ANGELS IN AMERICA
door EMILE SCHRA
ANGELS IN AMERICA: THE BARE, DUTCH VERSION
Ivo van Hove; from Shakespeare to David Bowie. Ed. by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai. Methuen Drama 2018, p 115-121
At the end of Part One of Angels in America the play reaches its climax as the AIDS patient Prior Walter is confronted with strange sounds in his New York apartment. The sounds reach a crescendo and become an insane noise, while blazing light fills the room, the walls start to shake and, finally, a magnificent angel with huge wings crashes through the ceiling. In the Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA) production directed by Ivo van Hove at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2014 you will have looked in vain for the classical image of the angel with wings. In spite of feathers and plaster that fill the space with dust when the angel makes its appearance, we only see a doctor in a white coat cross the stage. To the music of David Bowie’s ‘The Motel’ (‘There is no hell. There is no shame’) and on an almost dark stage, he starts dancing in circles with Prior Walter.
The central theme of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play, which bears the subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is the American AIDS epidemic in the 1980s during the years of the Reagan government. First performed in 1991, Angels in America was an instant succes: innovative, epic, poetic, it has remained a very popular play ever since, staged in its many different interpretations in and outside the US. There are three main storylines in the play that become more closely connected as the action progresses. The main characters — Prior and Louis, Harper and Joe and Roy Cohn — are all at important turning-points in their lives and all of them lose their certainties. Angels in America is built on a broad spectrum of emotions and themes, tackled with humour and cynicism: despair, fear, guilt, friendship, tenderness, sorrow, loss of friendship, loneliness, discriminaton, struggle with prejudices and hypocrisy are just a few elements that Kushner weaves through the dialogue. Often the main action is interrupted by apparitions, hallucinations and dreamlike scenes in which the people that appear on stage only seem to exist in the imagination of a certain character. In Part Two the real and the imaginative worlds alternate much more frequently and the main characters are taken away in a vortex of nightmares, delusions and fantasies.
The constant change of locations, scenes and storylines in Angels in America can be a challenge for theatre directors. Kushner himself strongly believed that his play needed a sort of realism when staged, so that the additional layers of magic and surrealism could work effectively. But in van Hove’s direction the stage is almost empty. The cast of eight Dutch actors have a huge stage at their disposal, on all three sides framed by white fluorescent tubes on the floor. There is no set, unless you consider the back wall as one. Here we see projections, in slow motion, in close up, images that are mixed, but never take the audience’s attention completely away from the onstage action. The projections, developed by the American video artist Tal Yarden, are more associative or atmospheric: slow-motion video images of a busy station hall with people criss-crossing each other, a hospital ward, the American flag waving in the wind, the World Trade Center towers (it is 1985), a child’s feet dangling from a swing.
In this stripped-down version of Kushner’s play, frontstage left there is a small cart with two turntables on it, two boxes and a few records of David Bowie’s music from the 1980s. Fragments from songs or instrumental numbers, sometimes hardly perceivable, sometimes very loud, and often about changes, support dramatic moments or create an atmosphere. No further chairs, tables, beds or other props are used, except for a mobile IV-drip in Part Two. The telephone call at the start of the play is simply acted out by the familiar gesture of holding thumb and finger of one hand to the side of the face.
Dramaturg Peter van Kraaij adapted Kushner’s play by shortening it to five hours’ playing time. Staging Angels again twenty-five years after it was written, van Hove decided that his staging could not be limited to the AIDS epidemic. If he wanted to do the play again, he would also have to deal with other developments of the past decades. With this shift in approach — to focus less exclusively on what had in the 1980s been a more or less terminal disease — the play’s other interests about conflicts and events that are also about change became more prominent. The play offers important insights into the difficulties of change but also about its liberating aspects, about transformation as a positive concept. According to van Kraaij, van Hove created a very hopeful performance, a performance which shows that change entails sacrifices, conflicts, doubts and pain, but that it finally leads to fresh understanding and new relationships. As van Kraaij described: ‘In our staging we still talk about the community that is confronted with AIDS, but at the same time it is a story about failing and starting all over again.’ Van Kraaij was referring to Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1989), a follow-up to her Illness as Metaphor (1978). The artistic team of Angels in America used Sontag’s questions in the book as a source of inspiration. What is the meaning of AIDS in a broader, more philosophical context? What bigger ideas does the disease arouse about transformation, decline, suffering and death, about the finity of life? But van Kraaij also suggests that they saw fundamental changes as a motor for rebirth: ‘For a long period of time Ivo van Hove made dark and pessimistic performances. But in this staging light enters into the darkness’.
