Ideas May Seem Quaint, But This Production Excels

The America depicted in Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America, Millenium Approaches,” was terrifying at the time. One character worries about the hole in the ozone layer, another reveals how the government is secretly controlled by shady lawyers, another is dying of AIDS, and Ronald Reagan looms over everyone as a power to hate or revere, depending on your politics. Seen now from our vantage point 16 years later, what the characters feared and wondered at in the play, which debuted on Broadway in 1993, could seem almost quaint. Conspiracy theories? Environmental disaster? Politicians who have little regard for the suffering of the people they are elected to serve? Oh, you people of 1985, you had no idea what was coming down the pike. But it’s a mark of excellence that the production at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck doesn’t seem quaint at all.

Starring Rhinebeck regulars Lou Trapani, Kevin Archambault, Emily DePew and Victoria Howland, all playing multiple roles, the play weaves together the story of two couples. Prior Walter (Archambault), the WASPy scion of  a long-established family, and his Jewish lover Louis Ironson (Bill Ross) and then ambitious young lawyer Joe Pitt (Alexander Taylor) and his anxious homebound wife, Harper (the excellent DePew).  The Pitts are Mormons, living in Brooklyn, and Joe works for the other main character, Roy Cohn (Trapani), the real-life ultra-anti-Communist lawyer who worked with McCarthy to bring down the Rosenbergs and later went to work for Reagan (and who once had Donald Trump as a client.) 

Trapani is terrific as the foul-mouthed manipulative Cohn — he launches the first act with a hilarious and scathing monologue involving a phone and entirely unprintable dialogue. He is offering the worshipful young lawyer Joe Pitt the chance to work for the Justice Department under Ed Meese (remember him?), an opportunity Pitt is thrilled by, but his wife is not. She stays home all day, popping Valium and hallucinating. But she’s not imagining Joe’s deep-buried secret — that he, like Cohn, is a deeply repressed and closeted homosexual (to use the parlance of the time.)

The real showstopper performance is Archambault’s portrayal of Walter. In the very first scene, at Ironson’s grandmother’s funeral, he reveals his first Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion, which was back then the first sign of AIDS and a portent of an inevitable and painful death. Ironson, cowardly and hating himself for it, soon abandons Walter, who is left to manage his illness and his own fears and fantasies on his own. Archambault fully inhabits both the flamboyant queen side of Walter as well as his terror and pain as his disease progresses, without ever descending into stereotype or becoming maudlin. He’s funny as well as tragic, and Archambault (along with Trapani) handles Kushner’s complex dialogue better than others in the cast.

The play is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and it weaves fantasy and reality, religion and politics, sex and race (in the form of the black nurse Belize, played with equal parts kindness and exasperation by Cesar Remon), with rapid-fire, highly literary dialogue.

Howland plays three parts, including the titular Angel, who haunts Walter and descends at the end to bring him to Heaven. (Although, spoiler alert, he lives to inhabit the second part of Angels in America, Perestroika, and I hope Rhinebeck has plans to mount that one soon.) Also notable is Alex Heinen, who plays three small but very juicy roles: Pitt’s Mormon mother, who pulls up her Salt Lake stakes and comes to Brooklyn when she learns Joe is gay (and where she has one of the funniest lines of the play), Ethel Rosenberg, who appears to taunt Cohn as his own AIDS progresses, and the Rabbi conducting the funeral for Louis’s grandmother in the opening scene who gives the best explanation I’ve ever heard of who those little Jewish grandmas were.

“Angels in America” runs at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck through March 13. For tickets and information, go to www.centerforperformingarts.org, or call 845-876-3080.