I will not share the authorship of this poem, unless, of course, the poet would like to come forward, but I couldn’t pass up sharing it with our readers:

It’s only recently that I have heard
‘Bout the position of a Dramaturg.
But my suspicions proved true,
After listening to Drew
That to be one you must be a drama nerd.

Love it.

Life for undergraduates at the U of C is notoriously tough and busy, but even in their downtime students still prefer activities that allow them opportunities for intellectual engagement. Enter Court Theatre Student nights. Students can always get reduced price tickets to Court productions, but during the beginning of each run, Court hosts a special Student Night that allows U of C kids to see an amazing show and get a free dinner, the magic words for college students.

April 8th was the Student Night for Angels in America, and around 50 students took advantage of the marathon day with a catered meal by Hyde Park restaurant Park 52. Student groups often use Student Night as a chance to organize large trips that stay close to campus and can be subsidized for their members, and the large group this time was Queers & Associates. Q & A is the largest queer organization on the U of C campus and they are dedicated to supporting the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) community through activism, events, and social activities. Angels was a chance for them to see an award-winning theatrical work dealing with themes that are still relevant to gay youth. Aside from the HBO special, most of the students on the trip had only read the play, so there was a lot of excitement about seeing it in its “original form,” and as a marathon.

One student, Caroline, talked about how the performance felt like a shared experience for everyone in the group: “I also really loved the format of seeing both parts in one day. I’d seen Part I performed before, but had never seen Part II. I was super exhausted—emotionally and physically—by the end of the second performance, but it definitely felt like I was “in it” with all the other folks who were at the event as well.”

Another student, Kate, who didn’t attend with Q&A said she liked Student Nights because they made it easier to fit in seeing “pretty fantastic shows,” into her schedule. She like being able to have full night of going to see a show, eating a great dinner and talking a group of students. “It’s my final quarter and my friends and I are doing Chicago bucket-list type things, and Angels was a bucket-list type show for us, so this was just too great of an opportunity to pass up.”

Having attended a few Student Nights myself, it really is a great chance to see an awesome play with friends, or even make some new ones, and then discuss the show while eating (free!) delicious food. Angels in particular is such a monumental play, and chatting with other students during dinner it was clear that everyone was really pleased to have this unique opportunity to see an amazing piece of art on a student’s budget. Tony Kushner writes in the program that Angels in America is supposed to wear the audience out, and as the Student night groups left, everyone was exhausted, but the good type of tired, like they had run, and won, a marathon.

Art and Activism in the 1980s
May 5th at 5:00 pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art
FREE with an RSVP

 
How did activist art provoke social change regarding the AIDS crisis? What is the relationship between art and public policy? What has changed between 1982 and 2012? We invite you to attend this free evening of cultural inquiry that explores the intersection between the exhibit This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s and Court Theatre’s production of Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America. After a brief introduction by Museum of Contemporary Art’s Curatorial Assistant Karsten Lund,  guests are welcome to walk through the galleries at their leisure and then participate in a discussion featuring the following panelists:

David Ernesto Munar
President/CEO of the AIDS foundation

Dr. Jennifer Brier
Author of Infectious Ideas: AIDS and US Politics, 1980-2006
Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies & History at UIC

Drew Dir
Court Theatre’s Resident Dramaturg
Production Dramaturg for Angels in America

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I actually stumbled upon This will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s via a groupon for the MCA rather than my own expansive knowledge of current cultural happenings in the city of Chicago. When I went to the MCA, I had no idea that I was about to find the most fascinating complementary experience to seeing Angels in America, but there it was.

The exhibit has four major themes: “The End is Near,” “Democracy,” “Gender Trouble,” and “Desire and Longing.”  The pieces in the exhibit address everything from Reaganism, the AIDS epidemic, the development of a media-saturated culture, and the evolution of gender as a malleable concept. It chronicles the visual art community’s response to this time in our history. There was a red carpet leading up to an oil painting of Ronald Reagan, nine 12x12 Samsung televisions showing images from the media with provocative phrases super-imposed on the screens such as “image world,” “self-censorship,” and “people with AIDS,” a banner with photographs of three sexually and culturally diverse couples kissing reading “Kissing Doesn’t Kill. Greed and Indifference Do” (see below)…it was fascinating.

