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?

Kushner in the Here and Now
Written by Gregory Trotter  
Thursday, 02 February 2012 21:18

Charlie Newell (at left), longtime artistic director of the Court Theatre,and playwright Tony Kushner discuss the upcoming production of Angels in America.
AFC Photos

Legendary playwright Tony Kushner shuffled into the rehearsal room about 10 minutes before the first read-through of the Court Theatre’s spring production of Angels in America.

He shook a few hands and took his perch on a stool next to artistic director, Charlie Newell, who has directed two other Kusher plays — Caroline, or Change and Illusion — in his 20-year tenure at the Court, but never Angels, not until now.

The two men faced a table of attentive cast members, as well as a small audience of donors, patrons and self-proclaimed Kushner “groupies” in the back of the room.

“Why Angels in America now?” Newell said, asking his first question in an introductory conversation with Kushner.  (Angels changed the discourse on HIV/AIDS when it premiered some 20 years ago. Set in 1985, the characters struggle with AIDS during the Reagan administration. Much has changed since then, hence Newell’s question.)

“I don’t know, you’re the one who’s doing it,” Kushner said, breaking into a toothy grin.

The 50 or so people burst into laughter. Kushner had his audience.

The Court Theatre is partnering with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) to stage Angels. Kushner will be the guest of honor at AFC’s March 27 fundraising dinner, An Angel Among Us.

And both parts of the play, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, open at the Court Theatre on April 14. Proceeds from the opener will benefit AFC.

Growing more serious, Kushner acknowledged his healthy past relationship with the Court, as well as the chance to benefit AFC, as motivations.

“The fact that the play has identified with late early days of the epidemic, it coincided with a turning point … if not a genuine shouldering of the responsibilities needed to address the epidemic — that connection has always meant a lot to me,” he said.

Angels, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, provided a much-needed opportunity for a large public gathering of those who had been affected by HIV/AIDS, those who had lost loved ones.

“It’s a great pride to me the play was able to function as that,” Kushner said.

Actor Michael Pogue will play the part of Belize.

That being said, Kushner said he never intended to write a play about AIDS, raise public awareness about the epidemic or advocate for any particular group of people.

Rather, his aim was to write an honest play about “living in the here and now” amid the “biological catastrophe of the epidemic and the political catastrophe of Reaganism.”

“I don’t think any play should have the job of teaching people to feel or think a certain way,” Kushner said, adding that goal could be more effectively achieved by writing an essay.

Funny, expressive, delightfully tangential, Kushner soon veered off into global warming and the unseasonably warm Chicago weather: “We have to hate this weather but it makes us happy. That’s the grim irony of the universe making us all enjoy our approaching extinction.”

One was reminded of the great Angels line: “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”

But, back to the question, why Angels now?

Actors Geoff Packard and Larry Yando are cast as Joe Pitt and Roy Cohn respectively.

Much has changed in the last 20 years but much has not, Kushner said. The epidemic continues on as we continue to suffer from the lasting effects of Reagan politics, he said.

And he put it more simply. “A play gets redone when it’s time.”

Kushner likened an audience’s experience with a play to the relationship between a sleeper and a dream. It shifts and evolves constantly. No one point in time is necessarily better than another.

Why Angels now?

“Why not?” Kushner said, grinning.

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 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.

Adding the technical elements to any show is a tricky process.  The lights, sound, and projections for Invisible Man are super complicated, challenging us as we move through our week of tech rehearsals.  There is also a revolve onstage that the actors themselves manipulate, moving set pieces that the actors push and pull into place for scene changes, and video and sound that supports key elements of the play like Tod Clifton’s Sambo dance sequence, the Battle Royal, and the Harlem riots.

One of the most unique aspects of this production is Alex Koch’s projection design which provides context, a sense of place, and symbolic images to an otherwise bare stage.  Alex and his four person team are using six projectors, two Macintosh computers, and about 16 different projection surfaces onstage. 

His inspiration for his design mainly comes from the work of African-American artists Romare Bearden and Kara Walker, and old archival films and newsreels.  He was also inspired by the phenomenon of hoarding.  Alex, who compiled 300 archival films and 150 photos from the National Archives in Washington, the Library of Congress, and his own personal collection, says, “The idea of gathering so much is to see what happens when you have all these stories and objects on top of one another.  That is who the Invisible Man is.  He’s hoarded all these events and hopes to make sense of them.  My job is to make that digestible.”

Collage by Romare Bearden

Alex says his challenge during the tech rehearsal process is to edit down his collection to about 20 or 30 compositions for the play, and he admits that he only uses about 1/5 of what he’s made on any show he works on.  “There’s a desire to be really reductive right now,” Alex reflects, “Tech on this show is a vortex where I need to make my ideas really simple.  In previews, I expect to expand.”

