Angels of No Mercy

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Angels in America opened its Pulitzer-prizewinning first half, Millennium Approaches, in May, the producers' main worry was keeping it afloat long enough to get the second half, Perestroika, up and running. They feared Millennium's gay outlook might limit audiences to homosexuals, sympathetic straights and the relative handful of theater mavens who see everything. Nobody worried about the logistics of using the same eight actors to perform one 3 1/2-hour play and rehearse another, let alone installing sets for the sequel on the same stage where Millennium was playing.

They needn't have fretted about money. Millennium has played to 98% of capacity and repaid a third of its investment. And as for the supposedly easy part, mounting the second half? One $2 million nightmare later, after daily rewrites, stagehand mania, 49 foregone performances (to the occasional rage of ticketholders who traveled from as far as Maine) and cuts of nearly an hour once Perestroika was already in previews, the most awaited -- and beleaguered -- dramatic event of the Broadway season officially opened last week. If less profound than it pretends to be and a bit repetitively in love with its own bitchy-queen wisecracks and celestial effects, the show proved an absorbing entertainment worth the bumps along the road.

The producers profess only delight. Says Rocco Landesman, president of the Jujamcyn theater-ownership group that is co-financing and housing Millennium and Perestroika: "When we look back on this in five or 10 years, we are not going to remember our exasperation at the script coming in late or how much money it cost. We are going to remember that we are the producers of Angels in America, the most important play in a generation."

Extravagant as that sounds, and deeply flawed as Perestroika's metaphysical and ideological passages often are, the claim may not be far off. Angels is very far from the best play in a generation, and Nicholas Nickleby keeps it from being even the longest. But Angels has been hugely significant. More than any other work in a theater era of gay self-assertion, it has brought that perspective to the mainstream. Angels was not only the first gay-centered play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, it came to the fore just as the argument about gays in the military was putting the gay cause at center stage for the first time in U.S. history. With its aggressive scorn for Ronald Reagan and Republicanism; for Mormons and moralizing; and its demonic view of lawyer- dealmaker Roy Cohn, a gay-bashing closet gay and a top-level G.O.P. influence peddler for more than three decades, Angels disproved truisms about the unmarketability of political drama. Instead it compellingly reasserted the theater's place in public debate. Hearteningly to theater partisans, Angels generated excitement about a drama comparable to the biggest buzz about musicals. Above all, Angels demonstrated that plays can matter in a pop culture dominated by electronically recorded performances rather than live ones.

Now that it can be seen in a finished state -- a much different and in some ways more appealing version of Perestroika was performed in Los Angeles last year -- playwright Tony Kushner's "gay fantasia on national themes" looks both bigger and smaller. The work operates on two levels, as a soap opera about three intertwined households inhabited by homosexuals, and as a preachment about religion, social politics and the meaning of America. Kushner impressively sustains the soap-opera interest. It seemed to many playgoers that by the end of Millennium there was nothing left to happen. But each major character embarks on a further, and often longer, emotional journey. Perestroika is full of absorbing incident, from a Mormon mother's coming to terms with a son's homosexuality to Cohn's deathbed hallucinations (with the ghost of executed spy Ethel Rosenberg leading the Hebrew requiem, or Kaddish). Sometimes it is campy and funny, sometimes unnervingly bold -- as in a homosexual seduction that leaves the participants mostly clothed and clean spoken, yet celebrates taste and smell with well nigh disturbing intimacy.

Whenever Kushner waxes philosophical, however, the second half renders his epic smaller. The first half felt profound because it did not declaim opinions but left the audience to infer them. The second half shrinks steadily through its final act as it reduces the mystical and allegorical to banal leftist slogans. Despite the title, Perestroika has almost nothing to do with Russia or the collapse of its empire. The only connection is an opening character who never reappears, an ancient Bolshevik who asks with mixed plaintiveness and ( certitude, "How shall we proceed without theory?" Kushner seemingly believes he is portraying a counterpart America in which all values and belief systems have collapsed. Rather than prove it by dramatization, Kushner mainly asserts with withering rhetoric that he is right. He derides individualism as outmoded and urges an ill-defined group responsibility. But one can challenge his easy assumption that Reagan and all his works have been discredited; his implicit parallel with the Soviet Union is absurd. Russia may be a land in tumult. America is a land in the midst of social tinkering and tolerance, where the old Mormon world and the, truth to tell, just as old urban Jewish gay world may not often intersect but can comfortably coexist.

Most unsatisfying is Kushner's handling of religion. After divine interventions culminating in a trip to heaven by the dying Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), we are told that angels and religions have nothing to say about life, only death and the hereafter. That is a rather small perception to serve on so expansive a platter, even for atheists and agnostics in the audience. The Los Angeles version (which Kushner labels "a mistake") made heaven feel more comically political and Cohn, the devil on earth, seem more magically powerful. The revised Perestroika offers realism with less impact. Kushner even implies that Prior's fevered visions are dreams; he quotes Dorothy's words from The Wizard of Oz on returning to Kansas. Dreams are often sources of revelation in the Bible, but this retreat from the phantasmagorical to the everyday feels like a cheat. If Kushner means that spirituality is no substitute for clear morality and positive mental attitude, he shouldn't need the equivalent of a full working day to get that across.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York