Gran Fury
Kissing doesn’t kill: Greed and indifference do, 1989

Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces to me was an ad from Fortune magazine (I am in marketing, after all).  It read thusly:

“Nobody’s going to hand you success on a silver platter. If you want to make it, you’ll have to make it on your own. Your own drive, your own guts, your own energy, your own ambition. Yes, ambition. You don’t have to hide it anymore. Society’s decided it’s ok to be up-front about the drive for success.  Isn’t that what the fast track is all about?”

I mean, whoa, Roy Cohn anybody?

Contrast that with the two pieces below, hanging respectively on adjacent and opposite walls of the gallery, and I think you’ve truly captured the political and cultural rift of the 1980s.

Donald Moffett
Call the White House, 1990

Barbara Kruger
“Untitled” (We will no longer be seen and not heard), 1985

Of course, the MCA does a much better job of describing their exhibit:

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s covers the period from 1979 to 1992. During this era, the political sphere was dominated by the ideas of former US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the music scene was transformed by punk and the birth of hip-hop, and our everyday lives were radically altered by a host of technological developments, from the Sony Walkman and the ATM to the appearance of MTV and the first personal computers. In the United States, the decade opened with an enormous anti-nuclear protest in New York’s Central Park and closed with mass demonstrations against the government’s slow response to the AIDS crisis. This exhibition attempts to make sense of what happened to the visual arts in the United States during this tumultuous period.

The artists represented in This Will Have Been belong to the first generation of artists to grow up with a television in the home. They came of age in a culture saturated with images designed to promote desire—desire for objects, for lifestyles, for fame, for conformity, for anti-conformity. So too the majority of these artists lived through the heady days of the 1970s feminist movement and witnessed that broad-based social movement’s demands for equality in all areas of life—work, family, and intimate relationships. It became the task of the 1980s to assimilate these powerful social forces—the rise of television and movements for social justice—as they converged.

For many of the artists represented in this exhibition that meant grappling with complex questions: In a world increasingly filled with mass-media images, what is the role of the visual arts? How can artists make images that either compete with or counter the powerful images produced by advertising and Hollywood? In a society struggling for increased equality, how do historically marginalized people—women, people of color, and gays and lesbians—find their public voice? Toward the end of the decade, as the rise of HIV/AIDS created a growing political and medical crisis in the United States, these questions increased in urgency. This Will Have Been features a wide range of artworks, made by a diverse group of nearly one hundred artists, demonstrating the decade’s moments of contentious debate, raucous dialogue, erudite opinions, and joyful expression—all in the name of an expanded idea of freedom, long the promise of democratic societies.

I highly recommend that everyone see this exhibit—AND if you come to the event on May 5th, you can see it for FREE!  I’ll end this post with my favorite piece:

Guerrilla Girls
The Advantages of Being A Woman Artist, 1988

My last post was about my experience visiting Temple Square in Salt Lake City as a tourist who’s only interaction with the Mormon community was studying Angels in America. I received a response to this post from a wonderful Mormon lady named Mary Hinckley Thatcher who used to live in Hyde Park and come to Court Theatre. She graciously pointed out that she wears pants almost every day and that perhaps I had presented too narrow a view on this complex religion. We got to talking via email and decided it would be great to present another perspective on Mormonism.  She agreed to do an interview with me about her experience as a Mormon in Hyde Park and her relationship to Angels in America, and I’m very excited to share it with you. She also shared two very interesting links illustrating the diversity that exists within the Mormon faith that you should definitely check out:

It Gets Better at Brigham Young University
“Jabari Parker balances faith, fierceness on the court” by Seth Davis, Sports Illustrated  

1.    You said you loved living in the Mormon community in Hyde Park—was there anything in particular that made it special to you?