One of the play’s storylines concerns the relationship between Harper and Joe. Joe’s realization that he is more attracted to men undermines their marriage. His wife Harper has agoraphobia. She is depressed and has suspicions that something is the matter with her husband but she doesn’t know what. When he reveals his homosexual desire, that moment is the start of a huge process of transformation for both of them: Joe leaves, Harper stays. Louis and Prior form the second couple. In one of the first scenes, Prior confesses that he has AIDS. Here the disease is the bomb under their relationship. The one who leaves is Louis; the one who remains alone is Prior. The genius of Kushner is that he created dreamlike scenes in which the characters who are left behind get to meet. They tell deep truths, they console each other. On the other hand, those who ran away get to meet in the ‘real life’ scenes. The third storyline concerns Roy Cohn, a character based on the real, historical person (1927—86). The American attorney was, of course, the right-hand man of Senator McCarthy during the famous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations into communist activities in the US in the 1950s. In the play, Cohn is interlinked with Joe who works for him. Cohn is a rude and cynical guy who loves power, a potentate capable of anything. He has AIDS but tries to ignore it, even when his body is in total decay and he is hardly able to stand on his feet any longer. Van Kraaij described how the Toneelgroep production brought these various storylines together: ‘we focused upon transformation, change, upon the different ways the characters search for modes to survive’.
At the climax of Part One – Millennium Approaches an angel arrives to have a word with Prior (the scene with which my essay opens). Crashing through the roof of Prior’s apartment, the angel says:
Greetings, Prophet;
The Great Work begins:
The Messenger has arrived.
In Part Two: Perestroika, Act One, Scene Two, there is a flashback to this earlier scene, the wrecked ceiling in Prior’s bedroom and the angel ‘in the air’, but this time the angel explains why God left, eventually telling Prior ‘YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING! ‘ At first Prior is ’terrified and very angry’, but then, in a crucial speech, he refuses the angel’s reactionary ideas:
I’M TIRED! Tired to death of, of being done to, um, infected, fucked-over and tortured by you, by this —
Is this, is this, disease, is the virus in me, is that the, the epistle, is that the prophecy? Is this just . . . revenge, because we, because you think we ruined.
No. No, I want you to go away, you go away or I will.
Prior wants to embrace life as it is, even if it leads to his death. And that is van Hove’s essential statement in his staging of Angels in America: a person cannot live without suffering from loss, without changes, fractures, scars. But, in the end, life is worth living. According to van Kraaij, this element is becoming more and more important in van Hove’s work, as his interests have developed away from too much darkness in texts that centre around breakdown and stagnation. Van Kraaij suggests that ’today he tends to focus more upon ideas that change the world in a positive way, that bring something new to the foreground. This is something I have become aware of since his staging of Angels In America in 2007′.
In the epilogue of Kushner’s play the ‘survivors’ meet ‘four years later’ and look back and discuss the events of their past. In van Hove’s approach, this ending would have been too sentimental, too dated and too ‘finished’, and it is therefore hardly surprising that the ending was drastically cut. In the TGA performance, the epilogue is excised and replaced by fragments of an earlier monologue by Harper about the souls of the deceased who linger on earth. Then there is a final scene between Louis and Prior: they each confess that they are still in love with one another but, according to Prior, it will be impossible for Louis to ever return to him again and he leaves the stage. A little later Louis leaves. Ihe stage is empty. And in the final moments of van Hove’s version of Angels of America, we see on the huge back wall a video projection of a dark ocean by night and hear the sound of waves.
Projection and lighting play a crucial role in van Hove and Jan Versweyveld’s approach to theatre and the production of Angels in America was certainly light-driven. Versweyveld suggested that light use and light changes structured the whole performance and helped to link its many scenes: ‘I really love using those two rows of four black boxes above the acting area. Hanging on thin wires from the ceiling they each contain two fluorescent lights.’ And indeed, the performance, despite its almost five-hour duration, had a very high tempo facilitated by quick and smooth scene changes. A change of light was sufficient to let the audience know that a new scene was starting. Acting was very accurately adjusted to these seamless switches of action. Ten seconds before the end of a scene the actors for the next one entered, sometimes already in conversation, a technique which drives action forward.
The big challenge for van Hove and Versweyveld has been to make this very complex play with its ingenious structure as simple as possible for the audience. At the start of the design process they discussed several set ideas. They wanted to create a space in which the omnipresent theme of transitions between life and death would be possible. They arrived at the idea of one big hospital ward. Versweyveld started to design that space as s a kind of uterus that welcomes you back, invites a kind of rebirth, a new start. He planned t this space in skin color and also involved a sort of navel string in the form of a spiral staircase that would disappear in the theatre’s roof. But then he came up with the idea of using a full ward with a staircase, hospital beds and offices on wheels. At one moment in t the designing process Versveyweld threw all those ideas aside and started rethinking from scratch. They wanted a space where transition was ultimately possible. And what served this objective better than an empty space? Versweyveld notes: ‘Everything is possible there. Our video designer Tal Yarden got involved because we also wanted to evoke the more subjective and emotional side of the United States, together with David Bowie’s music. Our aim was not to use video images to indicate that you are in a hospital, in an apartment or at court. No, we wanted to create a framework in a more associative way and one that refers to a country in crisis with itself’.
