Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
February 28, 2012
Angels in America: The Play That Goes Clunk
Another post about Angels in America provided by the AIDS foundation, this time by Lauren Whalen, development and media coordinator for Pediatric AIDS Chicago Prevention Initiative (PACPI), a partner of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.
Angels in America: The Play That Goes Clunk
Friday, February 17, 2012
By Lauren Whalen
When I was 18, I did an art project against my will.
As a theatre major at Loyola University Chicago, I was required to take Introduction to Theatrical Design. Early in the semester, we had to create a conceptual project based on a favorite play. No rules. Just do it.
After 13 years of Catholic school, where structure was the air we breathed, I was at a loss. I couldn’t even draw a straight line.
The previous semester, I had been assigned Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. From the moment I sat down to read the play, on a bench facing Lake Michigan on a mild November day, I’d fallen in love with it. But even though I’d written a paper about the play, I still couldn’t express exactly why I loved it.
Time was running out. I did what I could. On critique day, I dreaded my fate — which would be delivered out loud to the entire class.
My teacher Daniel Ostling, a well-known set designer, circled the room until he came to my project. I held my breath in anticipation of the verbal smackdown sure to come.
Our names weren’t on the projects, only numbers. Dan picked mine up and looked out at the 30 or so performers and designers.
“Wow,” he said.
What?
My shocked face was a dead giveaway, so I hid behind a taller classmate and listened.
“Angels in America,” Dan said, still holding my project. “I walked up to this and thought, okay, cloud, celestial, whatever.”
I’d taken a cardboard jewelry box, covered it with fluffed-out cotton balls, adding a red stripe to symbolize the struggle with AIDS several of the characters faced.
“And then I turned it over,” Dan continued, “and listen to this.”
Clunk.
He’d found the rock I’d placed inside the box. Dan turned it over again. Clunk. The room was quiet. A classmate moved in to get a closer look.
“It made me rethink everything,” Dan told us. “I wanted to hold this, to protect it. I thought of what the characters in the play face: the delicacy of life. It’s precious. Not to be wasted. You think it’s one thing, and then it goes…” Clunk.
This is why Daniel Ostling has a Tony nomination and I don’t.
Intentionally or no, he perfectly summed up what I didn’t realize when I put the project together, why I loved Angels in America as an 18-year-old theatre major, and why I love it still.
Clunk.
Angels in America is seven hours long. Part One is a political drama, Part Two a divine comedy. The characters fight, screw, lust and collide, entering and exiting each other’s fantasies, hallucinations, flashbacks and flash- forwards while speaking a poetic tongue to which real-life humans can only aspire. It’s profane, searing, judgmental and hilarious — often within the same scene. It absolutely should not work. But it does.
Because Angels in America is the play that goes clunk.
The characters don’t speak like real people, but they certainly think and feel like them. They are a messy bunch: confused Mormons, corrupt attorneys, imaginative pill-popping housewives. A drag queen turned nurse is the sole voice of reason; a spurned gay man dying of AIDS the unlikely prophet.
Presiding over the action is the Angel, with “magnificent steel gray wings” (per Kushner’s stage directions), strongly sexual with a dry, barking cough: a far cry from the stained-glass creatures I was surrounded with growing up.
I was fresh out of a small farm town, brand new to the big city. I’d been taught that God made Adam for Eve, not Steve, Planned Parenthood was evil and anyone with AIDS deserved a grisly fate.
Once I read Angels in America, sitting on that bench overlooking Lake Michigan, I started to rethink everything. Even before I put the rock in the box, I heard the clunk — a wake-up call.
That was 13 years ago. Now instead of acting in plays, I review them. I also work for an organization that helps HIV-positive pregnant women.
Recently, I reread Angels in America. I was struck all over again by the beauty of Kushner’s language, the unexpected laughter rising out of the darkest moments, the call to action to fight injustices still plaguing our nation in 2012: the stigmas of homosexuality and HIV/AIDS, the inadequacy of health care, the fear to be who we are and do what we feel.
And after I read the last powerful line — “The Great Work Begins” — I heard it again.
Clunk.