I loved Hyde Park, and the Mormon community there is unique.  The Hyde Park Ward—a ward is like a parish—includes Hyde Park but also includes most of the south side of Chicago.  The ward is diverse (I need to add the qualifier “for a Mormon ward”) and is among a handful of Mormon wards with a reputation for being liberal (again, the qualifier…).  I’m a sixth generation Mormon and at least a fourth generation liberal Democrat , so I felt I had finally found a real home. 

2.    Did you ever experience any misconceptions about Mormonism while living in Hyde Park?

I don’t introduce myself by saying “Hi, I’m Mary.  And I’m a Mormon.”  By the time people find out that I am a Mormon I would hope they would trust me enough to know that I won’t send missionaries over to their home or try to force my religion on them.  I found that people who were very involved in their own religious traditions were more interested, or curious, and more likely to ask questions.  For a few years I taught part-time at Akiba-Schechter Jewish Day School, and because religious topics were frequently discussed in school my colleagues there felt very comfortable asking about my religion.  While they may have privately thought Mormonism is unusual (let’s face it, Mormonism is a little weird), I always felt respect from them for my religion and my lifestyle.  After we got to know each other better it was easier to see similarities and shared beliefs rather than the obvious differences.

I did feel some degree of prejudice in an unexpected setting—while I was working with an interfaith group.  I felt that my religion was seen as inferior; particularly that our clergy didn’t quite measure up to the professional clergy in other area churches.  We have a lay clergy—all local positions are volunteer and unpaid, including the bishop, teachers, organists and choristers—so we are different.  I hope my somewhat negative experience was an isolated one.

3.    You mentioned that Angels is one of your “favorite plays for many reasons.”  What do you like about Angels?

Angels really packs a punch.  It feels audacious and dangerous at times but sometimes feels strangely familiar.  How many people besides Mormons would feel fairly comfortable with the idea that angels could come crashing through your ceiling? And Angels tackles the big issues.  Not just life and death, but change and growth.  The play can be moving, uncomfortable—my mother saw the play in New York when it opened and I don’t think she has ever fully recovered—and sometimes laugh out loud funny.  There are not many serious, realistic Mormon characters out there (I prefer to believe that Neil LaBute’s Mormon characters are not representative of most Mormons, and the Mormons in The Book of Mormon musical are caricatures, though clearly drawn from life), so finding Mormons in an important work like Angels is exciting.

4.    Do you think Mormons are fairly represented in Angels in America? 

Yes, though this is a very different question from the following one (do they feel authentic?).  Yes, there are valium-addicted, agoraphobic Mormon women like Harper.  There have been many Mormon men like Joe.  If you know the song “Turn It Off” from The Book of Mormon, that’s a fairly accurate picture of the Mormon view of homosexuality. I think the Mormon Church has made some positive steps—baby steps—in the right direction recently, especially after the Prop 8 debacle in California in 2008, but the church is very slow to change.  Just last week I saw an “It Gets Better” video put together by LGBT students at Brigham Young University, the Mormon university in Utah.  My first thought was, “I hope these students aren’t censured or attacked for this,” though a tiny cynical voice inside me also hoped this wasn’t put together by a savvy PR person to repair some of damage from Prop 8.  I hope the video is sincere—I think it is—and is a sign that things are changing.

5.    When you said you love to see which actors “feel” authentically Mormon—what does that mean to you?

I was obsessed with this question when I watched the HBO version of Angels.  I had a track running in my head:  “No, Hannah would never do that,” or “I can’t believe Harper said that!”  My son reminded me that he and I both burst out laughing when Hannah approaches the homeless woman to ask for directions, because that scene felt so real.  We both imagined my mother as Hannah, just off the plane from Salt Lake City and lost in the South Bronx.  In that production, Patrick Wilson as Joe “feels” like a Mormon (he also looks like one); Mary-Louise Parker as Harper does not, and Meryl Streep as Hannah…I wanted her to move into my ward and sing in my ward choir and join the ward book group.

