Perestroika: (noun)
the policy or practice of restructuring or reforming the economic and political system. (...) perestroika originally referred to increased automation and labor
efficiency, but came to entail greater awareness of economic markets and
the ending of central planning.
Perestroika: (Definitive Noun)
The second and concluding part of Tony Kusher's revelatory theater piece, Angels in America.
Last
night I wished I had someone to hug and talk to and scream with.
Perestroika knocked me the fuck out. I don't have the proper words to
fully explain it.
|
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, February 2018 |
Angels was written and
workshopped in Los Angeles and I saw it at the Mark Taper Forum, before
it went to London and New York the first time in 1991 / 1992. And the
end of the play (part 2) is bittersweet. A defiant Prior Walter vows to
live on and beat AIDS.
When I saw it in 1992, Stephen
Spinella issued that as hollow scream against a killer that we all knew
would beat him as it beat so many of our friends.
Last
night Andrew Garfield gave that same line as a quiet promise that turned
out to be true for hundreds of thousands of my peers and friends - and
heartbreakingly false for thousands more.
Last night, I
sat there and listened and cried. And then laughed and stood up and
applauded with the theater through multiple curtain calls.
And then looked around, wiped my eyes and thought, "
fuck me" - because I lacked the even internal words to emotionally explain what just happened.
I
really though nothing could ever touch that first impression of Angels
in America. The perfection of Stephen Spinella, Ron Leibman, Kathleen
Chalfant and Joe Mantello is like a delicate, flawless memory frozen in
time. This cast didn't change those memories, but did bring me back to
that place - that momentary balance where good and terrible hang in the
scales and we scream and push down on a side that isn't going the way we
want.
This cast hues close to the original in
delivery, but some how makes it their own. Sure, there are moments that
aren't (yet) perfect. Andrew Garfield is playing a caricature of gay
may, but that
is how the part is written. And Lee Pace, amazing
though he is, still needs to work into this cast - Russel Tovey was
their Joe Harper in London and you see them struggling to react to Pace
and his choices. But Nathan Lane blew out my worries as Roy Cohn.
I fear I am going to see it again and again. I only saw the first Angels in American once (it
is
a 2 part show, each part about 3 1/2 hours). But before I couldn't go
back because I couldn't let me heart break again. Now I would go back
because I want that same heart mended. In this case, time has healed a
thousand wounds.
The
amazing cast: Amanda Lawrence, Lee Pace, Denise Gough (Harper!), Nathan
Lane, Andrew Garfield, James McArdle (Louis!), Nathan Stweart-Jarret
(Belize!), Susan Brown - the body stocking people did.. well you have to
see it.