Alex hopes that the audience views his projections as another character in the play.  They should add interaction, complicate the scenes, and have a genuine relationship to what is going on onstage.  He is most pumped about the images he’s designed for when the Invisible Man arrives in Harlem.  Alex, who has lived in Harlem for over three years, says he has walked the same neighborhoods as the Invisible Man and Ralph Ellison.  He lives only 10 blocks from where the character Mary would have lived, and only 12 blocks from where Ellison himself spent most of his adult life. 

For more information about Alex and his work, visit alexkochdesign.com

Director Chris McElroen’s staging of the Invisible Man’s post-Liberty Paints electroshock therapy treatment, circa 1945, is inspired by German choreographer Pina Baush’s modern dance pieces. The idea is that the Invisible Man is being held by a harness and tether that he struggles against when he is receiving the electric shocks. 

Baush developed a Neo-Expressionist form of German dance known as Tanztheater.  New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay commented that her work could be “strikingly picturesque, always fluid in its comings and goings” as it “switches between episodes of sensual impulsiveness; coy, catwalk like audience-awareness; rushing scenes of harrowing need or anxiety; and diverse aspects of melancholia.”

Baush’s work was theatrical, elaborate and absurd, often based on dreamlike recollections.  According to the New York Times, “Her work has also been a major influence on American contemporary dance choreographers who question the boundaries between theater and dance.”

A documentary film, called “Pina,” released earlier this year explores her incredible life.  She died in 2009 at the age of 68 of an unspecified form of cancer.

We’re exactly two weeks out from the first preview of Invisible Man, and the cast and crew have been working long hours over the holidays to get this show on its feet. As director Chris McElroen said on the first day of rehearsal, this play is going to kick our asses a few times before we wrestle it to the ground, but so far, it looks like they’ve been able to do just that before the year is out. Still, as far as the overall journey of this adaptation is concerned, our four-week rehearsal period has been just the tip of the iceberg.

Ralph Ellison had always been wary of film or theater adaptations of his novel Invisible Man. He stipulated in his will that any adaptation for film, television, or theater could be produced only after his death. Ralph Ellison passed away in 1994, and ten years later, the Ralph Ellison Foundation, along with Ellison’s friend and literary executor John F. Callahan, were approached by Oscar- nominated filmmaker Oren Jacoby, who was interested in undertaking a dramatic adaptation. Jacoby had met John Callahan in 1996 while working on a documentary film about former senator and would-be presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Jacoby had a strong interest in adapting an epic American novel for the stage (he had previously collaborated on an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men for Dallas Theater Center and Trinity Rep). Invisible Man was at the top of his list. With Callahan’s blessing, Jacoby began work on a first draft to present to the estate. From the very beginning, the script hewed closely to the novel; all of the adaptation’s dialogue was (and remains) Ellison’s. Jacoby’s task was to coax out the inherent theatricality of the piece and create a playable script that would be not only a faithful translation of Ellison’s novel but a vital, breathing work of theater in its own right. In 2010, the Ellison Foundation approved Jacoby’s adaptation and granted him an exclusive option on the novel’s theatrical rights.

Jacoby has continued to refine the adaptation as he teamed up with director Christopher McElroen. As the executive director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, McElroen had previously recommended some actors to Jacoby for the first reading of Invisible Man at the TriBeCa Theater Festival. In 2010 the two agreed to collaborate as a writer-director team, and under the guidance of Callahan and the Ellison estate, began an intensive year of workshops on the play, hosted by universities and cultural organizations like the University of Iowa, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Pace University, New York University, and the August Wilson Center. Around this time, we at Court Theatre had gotten wind of the project, and hosted a reading of the play with Chicago actors in November 2010. Shortly thereafter, Jacoby and McElroen decided that Court Theatre would produce the world premiere of Invisible Man, the first adaptation to be authorized by the Ellison estate.

In our first two weeks of rehearsal, Oren Jacoby and John Callahan joined McElroen and the actors in rehearsal, making small but crucial cuts and changes to the script as actors offered fresh input on their characters. It’s been thrilling to watch the adaptation take its final shape in the crucible of rehearsal, which has been a true collaborative space. The question of how to make Invisible Man theatrical has been paramount; often this has meant replacing a passage of Ellison’s text with a visual gesture more appropriate for live theater. Just as often, however, it has meant returning to Ellison’s novel again and again to add more of Ellison’s scenes, which he wrote in a heightened language of action seemingly ripe for theatrical adaptation.

Only one more week before we move from the rehearsal hall to the theater!