After reading the plays again this week I no longer blame Mary-Louise Parker for not feeling authentically Mormon.  Nothing about Harper feels Mormon to me.  I’ve had to create a personal backstory for Harper in which she joined the Mormon Church just before she married Joe and she only went to church meetings for a short time.  Harper does not feel inauthentic as a person if I take away the Mormon part.  This is hard to explain, what “feels” Mormon and what doesn’t, because it is different for each character.  For Joe, his rigidity and fearfulness feel real, and even what I see as his lack of nerve at the end, when he goes back to Harper, “feels” Mormon, unfortunately.  With Hannah, it is actually her ability to change and adapt that feels true to me.  Not every Mormon could create a new life like Hannah did, but Hannah reminds me of some of my favorite Mormon women, a few of whom live in Hyde Park.

A big thank you to Mary Hinckley Thatcher for her insight and time!

Why am I telling you this, you ask?

Well, all this is to say that when I went to visit a friend who had moved to Salt Lake City after college, I literally couldn’t WAIT to visit Temple Square. Talk about researching for a role. I was going to get to experience Mormonism in Salt Lake first hand!

When I first arrived, I tried to get a sense from my friend of what it was like to live in a community with such a large Mormon presence. I didn’t learn much except that people in Salt Lake fall into two categories: LDS (latter day saints) and non-LDS.  If you ever visit Salt Lake and want to fit in, use these terms freely and in abundance. My friend also shared with me that coffee shops played an important role in the non-LDS culture because coffee shops were by definition LDS-free (Mormon’s don’t believe in consuming caffeine).

Fortified by this knowledge, I made my way to Temple Square. Temple Square in Salt Lake City is basically the geographic heart of Mormonism. It is a place of pilgrimage for Mormons and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Salt Lake.  Its grounds include “over twenty attractions” according to Utah.com including the Salt Lake Temple, the Tabernacle (home of, you guessed it, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir), the Family History Library, the Church History Library, the Church History Museum, the North Visitor’s Center, the South Visitor’s Center, the Joseph Smith Memorial Building…you get the idea.

I wandered around all day taking in the sights and reading the literature. I even saw the “Joseph Smith movie,” an hour-long piece presented in a massive amphitheater detailing the life, revelations, and death of Joseph Smith. When the movie finished, the lights came up on an interesting juxtaposition between a weeping Mormon couple that was seated in front of me and a large group of Japanese tourists filing loudly out of the theater. Temple Square is an interesting place.

As I meandered through the “attractions,” I did feel a strange, undeniable desire to see the inside of the Temple. It looms large in the center of the square and has a Rococo meets Brutalism meets Disney feel to it (they light it up quite colorfully at night). Non-LDS aren’t allowed inside, making the Temple a sort of “forbidden fruit” as it were.  In addition to being intensely curious, I felt a sense that I was different from everyone there, but couldn’t figure out why. Everyone was very polite and maintained a friendly distance; I didn’t feel gawked at or unwelcome so why did I feel out of place? Then I realized it was because I was wearing pants. More specifically, I was a woman, and I was wearing pants. The only woman wearing pants.

It was a truly fascinating trip.  I thought you might be interested to see some of the photos I took along the way:

A tourist-friendly map of Temple Square.

The Salt Lake Temple.

A sort of diorama display inside the South Visitor’s Center.

The inside of the Tabernacle.

Some displays from the Family History Museum.

The inside of the amphitheater for the Joseph Smith movie.

And one more just because it’s beautiful. This is from Antelope Island, national state park (and yes, I saw antelope).

10. Angels in America is a classic play. Only twenty years after its premiere, it still has the test of time to face; nevertheless, Angels so completely rocked and re-oriented American theatre that we’re still feeling its aftershocks today. It’s all but guaranteed that critics one hundred years from now will identify Angels in America as a pivotal work of drama.

