS GRAHAM Harper Amaty Pitt Composer AMBER McMAHON ALAN JOHN Prior Walter Sound Designer LUKE MULLINS STEVE FRANCIS Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz / Hannah Assistant Director Porter Pitt / Ethel Rosenberg / Aleksii SHELLY LAUMAN ROBYN NEVIN Fight Director Belize / Mr Lies SCOTT WITT DEOBIA OPAREI American Dialect Coach Joseph Porter Pitt PAIGE WALKER-CARLTON ASHLEY ZUKERMAN Stage Manager All other characters are played by MEL DYER the company. Assistant Stage Manager ROXZAN BOWES Angels in America is presented by arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, on behalf of Josef Weinberger Ltd of London. Angels in America was commissioned by and received its premiere at the Eureka Theatre, San Francisco, in May 1991. Also produced by Centre Theatre Group/ Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles (Gordon Davidson, Artistic Director/Producer). Produced in New York at the Walter Kerr Theatre by Jujamcyn Theatres, Mark Taper Forum with Margo Lion, Susan Quint Gallin, Jon B. Platt, The Baruch-Frankel-Viertel Group and Frederick Zollo in association with Herb Alpert. PRODUCTION THANKS José Machado, Jonathon Street and Positive Life NSW; Tia Jordan; Aku Kadogo; The National Association of People with HIV Australia. Thank you from Eamon: Neil Armfield, Tom Conroy, Chris Edmund, Matt Lutton, Brandon Martignago, Kirsty McGregor, Matt Whittet, and the Fitzroy Street household (ring-ins included, you know who you are). BDeObia Oparei PhotoGraphY Brett Boardman DESIGN Alphabet Studio 1 are only to be encountered once I finished the first draft of Millennium the plunge is made. Introductory Approaches in 1988, and the first material is for reluctant dawdlers and draft of Perestroika in 1990. So lag-behinds. A dusty grammar school Angels in America is approximately usher and a sub-sub-librarian take twenty-two years old, and I’m Writer’s Note many pages to tell you everything precisely fifty-six. Tony Kushner known about whales before each This edition incorporates changes From the revised edition of Angels in America, 2013 steps aside (well, before each dies, I’ve made to Angels over the actually) to permit you to hazard the past several years. Most of these extremely perilous, mind-, heart- and changes are to be found in Part Two, Should plays have introductions? their programs, on the way to their molecule-altering voyage that is seats, audiences passed through Perestroika, which is now closer I started writing in the early 1980s, Moby-Dick, in the course of which lobby displays in which wall murals to complete than it’s ever been. at a moment in American theatre voyage you realise that neither the related historical truths behind the I can’t quite bring myself to write when introductions and other usher nor the sub-sub, nor you, fiction to which they were about to that it’s complete. Since the day I presumably helpful apparatuses nor for that matter the crew of the be exposed. I was enamoured of finished the first draft of Perestroika, – incredibly detailed historical Pequod nor their lunatic captain this extra-theatrical informational I’ve always known that it’s one timelines, research documentation knows thing one about what a bombardment. As a young of those plays that refuses to be and theoretical notation – announced whale is. When it’s a damp, drizzly playwright, I loved reading Shaw’s entirely in harmony with itself. Some the unapologetic embrace by November in your soul, Ishmael tells prefaces, and I looked forward to plays want to sprawl, some plays narrative theatre-makers of an us, plunge in without preparation! having plays of my own to preface. contain expansiveness, roughness, intellectual and political seriousness The sea awaits! I felt only slightly guilty observing wildness and incompleteness in that had previously been at home theatre-goers diligently, frantically If you’re still reading this and haven’t their DNA. These plays may, if in European theatres and among trying to absorb this embarrassment skipped ahead to the first scene, it they’re not misunderstood and American experimental theatre of supplementary illumination before could be because you strenuously dismissed as failed attempts at artists. Dramaturgs arrived for the the house lights dimmed and the disagree with me about introductions, tidiness, speak more powerfully first time on the staffs of not-for-profit play began. or you’re unconvinced or simply about what’s expansive, rough, wild regional theatres; with the advent of agnostic on the subject. You may be and incomplete in human life than production