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.
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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.
