Relevance, Applicability, and STANDING THE TEST OF TIME!
In ANGELS IN AMERICA: Millennium Approaches, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg says to the despicable and dying Roy Cohn “History is About to Crack Wide Open.” And it’s that same line that resonates most with me in 2010, just as it did in 1993, as I sat in the Walter Kerr Theatre, in New York City, a gay, married, still Mormon man. I sat next to my Mormon—then wife, now ex-wife, feeling as though Tony Kushner was telling my story! That he had somehow found access to my deepest and most secret feelings and was sharing them without my permission with the entire world. I vividly recall the first intermission, grabbing my playbill and leaving the theatre, running down the sidewalk through the smoking patrons, around the block - literally trying to fill my lungs with a comforting and settling full breath of air. The lungs never filled, but I returned to my seat, compelled to watch Act II, followed by a similar intermission routine, and then the utterly theatrically unnerving but rewarding Act III. I was Joe Pitt and I was naked in the raw wind as Kushner also writes in the play. Little did I know the Universe had set into action an impending personal implosion by planting me in that theatre, that night, in that seat, observing the most revelatory piece of theatre I had theretofore witnessed.
Fast forward one year, 1994. My personal history was about to crack wide open. In that year, that same splendid Universe provided me with the inner strength to reject Mormonism once and for all, come out, get divorced, leave education for the corporate world, be excommunicated, and hold my mother in my arms as she died. A year that my therapist later informed me - any one of the aforementioned events should have sent me over the edge. But they didn’t, and I feel I owe that to my forcible desire to live authentically and powerfully and to finally, really, love myself. Something we never find out in ANGELS if Joe Pitt ever realizes. In my own made up ending for Joe—he does, for self love is the turn key to any other kind of love we human beings are lucky to find in this life.
So enough memory lane--back to 2010, where I have been given the tremendous opportunity to do what I love the most—ACT in Salt Lake Acting Company’s second staging of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Only this time and to my good fortune the character table turned has been turned full tilt boogie! The Universe has thrown me a character that Frank Rich capably describes as “the Antichrist, Roy Cohn, an unreconstructed right-wing warrior who believes that life is full of horror from which no one can escape.” Me, I get to play Roy Cohn! And I consider this the most challenging role I have ever had to embody. Fortunately I get Keven Myhre and his talented team to direct me through the sinewy cellular and psychological incarnation that is ROY. And that’s why acting is so wonderful? You always have to dig and dig deeply to create something you usually know very little about. I’m not playing the closeted, confused, married, Utah born, gay Mormon, but instead I get to discover the egomaniacal, power hungry, self-loathing, desperate & driven, Jewish pessimist Roy Cohn.
This play is as relevant and accessible today as when Tony Kushner wrote it in the late 1980’s. The world is still reeling as we are hurled towards huge transformational shifts that are taking place. The political and diplomatic stability of our world seems even more tenuous now than it did then. The disease—AIDS that the play centers around is a worldwide epidemic of monstrous proportions, not just destroying a generation of mostly gay young American men. Religions are still polemic, healthcare still holds tremendous mysteries, hope staggers between pinnacle and abyss, and Love and Relationships are still at the center of what it truly means to be fully human.
Awhile back a dear friend of mine from the theatre-world shared with me a preface of Grief Lessons by poet Ann Carson.
“Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you and your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch yourself act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”
I have a feeling that all of us involved in this ANGELS IN AMERICA - both artists and audiences are about to have our worlds ‘cracked wide open.’ And I sincerely believe the theatre is perhaps the most wonderfully safe place for that experience to unfold. After all, art is sharing love with strangers.
