THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

HBO's Angels in America Part 1, 'Millennium Approaches,' debuts Sunday, Dec. 7, 7-10 p.m. Part 2, 'Perestroika,' debuts Sunday, Dec. 14, 7-10:05 p.m. ----------------------------------------

Hark, the herald angels sing! The long-awaited movie adaptation of playwright Tony Kushner's 1993 Pulitzer Prize/multi-Tony Awards-winning Angels in America arrives compliments director Mike Nichols on HBO. Much like the Broadway production, it will be presented in two three-hour parts—Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.

Angels in America, originally subtitled 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,' revolves around two radically different men with AIDS in late 1980s Manhattan. Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) is an out, smart, well-adjusted gay man. But after he breaks the news that he's developed AIDS—and kaposi sarcoma lesions—to lover Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), Prior's world falls apart. Louis, panicked by Prior's worsening health, abandons him and begins an affair with Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a Mormon Republican closet case whose alienated wife, Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), is a mentally disturbed Valium addict. Unbeknownst to Louis, Joe is friends with Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the infamously obnoxious—and self-hating Jewish homosexual—lawyer who worked alongside Sen. Joe McCarthy during the '50s anti-Communist witch hunt.

Roy has just been diagnosed with AIDS by his doctor (James Cromwell). But, denial-prone, Roy insists it's merely 'liver cancer,' even when he lands in a hospital bed, haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), whom he helped sentence to death. Prior is also visited by spirits—a shrieking angel (Emma Thompson) who reveals that he's a prophet ... but of what? A sublime critique of a right-wing Reagan-ruled era when AIDS was deemed a just punishment for homosexuals and Central Park cruising was the norm, Angels is bitingly humorous, profoundly affecting, visually stunning, and supremely put together.

'Angels is the thing for which I'm best known and I care about it very deeply and it changed my life,' admits the Louisiana-raised, politically minded Kushner. 'Taking good care of it has always felt like a very important thing to me. I've seen bad films made of good plays before and it didn't destroy the plays but Angels has always been a very large project if for no other reason than its length. And I knew this was going to be a big expensive movie so I was scared about it.'

It's taken a decade for Angels to reach the screen, small or otherwise. Angels in America's two parts swept the Tony Awards in 1993 and 1994 respectively, including Best Play, Director, and Actor honors. In 1994, Robert Altman, director of Short Cuts, The Player, and a faithful 1983 film version of playwright David Rabe's Streamers, began working towards a cinematic adaptation. Altman and Kushner (who reportedly received $1 million for Angels' film rights) labored on a script for two separate studio films. However, after coming up against difficulties 'we sort of came to the realization that wasn't going to happen,' Kushner admits, 'and condensing the thing into a shorter version of itself didn't appeal to either one of us so we called it quits.'

After Altman departed, producer Cary Brokaw, Altman's oft-collaborator, remained attached to Angels and quietly continued to pursue the project. Annually, he would call up Kushner and report any headway. 'There was one attempt to do it as a three-hour movie again in the mid '90s I think,' Kushner recalls. 'I'm not gonna say with whom. But you couldn't do it as a condensed thing. There was no possibility of squeezing it down to tiny size.'

Come 2001, Brokaw approached Mike Nichols with the project, having just worked with the Oscar/Emmy/Tony Award-winning director on HBO's acclaimed adaptation of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit (starring Emma Thompson). 'I got a call from Cary saying 'I'm having an amazing time with Mike and he'd be the perfect person to do this,'' Kushner reminisces. 'I said 'absolutely, but I can't imagine he'd want to. It's a huge project, and would HBO be behind it?' Altman and I had actually approached HBO at one point, but for various reasons that didn't work out. I think that's the first time Al Pacino got involved.'

Working with Nichols (and HBO) proved fruitful, especially for Kushner, who was always extremely apprehensive about tampering with his most heralded, identified work. He admits that a sole previous attempt to write a screenplay proved disastrous, especially since he was given no guidance. 'I never made a movie, I had never even been on a film set before,' he admits, 'and I didn't know if I could write a screenplay. What I really understand is theater and Mike was just incredibly helpful. We talked a lot before I did the first draft [of Angels] so it was a lot less frightening writing it than I thought it was going to be. And the rewriting process was actually really pleasurable—we really dug in and made decisions together. I felt really good.'

In translating Angels from play to film, Kushner and Nichols made both cuts and additions. Kushner says a number of monologues and scenes were scrapped. Addiionally, a section of Perestroika has been altered. 'It's a whole sort of dramaturgical problem I had,' Kushner proffers, without revealing specifics, 'so I think I'm going to change the play to reflect that.'

Kushner credits Nichols with managing to keep the play's theatrical language without it seeming 'corny.' 'You actually write for theater for a public address,' Kushner notes. 'What's miraculous about what Mike's done is you don't sit there the whole time going 'people don't talk like this.' It's very much stage language, it's not naturalism, but he's handled it so deftly, the actors are so great, I hope people will enjoy it rather than flinch.'

Another theatrical element brought over from Angels' stage incarnation is double-casting: Streep plays three characters including Rosenberg, Michael Pitt's Mormon mother, and an elderly bearded Rabbi. Thompson appears as the Angel, a homeless woman, and a nurse.

