Tony Kushner’s rich, sprawling play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is nothing if not operatic, so it was perhaps inevitable that it would be adapted as an opera. Set in 1985 and staged in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Kushner’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning drama became the unsparing morality play of the first, devastating decade of the AIDS epidemic. Its transcendent themes of love, death, good, and evil are played out by a cast of characters—real and imagined—spanning the contemporary American experience. The AIDS epidemic was a tragedy of epic proportions, as those who witnessed the agonizing deaths of loved ones can attest.
Kushner’s play was made into an HBO miniseries in 2003, and a year later composer Peter Eötvös and librettist Mari Mezei created an opera based on the play. Rarely staged, the opera had its American premiere in Boston in 2006 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Tonight it returns to the city with a mainstage production at the Boston University Theatre, presented by the College of Fine Arts School of Music Opera Institute and School of Theatre, one of CFA’s two annual operas performed and designed by students.
Like the Angels plays, which one critic described as marrying the extravagant and the mundane, the opera dances all over the human landscape. “No one will leave unscathed,” says stage director Jim Petosa, a CFA professor of theater and School of Theatre director. He and conductor William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music and Opera Institute artistic director, have interpreted Eötvös’ Angels with minimalist sets that make riveting use of light and reflective surfaces and a cast of gifted singers whose most important passages are actually spoken. For Lumpkin, the production demands an edgy, jazzy mix of musical performance combined with electronically generated sounds, including bells and sirens. The angels chorus “smacks you in the face with sound,” says Arielle Basile (CFA’15), who sings the part of the Angel. “It’s otherworldly.”
The opera, being performed with alternating casts, combines and condenses Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, which together run seven hours, into two and a half hours. Like Kushner’s drama, Eötvös’ plot swirls around the visions of a young man dying of AIDS and is woven from a tapestry of characters, dead and alive, singing multiple roles, ranging from the obscure—a closeted gay Mormon, a former drag queen, and an elderly Orthodox rabbi—to the historically prominent, among them Ethel Rosenberg and Roy Cohn. And of course, those angels.
Jorgeandres Camargo (CFA’16) (standing, from left) plays Roy Cohn and Darrick Speller (CFA’16) is Joseph Pitt in CFA’s Angels in America, at the BU Theatre through February 22.
Quoting Ezra Pound—“To condense is to transcend”—Petosa admires Eötvös’ deftness at distilling Kushner’s sprawling drama into less than half the original running time. New York Times critic Bernard Holland writes of Angels the opera that “if the opportunities to ruminate have been curtailed in Mari Mezei’s libretto, the death clock of the AIDS epidemic sounds with an even more urgent tick.” And in the program notes Eötvös writes, “Hallucination and reality merge perfectly in Angels in America. It is precisely this characteristic of Kushner’s play which has inspired me most to work on this piece. In my opera version, I do not focus so much on the political aspect of the piece, but instead emphasize the passionate relationships and the dramatic suspense created by the strong writing, as well as the shapeless condition of the hallucinations.”
“It takes all of us out of our comfort zones,” says Jesse Darden (CFA’16), who sings the role of young Jewish New Yorker Louis Ironson. “This piece has us going from opera singers to singing actors.” Singing the role of Prior, the lead character dying of AIDS, tenor Ben Taylor (CFA’16) says the piece is a challenge, not only because the singers wear microphones, something their former opera roles didn’t demand, but because the music stretches the range limits of the singers. For John Allen Nelson (CFA’16), the alternate Prior, the opera is particularly challenging, because the spoken parts must be delivered rhythmically; they are, in a sense, scored. “It turns the piece on its head,” Nelson says, describing the opera as pervaded by “a sense of unease.”
“It’s such an exciting, different kind of experience,” says Petosa. “It’s got anger, it’s got radical thinking, it’s got self-loathing, and it’s viscerally human.” And although much of it is heartbreaking, Angels ends on a note of hope.
Angels in America runs tonight, February 19, Friday, February 20, and Saturday, February 21, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, February 22, at 2 p.m., at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Tickets are $20 for the general public, $15 for BU alumni, WGBH members, Huntington Theatre Company subscribers, and senior citizens; $5 for students with ID. Members of the BU community can get two free tickets with BU ID at the door on the day of performance. By public transportation, take an MBTA Green Line trolley to Hynes Auditorium or Symphony, or the Orange Line to Mass. Ave. Purchase tickets here or call 617-933-8600.