Celebrating Gay Anger

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ANGELS IN AMERICA

AUTHOR: TONY KUSHNER

WHERE: MARK TAPER FORUM, LOS ANGELES

THE BOTTOM LINE: An AIDS epic dazzlingly blends sitcom, the supernatural and the ghost of Roy Cohn.

The central visual image of this season's most eagerly awaited American play is a towering wall, like the facade of some Greek Revival government colossus, with two jagged cracks running from top to bottom. Before a word is spoken, this symbol -- with its promise of that facade's eventually cracking wide open -- conveys the aura of physical decay and revolutionary social change that drives Tony Kushner's 7 1/2-hr. epic about AIDS, gay liberation and the breakdown of the Reagan era's sanctimonious hypocrisy.

But if the imagery sums up the foundation-toppling ideology of Angels in America, which last week won the Evening Standard award as London's best play while an updated and expanded version debuted in Los Angeles, it cannot begin to suggest the playwright's wacky tactics -- the derisive humor, uninhibited fantasy and freehand jumbling of the journalistic and the supernatural that distinguish this raging farce from lesser, if tidier, AIDS plays. Kushner takes a topic for a TV mini-series and warps it into weirdly satisfying poetry.

Kushner isn't much interested in promoting understanding between gays and the straight world, as is fostered by the current Broadway musical Falsettos. He certainly isn't interested in autobiographical pain of the kind that Larry Kramer so affectingly revisits in his off-Broadway drama The Destiny of Me. He seems especially unsympathetic to closet cases and bisexuals, as personified in a Mormon character whose ambitions clash with his libido: the man's straight wife and gay lover both cast him aside. Politically, Angels preaches to the choir, celebrating gay anger and self-righteousness (to gleeful whoops from the audience) rather than explaining gay angst to the uninitiated. The author and the delighted spectators reflect an evolution in attitude akin to what happened among blacks and women: one generation sought empathy; the next demanded justice; the generation equivalent to Kushner's just flat-out asserted equality and spurned any more debate.

At the center of a slender and increasingly metaphysical plot are broken troths, gay and straight, and the socially rich yet emotionally solitary life of Roy Cohn, the lawyer and dealmaker who denied his homosexuality up to the moment of his death from AIDS in 1986.

Cohn is the ideal villain. He stole from clients. He corrupted the political system. He illegally lobbied a judge to secure the execution of Ethel Rosenberg (who haunts Cohn in his dying days, then says the Kaddish over his corpse, ending with a blasphemous but heartfelt "son of a bitch"). But for Kushner's polemical purposes, Cohn's greatest evil was his willingness to tolerate, in fact promote, discrimination against gays even as he secretly enjoyed boundless gay sex. He is embodied with robust humor and seductive malevolence by Kushner and actor Ron Leibman, who make Cohn a villain-one- loves-to-hate, like Richard III but slipperier and funnier. In the best passage, Cohn asserts he is not a gay man at all but a heterosexual who sleeps with men. Gays, he explains, know no one and have "zero clout."

The other actors are bland, save for Cynthia Mace as the Mormon's deranged ; wife, but her role starts at a mountaintop of emotional frenzy and leaves her nowhere to go. As a gay man who deserts a dying lover, Joe Mantello projects a nihilism far more intriguing than Stephen Spinella's saintliness as the lover, although Spinella has the almost unplayable task of being visited by angels, ascending to heaven and returning to earth -- alive despite two apparent death scenes -- to bless the multitudes. Kushner has said the play's second half is two drafts away from being done. He should focus on this character and the banal finale if he wants to be poetically -- rather than just politically -- correct.