Lauren Whalen is development and media coordinator for Pediatric AIDS Chicago Prevention Initiative (PACPI), a partner of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. Her writing can be found on The Huffington Post, Chicago Theater Beat, The Film Yap and RedEye ‘Hoods. She still can’t draw a straight line.
Tony Kushner will be the guest of honor at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago’s 2012 fundraising dinner, An Angel Among Us: A Evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright Tony Kushner, on March 27. Tickets can be purchased online or by calling Rhett Lindsay, AFC’s manager of fundraiser events, at (312) 334-0935.
February 21, 2012
Setting the Scene: Millennium Approaches
Invisible Man has officially closed, and it’s now time to move on to yet another new theatrical adventure for Court Theatre. If you’re familiar with Angels in America, you know there is going to be a LOT to discuss over the next few months, but for now, let’s just set the scene for Millennium Approaches in NYC with some text and some photos:
Grand Concourse and Flatbush
“Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names, you do not live in America, no such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes. Because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.”—Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, Act 1, Scene 1
Grand Concourse in 1919.
Flatbush in 1919.
Atlantic Avenue
“And today out the window on Atlantic Avenue there was a schizophrenic traffic cop who was making these—”—Harper, Act 1, Scene 5
Images from Atlantic Avenue in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood.
The Ramble
(Split scene: Joe and Roy in a fancy (straight) bar; Louis and a man, dressed in leather, in the Ramble in Central Park…Louis and the man are eyeing each other, each alternating interest and indifference.)
The ramble is just to the right of the lake.
A photo of the ramble.
The Mormon Visitor’s Center
HANNAH
Manhattan? Maybe you know… (Giving up, defeated:) I don’t suppose you know the location of the Mormon Visitors’ -
WOMAN
65th and Broadway.
HANNAH
How do you -
WOMAN
Go there all the time. Free movies. Boring, but you can stay all day.
The Mormon Center from 65th street.
Roy Cohn’s Apartment
ETHEL ROSENBERG
(dials the phone:)
It sings!
(imitating dial tones:) La la la…
Huh.
Yes, you should please send an ambulance to the home of Mr. Roy Cohn, the famous lawyer.
What’s the address, Roy?
ROY (a beat, then:)
244 East 87th.
ETHEL ROSENBERG
244 East 87th Street. No apartment number, he’s got the whole building.
Not the exact address, but a possible look for Roy’s apartment.
February 17, 2012
A Brother Lost to AIDS Lights the Way
Another post from our friends at the AIDS foundation of Chicago—
A Brother Lost to AIDS Lights the Way
Written by Gregory Trotter
Friday, February 10, 2012
Tom Rubnitz in 1990
When Mary Lu Roffe’s brother died of AIDS in 1992, his death left a void in her life that likely will never be filled.
In a recent interview, she fought back tears before the first question had been asked.
“People say it gets better with time,” said Roffe, a longtime board member for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC). “It does not. It really doesn’t.”
But when Tom Rubnitz died, he also left his sister a way forward, a path lit by HIV/AIDS activism and theatrical production for the past 20 years.
Shortly after his death, Roffe was elected to the AFC board. Within the same year, she was asked to be an associate producer of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking play that spurred conversation on AIDS, when the national tour launched at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in 1994.
“I knew there was some plan left for me,” she said. “I couldn’t think of a more important project to begin a career. It’s the greatest play ever written in my opinion. I said yes.”
Now, as the play returns this spring, opening at the Court Theatre on April 14, and with Tony Kushner as the guest of honor at AFC’s 2012 fundraising dinner, An Angel Among Us on March 27, there is a feeling of things coming full circle. There is also a “thrill” for Roffe, who helped forge the first connection between Angels and AFC.
Mary Lu was extremely close with her younger brother, Tom, who studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute before becoming a well-known painter and video artist in New York in the late 1980s.
Mary Lu Roffe
In 1988, the Rubnitz family organized a trip to Wisconsin for their grandmother’s birthday. The family always made these trips together but, this time, Tom called and said that he couldn’t make it because he was sick. So, Mary Lu, her other two brothers, Bob and Peter, and their parents went without him.
“We all made a pact we weren’t going to call him and bug him,” she said. “But everyone would sneak off to their room and start calling him.”