“Can you sell this vocally with a grunt, or whatever sound one makes when you bash somebody in the head with a bottle?”—Chris McElroen, Director

“I think I’m struggling with this transition.  The way I’m thinking about it in my head is pulling me off course.”—Julia Watt, Ensemble

“We’ll continue to find out what this world is.”—Chris McElroen, Director

“We’ll layer more people into this scene later.  This is just broad strokes.”—Chris McElroen, Director

“I’m supposed to leave, is that right?  I’m trying to figure out when and why.”—Tracey N. Bonner, Ensemble

“Now do you want, as they’re crossing out, for me to cross in, so we overlap?”—Kenn E. Head, Ensemble

“I can do that in my mind.”—Teagle F. Bougere, Ensemble

“So, it’s jab, jab?”
“Yeah, it’s jab jab.  One, two, three, four, slip, one, two, push away, jab, jab.”
—Teagle F. Bougere and Chris Boykin during the fight choreography practice for the Battle Royal

“So, let’s throw the rest of the world into this.”—Chris McElroen, Director

Director Christopher McElroen goes over the text during a break in rehearsal.

“I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality…Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility”—Invisible Man

Obviously, light plays a very important thematic role in Invisible Man, and what better way to express that theme than with light itself?  Behold the awesomeness of theater.

During his presentation at first rehearsal, Lighting Designer John Culbert discussed some of the fascinating paradoxes in the novel that he intends to bring to life with his lighting design: the idea of being invisible, yet wanting desperately to be seen; the concept of living in the brightest place in NYC, yet no one knows it’s there..the list goes on and on. He is going to create an “urban texture” with the lighting design, using shafts of light that simultaneously reveal and hide aspects of the story.

John was gracious enough to share some photos he is using as inspiration for Invisible Man‘s lighting design—enjoy!

“The truth is the light and the light is the truth”—Invisible Man

Impressions of Ralph Ellison from his personal friend and literary executor, John Callahan:

Ellison used to wander Harlem incessantly when he was writing Invisible Man. He was a gregarious guy. The novel is based on his personal experiences as a student, musician, and writer. At the start of the Harlem riot of 1943, Ellison was having dinner with a couple who invited him to stay overnight in Queens and all of a sudden, something hit him, and he said, “no, I have to go back to Harlem.”  He reported on the riots for the New York Post and also wrote his version of them in Invisible Man.

In the rehearsal room:

This rehearsal process is all about movement. Twisting, turning, ensemble-based physicality. Director Chris McElroen describes his approach to the play as one of circular movement that gets down to the vortex of the Invisible Man.  As a jumping off point, we will use the UK company Frantic Assembly’s “round-by-through” technique.  This company uses an extremely physical approach into theater, developed by the actors themselves rather than a choreographer. 

Chris describes, “We’re going to try a lot of different things. We’re going to manipulate and move him through the space. We have a revolve in the middle of the room, where we’ll disorient him. The trial and error will be finding the fluidity of the piece, and how we operate as one”.

I would like to honor her time at Court with the following haiku:

A Friend of Penguins
A Fixer of All Problems
We will miss Brea Hayes

All is not lost however. I would also like to write a welcoming haiku to our new Management Assistant, Gretchen Wright, who happens to be one of my dear friends:

Welcome to Gretchen
Thank you for replacing me
As the new girl here

And, scene.

John Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s literary executor (and personal friend) summed it up perfectly in his speech to the cast of Invisible Man before they began the first read-through of the script today.  He said of his friend:

“Ralph had both fear and joy in chaos” 

Fear and joy in chaos. What better way to describe the feeling you have when you’re putting on a world premiere? And not just any world premiere.  A world premiere of one of the most seminal, game-changing novels in the history of American literature.

And truly, Invisible Man isn’t just a novel—it’s part of America’s cultural subconscious. Even if you haven’t read the book—it’s all very, very familiar: the ever-unnamed Invisible Man, Monopolated Light and Power, 1,369 lights hanging from the ceiling of a basement on the outskirts of Harlem, Dr. Bledsoe and Mr. Norton, Trueblood and the Golden Day, the Battle Royale, Liberty Paints, the Brotherhood…..“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectopplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to posess a mind”....  We KNOW this work.  It’s part of who we are as Americans.  And now, for the first time, we are going to get to SEE this work.

Personally, I can’t wait.  And not only that, I can’t wait to blog about it. I am going to share everything I can with you about the process of developing this piece for the stage.  There are going to be projections and masks and deconstructed jazz standards and the rhythm of the blues and shafts of light and moments of darkness and most of all, the words of Ralph Ellison brought to life.

Let the chaos begin!

John Callahan shakes hands with Teagle Bougere who will be playing the title role.