| February 5, 1999 |
|
Calvin College Chimes
|
|
‘Angels in America’ crash at Spectrum By Amy Packwood I’ll just say it: Spectrum Theatre’s production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America Part 1: Millenium Approaches” sucked. I wasted fifteen dollars and over three hours of my life watching cheap lighting, bad acting and amateurish scripting. Afterwards they served cafeteria punch and stale cookies in the lobby. WhenI left the theater building I was furious that a production so audaciously bad could be so highly acclaimed. The plot -- in which people of various backgrounds, including the married Joe Pitt, his wife Harper, gay couple Prior and Louis, and Joe McCarthy right-hand-man Roy Cohn, struggle with AIDS in the mid-80s -- seemed random, disjointed and self-indulgent, a bad script enacted by a worse production team. It’s a shame, really. A guy decides to write a play that deals from the inside with homosexuality, AIDS and the confusion of American politics and religion and, because he is one of the first to breach these taboo subjects in such a blunt manner, he gets away with sloppy writing, sensationalism, melodrama and self-indulgent “gay fantasia.” The problem with the script lies mainly in the editing -- or lack thereof. Instead of editing for continuity, clarity or brevity, Kushner seemed to save his pet jokes and ideas at all costs, stringing them together with loose transitional scenes. The other major problem I had with the script was the lack of resolution for any of the characters. Kushner seemed to lose interest in the thing several unnecessary scenes too late and just cut it off with an abrupt, wordless finale involving lots of noise, flashing lights and a jerkily-lowered angel. If he had tried to fit his politico-sexual insights into a story instead of a story into his rants, he would have produced something at least a little more artful. Spectrum’s staging of this rocky script made a bad thing worse. The production staff committed the cardinal no-no of majoring in the minors, spending too much time and money on cheap pyrotechnics during Kushner’s already-over-the-top dream sequences, including flaming holy books and billows of dry ice “snow.” In one of the most intense scenes, on the other hand, a man falls and mimes bleeding from his mouth. Blood capsules are $1.79 at Meijer’s during Halloween, people! It would have been an important, cheap effect that could have lent a degree of reality or believability to the show not achieved by smoldering Bibles. Not that believability seemed to be a goal for most of the actors. All of them overdid it. Lead Craig Hammerlind apparently graduated from the William Shatner school of acting. As the weak, tormented Louis, Prior’s lover, he carried much of the emotional responsibility for the show. He dealt with this in long tortuous mid-sentence pauses and sudden shoulder spasms intended to imply crying. It is a pet peeve of mine when actors try to fake a cry. If you can’t do it, don’t fake it. It completely ruins the honesty of the moment. This play coulda been a contender. If only Kushner hadn’t edited himself, leaving ill-considered incoherent vignettes in place of a story, we would’ve had a “Message play” that doesn’t make you think Western Union would be an improvement. |