They cut the trip short and returned home. Within days, Tom’s parents flew him back to Chicago and checked him into the Evanston Hospital.
“How he didn’t die right then is beyond me,” Roffe said. “He had meningitis. He had full blown AIDS. He was so sick.”
Tom insisted on returning to Manhattan, where he lived there for another four years, flourishing as an artist and surrounded by his friends and peers in the New York East Village drag scene.
The Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has since archived his video art, described Rubnitz as a “genre artist par excellence” and “a quintessential New York underground film/video artist” who “took a bite out of the Big Apple and spat it out in a wild kaleidoscope of unequivocal camp and hallucinogenic color.”
Tom Rubnitz died in August 1992. He was 36 years old.
His death was devastating for his family. Shortly thereafter, a grieving Roffe was approached by Lori Kaufman, who still serves on the AFC board of directors, and was asked to join the fight against AIDS.
“I was very honored she had asked me,” Roffe said. “I thought, OK, I’ve got to make a difference somehow. This is where I need to hang my hat.”
The stars further aligned when it was announced that Angels would be touring the country, beginning with a six-month run at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in 1994. Roffe was approached by longtime friends involved in theatre and was asked to be an associate producer for the Chicago production.
Having seen in it New York, Roffe knew it was a brilliant play. She signed on.
“(Angels) made everything else pale in comparison. It could have just been very sad but it wasn’t,” Roffe said. “It‘s an intricate weave of human experience. “
Nearly 20 years later, Roffe continues to serve AFC’s board of directors, while producing award-winning plays over the years — including Chinglish, Spamalot, Frost-Nixon and Man of La Mancha — in Chicago, on Broadway and in various cities around the world.
When her brother was diagnosed with AIDS, not many people were comfortable talking about the disease claiming the lives of so many gay men. These days, Roffe finds herself outraged at a different kind of silence: complacency.
“I’ve had two people say to me in the last week, you never hear about AIDS anymore, it must not be an issue anymore,” Roffe said.
Roffe and many others in Chicago’s HIV/AIDS community are hoping the return of Angels to Chicago can once again ignite conversation about the ongoing epidemic that continues to ravage lives.
“It’s important for AFC and it’s important for Angels,” she said. “I think it’s crucial to show this to a whole new generation to show what people went through in the 80s, the whole denial thing, the whole political thing and to keep it out there.”
Tickets to An Angel Among Us: A Evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright Tony Kushner, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago’s 2012 dinner on March 27, start at $225. They can be purchased online or by calling Rhett Lindsay, AFC’s manager of fundraiser events, at (312) 334-0935.
The Court Theatre’s preview performance of Angels in America begins March 30. Proceeds from the April 14 opening night performance go to AFC.
February 14, 2012
The Apocalypse and…Water Balloons
“I feel… that something’s going to give.”—Harper
A few weeks ago before rehearsal started, Artistic Director Charles Newell made an impromptu visit to our weekly marketing meeting and shared some thoughts about his impending production of Angels in America, a project that has been looming large in all of our imaginations for the entirety of the 11/12 season. Angels in America is hands-down my favorite play EVER, so it would never occur to me to question why one would produce it (um…because it’s awesome?), but I found Charlie’s perspective on the continuing relevance of this piece absolutely fascinating.
He described the world of the play thusly: “the world is flying too fast and everything feels like it might fly apart.” I don’t know about you, but that about sums up how I feel right about now. 2012 has begun. It’s the year of a presidential election that could forever alter the course of our country. It’s the year of a potential Mayan apocalypse. In Charlie’s words, it’s a year when our country must decide “how we are going to care for ourselves and how we’re going to care for each other.” What better time to see this play than when questions of healthcare, access, and perhaps most essentially, equality, are glaring at every American.
Charlie pointed out that this sense could be visually captured by the moment after a water balloon is punctured, but the moment before the water falls. Infinite, unknown possibilities encapsulated in a single, delicate moment of chaos. Pretty cool.
February 3, 2012
A First Rehearsal Mug Shot
Mug Shot
Court Theatre marked the first rehearsal for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America with a special visit from an auspicious guest. Can you guess who?