For Versweyveld designing an empty space for Angels in America (‘An empty space is never completely empty!’) has been one of the bigger challenges in his career. Generally, the effect of the ‘bare bone approach’ can be twofold: it awakens the audience’s imagination and it helps them to focus on text and actor. Like theatre pioneer Peter Brook discovered long ago, the use of an empty space facilitates mutual contact and exchange between actors and spectators. Moreover, in van Hove’s staging of Angels in America, the use of a bare stage was not only able to create impact in relation to the theme of transition between life and death, but it also gave a strong impression of the human condition, of the soul of modern mankind. Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, effectively described spectatorial response to characters struggling or suffering, together or alone, on the vast and empty stage: ‘You imagine how lonely it must feel to be up there. That naked space is also a mirror, accurate and unforgiving, of the densely populated city that stretches beyond this outpost of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I mean New York, or any of those densely crowded places where it’s easy to think that the person next to you in the subway or the elevator, or even in bed, might as well be on the other side of the world’.
The response of the New York audience in 2014 came as a complete surprise for the Dutch ensemble. To date, they had only performed Angels in America in Europe, but in BAM’s Harvey Theater they realized how it was really the audience’s story, ’their’ world and ’their’ characters that the company was performing. When the rabbi enters at the start of the performance, shambling over the bare stage and impersonated by the actress Marieke Heebink, and the audience is wished a good afternoon and welcomed to a funeral, in the Netherlands you could sometimes hear a small giggle. In New York, however, the rabbi was met by thunderous laughter, prompted by Kushner’s text (spoken in Dutch, surtitled in English) but also by the way the actress performed her role. The character of the rabbi proved to be more anchored in American than in European culture and resonated more deeply. The actors of TGA discovered that they were back at ’the source’, back where it all began.
The Dutch cast had been nervous about their American visit, as actor Hans Kesting, who played the role of Roy Cohn, explained. But it was a tremendous success. Kesting noted: ‘Of course you first have to get acclimatized as a spectator to the “van Hove approach”; certainly in America things are generally done quite differently. It is first of all a matter of becoming familiar with the idea that things can also be done differently.’ Kesting believes the performance must have been an eye-opener especially for that part of the American audience which had seen other productions. Could you also do it this way?! Kesting remembers very vividly the moment in 2007 when van Hove and Versweyveld entered the rehearsal space with the idea for their minimal set: ‘Their explanation for the use of a bare stage made complete sense. All characters are in transition, are in search, had not found their destination yet. That’s why the idea of an empty space was so marvellous. A magnificent trouvaille that offered a lot of freedom to us and to the audience to project their own images on the characters’.
For Kesting, his work on the role of the homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn was challenging and intensive. He did not do any serious character studies, but googled, looked at images and read a bit. And he saw a short black-and-white film fragment on YouTube, featuring Joe McCarthy during the HUAC hearings in the 1950s. Next to him he saw Roy Cohn, who was still very young then. But to attempt to imitate this image would have been complete nonsense: Kesting is not a small, bald Jewish male but a Dutchman, who is almost two metres high and 100 kilos in weight. Kushner said of Kesting’s interpretation: ‘It was awe inspiring, it completely blew me away. . . . America is full of actors desperate to feel something on stage. The playwright’s words merely provide them with the sounds to match those emotions. I need actors who devote excessive attention to the detail of the script. And I get that here I love Hans Kesting’s recklessness, his ruthless passion and his quick tempo. His physical acting is better than any Cohn I’ve ever seen before’. 52
In an artist talk at BAM in October 2014, van Hove spoke of how he had seen Angels in America fifteen years earlier and that, since then, it had never completely disappeared from his mind. Why did he decide to stage the play? He doesn’t know. But he said it was like a love affair — it started with a feeling, with intuition: ‘It’s a process. It is like wine. It takes time.’ The reason why van Hove found Kushner’s play so attractive was that ‘it is very American and at the same time universal’. Many people would recognize the characters on stage who are stuck in impossible or loveless relationships: ‘It is about getting out of your own frames, frames of society, frames you are unhappy in … That was important for me to stage: people who got stuck and suddenly got in touch with another life or person and then transform slowly. And develop into a new life’. But for van Hove there was one other crucial element in Angels in America that he discovered while directing it, that is, the quality of ambivalence: ‘The person that you hated most in the play, Roy Cohn, you really feel for in the last half hour of the production. For me that was really important. At the end of the day, it is also a human being dying from AIDS.’
Bovenstaand artikel schreef ik in 2017 op verzoek van mijn Amerikaanse collega-dramaturg uit Boston, Joshua Polster. De noten zijn hier achterwege gelaten maar terug te vinden in het oorspronkelijke stuk.
