EIF - Angels in America ★★★★

At the end of Part I of director Ivo van Hove’s Angels in America, when it’s time for the angel to finally break through the ceiling and make her grand entrance, a male nurse walks onstage and simply sits on a counter, the one set piece of this ultra-minimalist production from International Theater Amsterdam. Right after the nurse places himself, Prior Walter (Eelco Smits) utters one of the great, succinct lines from Tony Kushner’s magnum opus: “Very Steven Spielberg.”

And suddenly the gay fantasia on national themes doesn’t feel so fantastic. Or, frankly, gay. Nothing on stage is even vaguely Spielbergian, just one of many times that the production actively works against the text.

Edinburgh International Festival has brought this intriguing Dutch production to Scotland this year, the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America, a year that currently finds those fifty states very much divided. The timing certainly feels right, and even though the play has been significantly chopped (the whole evening now runs just under five hours, with a 45-minute interval), the work definitely still stands strong and relevant. When the rabbi who opens the play says that America is a place that actually doesn’t exist, the moment hits, a prescient precursor to the nation’s current existential crisis.

The fact that Roy Cohn (played brilliantly by Hans Kesting, the standout of the uniformly excellent cast), the play’s true, mesmerizing villain, was Donald Trump’s mentor hits harder than ever before; without question, Cohn authored the nasty playbook — sue, lie, and deny — that his protégé is now using to deleterious effect. And that realization is repeatedly painful to swallow.

At this point, Kushner’s script is, fortunately, indestructible, and van Hove’s deconstruction of the play puts more focus on the show’s idea-fueled dialogue. But sometimes less is less, and as strong as this production is, its insistence on minimalism minimalizes the impact of its greatest strength: its glorious theatricality.

Still flies, but not as high as it could ★★★★ 4 stars

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Image by Andrew Perry

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