美国国家公共电台 NPR New Oral History Captures The Magic Of 'Angels In America'

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

A Broadway revival 1 opens this month - the landmark 2 two-part theater event "Angels In America." The plays, which deal with AIDS and homosexuality, have been produced and published and taught all over the world in the last quarter century. Now there's a new tool for understanding them - an oral history called "The World Only Spins Forward." Critic Bob Mondello calls the book a fascinating backstage tour.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE 4: By the time "Angels In America" got to Broadway in 1993 after workshops, a pair of West Coast stagings and an ecstatically received London production, it played like the smash audiences had heard it was.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ANGELS IN AMERICA")

JOE MANTELLO: (As Louis) Well, oh, boy, a gay Republican.

DAVID MARSHALL GRANT: (As Joe) Excuse me.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) Nothing.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: (As Joe) I am not - forget it.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) Republican - you're not Republican.

MONDELLO: Playwright 5 Tony Kushner had created what he called a gay "Fantasia" on national themes, a play that explored the AIDS era with characters real and fictional 6 in situations that were seriously out there.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ANGELS IN AMERICA")

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: (As Harper) What are you doing in my hallucination?

STEPHEN SPINELLA: (As Prior) I am not in your hallucination. You're in my dream.

HARDEN: (As Harper) You're wearing makeup 7.

SPINELLA: (As Prior) So are you.

HARDEN: (As Harper) But you're a man.

SPINELLA: (As Prior, screaming).

(LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: A winged angel flew in at the end of the first half, and that was after the action had leapt from Manhattan to Salt Lake City to Antarctica. Imagine the performers' reactions at that first read-through. Actually, you don't have to imagine because in their book "The World Only Spins Forward," Isaac Butler and Dan Kois got them to talk about it.

One actress from an early "Angels" workshop remembers the script being more than 200 pages, and that was just the first half. Others talked of the play's crazy mix of laughter, fury, poetry, drag queens, closeted lawyers, Mormons and especially politics. Would an audience get it? No one knew for sure, including, the author's learned, playwright Tony Kushner.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TONY KUSHNER: Opening night, which is critics night, they all sit there. It's like performing at a stenographers convention. Nobody laughs. And it's horrible, and they all go home and write their reviews. And the reviews come out.

MONDELLO: Here he's talking about the first London production before there was any talk about bringing "Angels" to New York. Kushner and director Declan Donnellan had disagreed strenuously 8 about the staging. Emotions were high.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KUSHNER: The whole cast and Declan and I were going to meet at a bar, and Declan said to the cast, I don't want anyone to read the reviews.

MONDELLO: But actors being actors, one went to a newsstand on the way to the bar.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KUSHNER: And then he comes in with this armload of newspapers. And I said, Jeffrey, what is - what's - he said, it's all the reviews, darling.

MONDELLO: And once they'd been plunked on a table, Donnellan forgot all about his instructions and started reading them aloud sight unseen.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DECLAN DONNELLAN: And Tony was sort of shriveling on the other side of the table. And I read all these reviews, and they're all total raves 9. And then I realized in a way what an awful and risky 10 thing I had done. It just never occurred to me that anybody could say a word against it.

MONDELLO: The book weaves together this sort of in-the-moment remembrance with the reactions of everyone from critics to gay Congressman 11 Barney Frank, more than 200 interviews in all not just to show how this play found its voice but also to place it in context. "Angels" was in and was dramatizing a moment when the purple splotch of Kaposi's sarcoma, evidence of a compromised immune system, amounted to a death sentence.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ANGELS IN AMERICA")

MANTELLO: (As Louis) That is just a burst blood vessel 12.

SPINELLA: (As Prior) Not according to the best medical authorities.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) What?

SPINELLA: (As Prior) KS, baby - lesion number one, the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) Oh, please.

SPINELLA: (As Prior) I'm a lesionnaire in the foreign lesion, the American lesion, lesionnaires' disease.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) Stop.

SPINELLA: (As Prior) My troubles are lesion.

MANTELLO: (As Louis) Will you stop?

SPINELLA: (As Prior, laughter) Don't you think I'm handling this well? I'm going to die.

MONDELLO: The actor sobbing 13 through that passage is Joe Mantello, now celebrated 14 as the director of the smash hit musical "Wicked" but completely unknown before "Angels" opened on Broadway in 1993.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MANTELLO: I was virtually unhirable.

MONDELLO: He tells the authors he was unskilled at auditioning 15.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MANTELLO: It wasn't like a natural progression of somebody who'd been working a lot off Broadway. It was really, like, very few acting 16 jobs, "Angels In America."

MONDELLO: Today the play attracts much bigger names. Movie star Andrew Garfield, who not long ago was Hollywood's Spider-Man, will wear the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death in this month's Broadway revival. The book's authors spoke 17 with him, too, about how his own sexuality affects playing a now-iconic gay character.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANDREW GARFIELD: I, as far as I know, am a heterosexual male in a heterosexual male's body, and I'm not confused about that. And of course the responsibility of taking on this role in a seminal 18 play - a seminal gay play - filled me with joy because I knew deep down that it was going to be fine. But just above that deep down was a layer of terror...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Laughter).

GARFIELD: ...Of I'm the wrong person for this.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Right.

MONDELLO: He does have big shoes to fill, as have the dozens of other actors who have played this part. Even after a quarter century, memories of Stephen Spinella standing 3 up to AIDS and an unreliable partner and the arrival of that problematic angel remains 19 strong.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "ANGELS IN AMERICA")

ELLEN MCLAUGHLIN: (As The Angel) And lo, the prophet was led by his nightly dreams to the hiding place of the sacred implement 20.

SPINELLA: (As Prior) You cracked the refrigerator. You probably release a whole cloud of fluorocarbons.

(LAUGHTER)

SPINELLA: (As Prior) That's bad for the environment.

MCLAUGHLIN: (As The Angel) My wrath 21 is as fearsome as my countenance 22 is splendid.

MONDELLO: Performers told the book's authors about one time the angel's countenance was less splendid. Her wig 23 caught in the rigging as she was flying in, and the director came home to a phone message from a patron who raved 24 about the moment, quote, "when the angel turned upside down screaming and her wings fell into the audience and the stage manager came out. It looked so real," he said, "but I knew you'd rehearsed it." Theater magic - you got to love it. And Dan Kois and Isaac Butler have captured a lot of it in their "Angels In America" oral history, "The World Only Spins Forward." I'm Bob Mondello.