dramaturgy in America I’ve changed, and in recent years asking yourself why I’m continuing plays with tauter, more efficient, more came a new deluge of prefatory and I’ve grown averse to anything that to write this introduction deploring cleanly constructed narratives. introductory information, served up intrudes itself upon an innocent introducing – a reasonable question. Millennium Approaches has a taut, to the casts of plays from enormous audience and the play it’s about to I suppose it’s because a good deal efficient narrative, and I’ve never seen black ring binders as they sat around watch, or an innocent reader about of time has passed since I wrote any need to change it. In this edition a table in the first days of rehearsal, to read a play for the first time. If Angels, and, while I have no desire it’s substantially the same play that and then to audiences in their theatre the playwright has done his or her to introduce the two plays of which was first published nearly twenty programs. Formerly these programs job, if the production team and it’s comprised, I feel I ought to make years ago, although as a result of the were slim pamphlets containing cast are doing theirs, the text of the mention of what’s changed. And work on both parts of Angels for the lists of the production’s personnel, play should be sufficient unto itself, maybe I haven’t changed as much as Signature Theatre’s 2010 revival, a short biographies of a few of these, complete within itself. I hoped, or as much as I ought. restaurant ads, and if needed, place few minor alterations were made to it. The moment a play begins, or a I began writing these plays – I thought and time settings; staff dramaturgs Far more significantly, I discovered reader takes in the words of the at the time that I was writing a single were now instructed to jam-pack in Perestroika what I believe to be script on the first page, is as exciting play – in 1987, when I was thirty- programs with poetry, imagery, a missing thread in its narrative, and scary as any plunge into the one years old. The AIDS epidemic critical theory and facts, messages the substructural space for which, I ocean ought to be. Disappointment, was in its sixth year, the Reagan from the playwright, director and realised, I’d laid in long before I knew bewilderment, outrage or great terror, administration in its seventh. It was artistic director. Before opening how to make use of it. In this version, pity and joy may follow, but these a terrifying and galvanizing time. 02 03 with a little help from my friends Angels outlasts me, I hope it will and a very long preview period, continue to be entertaining and of that thread has been woven in. I interest and use to people for years won’t specify to which moments I’m to come. I hope there’ll be people for referring, because calling attention to years to come. it would undermine the effort made I’m writing this introduction the day to integrate the new material. Of before America goes to the polls course there are two other versions of to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Perestroika in print, and anyone with Obama for president. So I’m writing sufficient time and interest can make this from the place from which it comparisons, but most people have seems to me I’ve always written, better things to do with their time. perched on the knife’s edge of terror Life, after all, is always shorter than Ashley Zukerman and hope. It’s familiar enough, though we think. today the edge is sharper than it’s I think a lot more about mortality ever been, and the two worlds of light at fifty-six than I did at thirty-one. and darkness it divides seem vaster, At fifty-six, I’m more certain of my respectively more brilliant and more own mortality, as it presses nearer, abysmal, more extremely opposed and much more uncertain about the than ever before. future existence of my species than Whatever tomorrow brings, the future I was when I started writing Angels. – I’m reasonably certain of this – Time has vindicated some of the remains indeterminate. plays’ conflictedly optimistic spirit; progress has been made. Angels Tony Kushner is not teleological, its apocalyptic 5 November 2012 forebodings notwithstanding. As the dead old rabbi says in Perestroika (in Introduction from Angels in America: a scene relegated in this edition to A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Theatre the appendix), hope, when it can’t be Communications Group, New York, 2013 discovered in certainty, can almost Robyn Nevin always be located in indeterminacy, and Angels is a hopeful work.