Another Waltz with Prior

It seems I will spend more time in NC than NY this year. In mid-December I’ll be leaving to play Prior in Angels in America at PlayMakers Rep in Chapel Hill. I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to this play (and to this role). It also gives me a chance to write about how circular and interconnected living and working in the theater can be. When you waltz, you dance in 3/4 time while moving mostly in circles. And unlike most partner dances, the man leads by stepping backwards.

(The original poster and playbill artwork for Angels by Milton Glaser)

An epic work by the playwright Tony Kushner, Angels in America is in fact two plays, or a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The plays can stand alone and are sometimes performed independently of each other, but are meant to be seen together. They are performed by the same cast in repertory (meaning that the actors alternate which play they perform) and on a two show day, they might do both: Millennium as the matinee and Perestroika in the evening. Set in New York City in the 1980s during the very beginning of the AIDS crisis, Angels in America blurs the line of fantasy and realism, and in doing so delves into such divisive subjects as politics, sex, and religion. The plays follow a diverse cast of characters that include a former drag queen and nurse named Belize, a fictional representation of the lawyer Roy Cohn, a young Mormon couple living in Brooklyn, and a man diagnosed with AIDS named Prior Walter who is abandoned by his boyfriend but receives visitations from a terrifying and beautiful angel.

I first read Angels in America as a twenty year old college student. Kim Rubinstein, my acting teacher at Northwestern, had been the associate director of the national tour. We spent an entire semester working on scenes from Millennium and Perestroika, and as our final exam of sorts my class performed the entirety of the two plays. Erik Hellman, Jonathan Saylors, and I all worked on Prior, each taking different scenes. Flash forward five years. As a twenty-five year old graduate student at NYU I played Prior in Millennium Approaches, a production which deeply affected the training I received there. Now another five years has passed and I am finally the right age to play Prior professionally. I’ll be doing both parts in repertory this winter at PlayMakers in NC. Even at a cursory glance, this play has obviously followed me throughout my life as an artist. But it even goes a bit further.

(Ellen McLaughlin and Stephen Spinella in the original Broadway production)

While doing Millennium at NYU, we met with Oskar Eustis. Oskar commissioned the play while running a theater called the Eureka in San Francisco, and directed the initial workshop production. He now runs the Public Theater, and teaches a class at Grad Acting about collaboration and devised work. Oskar gave me my first job out of grad school, directing me in his production of Hamlet as part of Shakespeare in the Park. Between years of graduate school, I spent a summer with the Chautauqua Theatre Company in upstate New York. I did a play called The Just with Ellen McLaughlin, who played the Angel in the original Broadway production. She performed a play at PlayMakers last season and recommended me. If that isn’t enough, Kate Goehring played my mother this fall in The Glass Menagerie. How is she connected you ask? Well, she played Harper in the first national tour, directed by my acting teacher at Northwestern, Kim Rubinstein.

Before the Angel crashes through the ceiling of Prior’s apartment at the end of Millennium Approaches, he is visited by several ghosts of his ancestors, prior Priors as it were. Attempting to calm him, they conjure a vision of Louis, the boyfriend who has abandoned Prior, unable to cope with the complexity of his sickness. Prior and Louis share a quiet waltz, moving in circles across the stage, with Prior retracing his steps backwards toward his bed. As I prepare for another waltz with Prior, I am reminded again just how circular everything can be.