Reviewed by Rob Gowland
Angels In America
ABC 8.30pm Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday June 8 — 10 Angels In America, the television adaptation of Tony Kushner's sprawling, Pultizer Prize-winning Broadway play is being ballyhooed not as a mere television program but as something called "Event Television". In fact the ABC is hailing it as nothing less than "the television event of the year". I am afraid that it is nothing of the sort. The first play in the seven-hour two-play cycle won the Tony Award for Best Drama in 1993, and the second play won the Tony for Best Drama in 1994. These awards are deceptive, however. Tony Awards are given only to plays on Broadway. But, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica noted at the time, "the concept of Broadway as the national American theatre was fast losing credibility even while drama itself was not". "The best dramatic work was being done either off-Broadway or in non-commercial, institutional theatres, whether in New York City or elsewhere." On Broadway, Angels In America stood out because, as a drama, it had almost no competition. Moreover, the play was both timely and, for the New York theatre world, highly topical. The Britannica again: "The devastation that AIDS continued to inflict on the United States generally, and in the theatre world in particular, was reflected by the plays that dominated not only Broadway and off-Broadway but also US regional theatres in 1993". It was especially reflected "in Broadway's most acclaimed play, Millennium Approaches", the first part of Angels in America. "The work by Tony Kushner was a drama about nothing less than a perceived crisis in American life. "With AIDS as its central metaphor, Angels in America, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, mixed characters as diverse as middle American conservatives, East Coast liberals, and Roy Cohn — the power broker and lawyer who castigated homosexuals even as he lay dying of AIDS." The play alternated naturalistic and surreal scenes with characters as far apart as a Mormon lawyer, his pill-popping wife and the ghost of judicially murdered "atom spy" Ethel Rosenberg. However, although Newsweek's critic, presumably caught up in the hysteria of the moment, called it, incredibly, "the broadest, deepest, most searching play of our time", the play is in fact a rather shallow rumination on love, morality, faith and the need for mutual support. Kushner seems to be saying "Hey, look, something's very wrong here", but he does not know exactly what it is, still less what to do about it. The television version, running five and three quarter hours, was adapted for the screen by Kushner himself. It suffers from the same fatal flaws. As directed by Mike Nichols, it sometimes plays like a clever comedy, sometimes like a parody of itself; occasionally genuinely moving it is too often over the top. The cast have been copiously rewarded with Golden Globe Awards for their performances, but these cannot save it from ultimately becoming tedious. Even Meryl Streep's portayal of Ethel Rosenberg seems to be just another of her exercises in cleverly faking a foreign accent. Also in the cast are Emma Thompson (as the Angel she has a very peculiar sex scene), Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright and Ben Shenkman. Made for US cable channel Home Box Office, the film is set in the early '80s, and touches on many themes that give it the appearance of depth: AIDS, homosexual love, Reaganite politics, religion, family breakdown, personal fulfillment, and the failure of the American dream. None of them, however, are handled with genuine depth. Near the end, Prior Walter, probably the central character (played by Justin Kirk), advises the Angels to sue God, because He deserted the human race in the 20th century "when we needed him the most". And right at the end, Harper, the pill-popping unhappy young wife (Mary-Louise Parker), tells the audience: "In this world, there's a kind of painful progress — longing for what we've left behind and dreaming ahead". Deep, eh? Don't be surprised if it wins a slew of Emmys later this year.