9. The United States still needs political theatre. Angels in America showed critics and audiences that a play could take an ambitious intellectual and political point of view (modeled by Bertolt Brecht) without sacrificing the pathos of the American family/relationship drama (modeled by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams). Twenty years later (with the exception of plays like Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit or Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Book of Mormon), mainstream drama continues to avoid political content, especially when it’s on Broadway.

8. The United States still needs progressivism. Tony Kushner doesn’t pretend to be a neutral commentator; Angels in America is a full-throated argument in favor of progressive politics as the shortest path to equal rights for Americans of every race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. As the states drag their feet on gay marriage, lawmakers attempt to erode the gains of the feminist movement, and the Supreme Court grants personhood to corporations, Prior Walter’s assertion that “We will be citizens” is just as relevant a call-to-arms as it was twenty years ago. Plus:

7. It’s a presidential election year--so you can register to vote and do something about it.

6. The 1980s are back—with a vengeance. Ronald Reagan remains a powerful American totem, and political issues like the social safety net, national defense spending, federal funding for the arts, and a woman’s right to choose continue to be re-litigated in congress. Forget nostalgia: in so many ways, American politics and culture never left the 80s.

5. AIDS hasn’t gone away. The affected demographic has shifted to children and teenagers, low income individuals, and African Americans—and that’s just in the United States. AIDS is a pandemic, there’s still no cure, and living with AIDS is an expensive lifestyle that not everyone can afford. Every nine and a half minutes, someone in the United States is infected with HIV.

4. Angels in America has become an important history lesson for the next generation. I grew up in the 1990s, and received my fair share of public school education about the HIV virus and how to prevent it. What I didn’t learn about was how Washington ignored the AIDS crisis for years (President Reagan never publicly addressed the crisis until 1987), and how that silence allowed tens of thousands disenfranchised individuals—especially homosexual men—to die. Those lessons I learned from Angels in America, which captures what it felt like to live during the crisis as only a great work of art can do.

3. Court Theatre’s intimate space is the perfect stage for Angels in America. In a larger theatre, Angels can sometimes feel overblown, but in Court’s 250-seat house, Angels in America can be staged as the nimble, intimate play it was intended to be. If you saw Angels in America on Broadway or at the Royal George, Court’s production will be a revelation to you.

2. Staging Angels in America is a challenge—and we love challenges. The play is seven hours long; it contains fifty-nine scenes that demand multiple locations, dozens of costume changes, rain and snow, blood scenes, sex scenes, a Mormon museum exhibit, a flaming book that explodes out of the ground, a ladder that ascends to heaven, and a flying angel. At Court Theatre, we’ve broken new technical ground to make this play happen; that’s exciting for us, and we think our audiences will feel the same way.

1. Charlie Newell and Tony Kushner, together again. After Court Theatre’s tremendous success in producing Caroline, or Change and The Illusion, we realized that the literary fireworks of Tony Kushner’s prose were just as well-matched to the sensibilities of Artistic Director Charlie Newell as the words of Tom Stoppard and Molière. When Kushner and Newell sat down to plan their third collaboration, Kushner was emphatic: he was eager to see Angels in America receive the kind of intimate, intelligent production that Court is known for.

How could we possibly say no?

Ingredients:
1 cup Book of Genesis, Chapter 32
1 cup Book of Revelations
1/3 cup William Blake
1/3 cup John Milton
1 whole Joseph Smith, trimmed
2 tsp. “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges
3 tbsp Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
1/2 cup Italian Renaissance, grated
dash of Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, to taste
dash of Percy Shelley, to taste
1 flying rig

