A ray of relevance even after the millennium

A review of a St. Louis production of "Millennium Approaches" — the first part of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Angels in America" — concludes, "A robbery attempt left me hospitalized for three days and therefore unable to review the second half."

One cannot help but chuckle at this jarring inclusion of personal narrative. The reviewer's account of his misfortune is approprate for "Millennium Approaches," which has everything to do with pain, hospitals and violation — with having things taken that are cherished and being afflicted with a paralyzing sense of dread and vulnerability.

Like the woebegone St. Louis reviewer, the characters in "Millennium Approaches" do not know what will happen to them "in the second half" of their lives, and their uncertainty terrifies them. Each one of Kushner's characters, to quote Paul Benjamin's interpretation of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, "would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise . . . This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

AIDS robs its victims of hope, dignity and love — those things, "Millennium Approaches" argues, that are as essential to the continuance of life as eating, drinking and a T4 cell count of at least 200 per cubic millimeter of blood.

"Millennium Approaches" is the story of a gay man named Prior Walter (Jed Peterson '04) who is diagnosed with AIDS. His lover, Louis Ironson (Noah Burger '04), meets up with Joe Pitt (Adam Friedman '01), a married Mormon who agonizes over his closeted homosexuality.

That Joe finds it increasingly difficult to fake sexual attraction to his wife, Harper (Devin Sidell '02), drives her to Valium-addiction and hallucination. Roy Cohn (Kurt Uy '01) — the infamous associate of Red Scare firebrand Joseph McCarthy — a drag queen named Belize (Khalil Sullivan '04) and various apparitions also feature prominently in the dramatic tableau.

"Millennium Approaches" is larger than any stage that has ever played it. Its geographic dimensions span all of America. The dialogue ranges from witty prattle to political polemic and spiritual catharsis.

Characters are visited by their long dead ancestors, the more recently expired Soviet spy Ethel Rosenberg and an angel whose biblical intonations and pyrotechnic arrival culminate in the uncertain union of the sacred and the profane.

Kushner calls his play a "Gay Fantasia on National Themes." Although "Millennium Approaches" has particular pertinence to the homosexual (and increasing numbers of straight) people beset with AIDS in the mid-80s, the play is also a fanciful articulation of American anxieties regarding religion, race, gender, politics and progress. It is unabashedly literary, with characters pontificating on everything from bourgeois liberalism to ozone depletion and the ominous implications of "systems of defense giving way."

Director Jared Ramos '01 has artfully kept the play from overwhelming itself by the very breadth and depth of its content. The minimalist set — a black-paneled wall painted with violent strokes of white and blue and a few simple props — allows for an almost instantaneous transition between scenes. Consequently, this three-hour play flies by at a breathless pace.

Elaborate sets often have a way of imposing themselves on the imagination of the audience and of stifling otherwise dynamic actors. Ramos' restraint allows his actors to invest the theatrical space with a sense of place. Through gesture and dance, the actors invent a Brooklyn apartment, a Manhattan men's room, and a Salt Lake City vista. These spaces become as complex, engaging and real as the characters who create, shape and abandon them.

Ramos and his cast have brought to life people wracked with guilt, ambivalence and a sense that a world fast succumbing to chaos has marked them for persecution.

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Harper seeks reprieve in a hallucinatory excursion to the South Pole, where she can be "numb and safe." Joe withdraws into the cold comfort of his job as a legal clerk. Louis nebbishly flees the blood and vomit of Prior's disease, yet engages in suicidal sexual relations with anonymous partners as if to join Prior in infection and death.

Across the board the actors turn in stirring performances, especially Uy, who has the headlining part of Roy Cohn and Peterson as Prior Walter.

Lesser actors would portray Cohn as a soul-less, one dimensional, egomaniac. Uy shows that this fast-talking, self-loathing persecutor of Communists and homosexuals is not so simple: Cohn is torn between his desire for redemption and his scorn for everything in the world that makes it redeemable. Peterson's spot-on camp and comic theatricality contributes to the poignancy of his character's moral and physical collapse.

The millennium has now past, and medical advances are enabling AIDS patients who can afford expensive treatments to live ever fuller, increasingly pain-free lives. In the American imagination, AIDS no longer prompts the eschatological foreboding that it did when "Millennium Approaches" was first performed in May 1990. Yet Ramos has shown us that the play, even as a work of past prophecy, remains relevant to the contemporary American experience.