Mix Book of Genesis story about Jacob wrestling an angel (“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me!”) with Book of Revelations apocalypticism; gradually stir in Italian Renaissance aesthetic traditions of winged angels derived from medieval Catholic theology. Add John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wiliam Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, depending on your allergies. Allow to set at room temperature; preheat oven to 375 degrees. Stuff angel mixture inside Joseph Smith’s origin story of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, in which the Angel Moroni instructs him to dig up an ancient gold-plated book of scripture and translate it with peep-stones. In a small bowl, mix Borges’ short story about the infinite Hebrew letter Aleph, Benjamin’s essay on the Angel of History that is propelled backwards by a storm called progress, and a dash of Percy Shelley (“Hell is a city much like London” / “Heaven is a place much like San Francisco”) and Star Trek (“protomatter”) for oblique allusion. Spread on top of Joseph Smith, then bake until golden brown, about seven-and-a-half hours (with intermissions). Truss Angel in one Peter Pan-style flying rig breaking through the ceiling of a New York City apartment. Enjoy!

Rembrandt 1659

Eugene Delcroix 1861

Alexander Leloir 1865

Leon Bonnat 1876

Gustav Moreau 1878

Paul Gaugin 1888

Marc Chagall 1963

Any set for Angels in America needs versatility to represent several different locations in quick succession. Often this results in a set that’s been watered down to be a kind of staging platform for tables, chairs, and beds to be wheeled on and off, but John’s set manages to hold its own integrity as an evocative piece of design. It’s capable of summoning a number of different feelings and impressions, either intentionally or unintentionally:

- It feels like a Greek theater, with a permanent altarpiece in the center that seems ritualistic but can be used practically as well (you could play the Oresteia in this space or, for that matter, all of Shakespeare’s plays—it is classical in its formal neutrality).

-It’s also a modern urban setting; the thick grid of beams on the back wall seem to extend upwards twenty stories past the ceiling of the theater. There are no diagonals or curves in this space, only boxes: everything is man-made. They look like little apartments or rooms, or maybe the long city blocks on the New York City grid.

-While the ruins of San Francisco following the 1904 earthquake were an explicit inspiration for the back wall, the first image that comes to my mind is the World Trade Center—the association isn’t overwhelming but it’s there—I acknowledge it and move on.

-The space is designed so that characters and stories can be rotated and reconfigured like a Rubik’s cube: Prior is rotated next to Harper, then next to Louis, who is rotated next to Joe, who is rotated next to Roy, who is rotated next to Harper. Blue green red white red blue blue green.  Like the island of Manhattan, strangers are forced together, then forced apart. Prior’s line: “People come and go so quickly here.” When I get up to go, they’re trying to make Michael Pogue (as Mr. Lies) disappear (no really: disappear.)

-The space is designed to trap light. Keith Parham’s lighting design doesn’t light the set so much as it tries to escape from within it: negotiating corners, adapting to crevices, filling whatever space it can find in cold, stately columns of light. The light breathes from within the ribs of the set.

-The set captures the uneasy relationship between public and private space, which is a condition I associate with New York. Personal space is guaranteed in Chicago, a natural right; in New York, personal space is always negotiated, traded, engineered. I’m somewhat paraphrasing a comment made by Tony Kushner when he was here, though he was relating it to the vowel pronunciations of Midwesterns versus New Yorkers.

A few weeks ago, I was parked illegally on a curb outside the Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago waiting for Dr. Daniel Johnson, a doctor and epidemiologist specializing in pediatric HIV/AIDS care for children and adolescents. I was picking up Dr. Johnson, who I’d never met before in person, to bring him to Court’s rehearsal hall to chat with the cast for Angels in America about AIDS. The medical campus and our theater are only a few blocks apart from each other, but they might as well be different countries. When you spend so much time in the theatre, it’s often shocking to visit another profession, especially one so serious as the medical field. When Dr. Johnson stepped into the passenger seat of my car, I felt as if I might be smuggling him over some national border. When we arrived at rehearsal, Dr. Johnson proved a substantial presence in the room. Actors and playwrights have their own cultivated charisma, but doctors have a certain gravitas too, and the excitement—there was a doctor in the house!—was palpable.

Dr. Johnson began by talking about his first encounter with a patient afflicted with HIV. It was the early 1980s, when the epidemic was rapidly growing but the medical field’s understanding about the disease remained in the relative dark ages. Dr. Johnson, who had a hunch about what the young man might be suffering from, had asked the patient if he was a homosexual, and the patient said that he was. When Dr. Johnson shared this fact with a senior doctor, his elder colleague was shocked—in the early 1980s, you couldn’t just ask a patient a question like that. There was a line of privacy and decency that was not to be crossed. This was a small detail of his memory, Dr. Johnson said, but it was indicative of the climate of ignorance that existed in the early day of the AIDS epidemic—an ignorance, in fact, that likely enabled the rapid spread of such a virus.

Dr. Johnson has seen nearly thirty years of the HIV virus, long enough to see the demographics of its victims shift over time. During that career, it’s been hard for him, as a human being, to see so many of his patients and friends lose their lives to AIDS. There was a period in the late 1980s, he says, when he was attending a funeral every three months for young people not much older than thirty. On the other hand, as an epidemiologist, Dr. Johnson has gained a wary respect for the HIV virus, an appreciation for its ruthless efficiency. During the primary infection of HIV, there may be as many as a few million virus particles in a single drop of blood—a cold fact that resonated with Prior’s line about feeling that every single part of him is infected, that his heart is “pumping polluted blood.” He described the process of how an HIV virus hijacks a cell and transforms it into a factory for producing more viruses with an attitude of awe and concern.

The cast continued to pepper Dr. Johnson with questions about their characters, almost as any of his patients might—“Why do I have these abdominal pains?” “Could my hallucinations be a symptom of dementia?” “Which forms of sexual intercourse are more likely to transmit the virus?” Dr. Johnson answered them all with patience, and not without (I thought) a bit of amusement. I wondered if he found this similar to his daily work, only without life or death atstake. As it turns out, Dr. Johnson is an avid theatergoer and a subscriber to Court Theatre—as he shared with me later, he was tickled to be taking questions from actors like Hollis Reznik and Larry Yando who he’d been seeing on stage for fifteen years!

I wasn’t able to be at first rehearsal—could you “present” your scenic design again for us in 250 words or less?

The first step in our process designing Angels in America was visual research on the literal locations in the play and on angels, the primary image. We then studied the play (we think of both plays as two parts of one journey) to discover the overall world for our production. It ultimately seemed to the design team that the core of the journey was heaven – the place where Prior rejects the idea of being a prophet to stop change, instead he chooses to live, despite his illness. Heaven became the metaphor for our world. The angels describe heaven as being pretty much like San Francisco after the earthquake. The set developed from the images of the empty shells of buildings left after the earthquake in San Francisco.  This abstracted structure also provides the urban context for the story. 

What was the most challenging part of designing the set for Angels in America?

Angels in America has many, many different scenes and locations.  Traditionally this would require transitions between each scene to change the environment for each location.  However, from our perspective, the emotional journey of the characters does not stop and it is imperative that it continue seamlessly between scenes.  So, our goals was to never have a ‘transition” where the forward trajectory of the charter journey pauses.  This presents many challenges in terms of telling the story and moving from “location” to “location”.  Ultimately, we are intending to focus on character relationships and not literal locations.

Is there anything surprising about the design that people should watch out for? 

The epilogue of the Perestroika is in a different context than the rest of the play.  It is set years later and the characters directly address the audience.  So, we have a big, fun,  change in the nature of the world for that critical few minutes at the end of the journey.

Anything else you’d like people to know before they see the show? 

The more we work on this play the richer it becomes, the sign of a classic!

John was kind enough to share some of the photos that he used as inspiration for the design:

The Bethesda fountain in winter.

Burning buildings from the San Francisco Earthquake.

San Francisco City Hall after the earthquake.

Antarctica.

Falling facades after the San Francisco earthquake.

Building remains after the San Francisco earthquake.

“Steps only”

ICU equipment.

“Patient wired up”

IV Equipment