'That was Mike's decision,' Kushner says of the double-casting. 'It was the first thing he said to me, he wanted to keep the doubling. It has many different values. It's a way of saying there are connections between very different kinds of human beings. A bag lady and a nurse and something that's not even human, like an Angel. What film is afraid of these days, unfortunately, is playing around with the fact that this is an artificial medium. Film has this thing that theater can't do which is to create perfect illusions you're completely swallowed up in. That's why I like theater—when the Angel comes into the theater she's hanging from a rope and you can see the rope, there's no disguising it, and I love that doubleness. It makes you think about how your willingness to believe can jump ahead of your skepticism ... you want to sort of hang on to your skepticism and be able to surrender at the same time. That's what life requires of us—to be able to look beneath the surface of the thing and not be overwhelmed by a successful illusion. Like the Reagan presidency!' Additionally, Kushner sees the role doubling as a celebration of the actor's art. 'It's fun to see a genius actress like Meryl Streep taking these different people and delivering a different human being.'

The double casting rule also applied to actor Jeffrey Wright, the only original Broadway cast member to carry over to the movie version. 'It was my feeling that if I wasn't invited to be a part of it I was gonna burn the sets down,' Wright laughs. 'So they didn't really have a choice.'

Wright, who won a 1994 Best Featured Actor Tony Award for playing Prior's best friend Belize, a former drag queen who ironically serves as Roy Cohn's nurse, and Mr. Lies, the mirthful figment of Harper Pitt's malformed imagination, has kept in touch with Kushner over the years. Although Kushner credits the Broadway ensemble (including Stephen Spinnella, Marcia Gay Harden, Kathleen Chalfant, Joe Mantello and Ron Leibman) as 'the most astonishing cast of actors you could possibly wish for,' he concedes that most of them are now too old to play their characters. 'These guys have to be in their early 30s, they can't make these mistakes in their late 40s.' Belize, however, 'is a slightly older person, he's a more together person,' says Kushner. To that end, Wright has refined his performance of Belize to reflect his added maturity.

'I think I wanted him to be harder,' Wright affirms. 'George C. Wolfe, [the Broadway production's director] who really built Belize with me, whose guiding hand I felt while doing the play and also the movie, would always say to me that Belize is a warrior and it's that kind of toughness and edge I wanted to bring. I think it's an outgrowth of time and being older and having seen more. Also, I think he does dress better now. He knows how to wear his skin.'

Of course, Belize still has to cope with Roy Cohn, an abrasive, hateful man determined to make enemies of anyone in his path. Rather than sink to Cohn's loathsome level (barring one very funny instance of exchanging disparages), Belize goes about his nursing chores responsibly. 'The only way to fuck with someone like that is not on their terms,' Wright opines. 'Clearly Roy's more practiced at evil than Belize is. Belize is more practiced at—love is a dangerous word—humanity. And I think that's the only way to destroy the monsters! You can't pull out your monster because their monster is bigger! You have to pull out your humanity.'

Asked if he personally would have pulled out something else and urinated into Cohn's IV, Wright (who has encountered his share of Cohn-esque Hollywood types in real life) admits that he probably 'would like to, but ultimately the real power is defying his world. And being a responsible human being! Which is something Roy never quite discovered how to be.'

Wright, a heterosexual, says that although his Tony win for Angels didn't energize his thespian career (he didn't work for a year afterwards, nor was he able to procure an agent—'it's still America,' he shrugs), playing Belize did refuel what led him to pursue acting in the first place. 'For me it rescued a sense of idealism,' he admits. 'This is what I wanted to do when I became an actor—I wanted to be political. To find work that challenged the establishment. The white, straight male establishment, because in many ways that's been a common enemy. Belize was the first gay role I played ... but it wasn't just about playing a gay man that attracted me to this. It was about being a part of the vision of the play and being a part of the assault on the politics of exclusion and cruelty.'

Liz Smith, who knew Cohn, has complimented Pacino's performance as dead-on. In writing the play, Kushner, who dubs Pacino's turn 'magnificent ... breathtaking,' studied up on the infamous personality, who was disbarred shortly before his 1986 death from AIDS (also recounted in the HBO film Citizen Cohn). 'I like to think I got something essentially true about [Cohn],' Kushner proffers. 'As much as I thought he was a really reprehensible human being, what made him interesting to me as a dramatic character is he wasn't incoherent. People have notoriously failed to try and come to terms with what Ronald Reagan was as a person. Not just the CBS series but the Edmund Morris biography. It's an incredible difficulty trying to figure that guy out probably because there isn't very much there. He was a mirage. He was always a mirage. An actor more than a thinker. So what I was attracted to with Cohn, for all that I disagree with everything he stood for, was he had a real consistency throughout his life. He stayed loyal to McCarthy, he wanted to be a lawyer, he hated Communists. He was an interesting, coherent character and I feel like after a lot of time thinking about him I came up with a version of him I could work with dramatically. And while it's not a documentary, [Cohn] doesn't claim to do anything in the play or film that he didn't claim to do in real life.'

As for whether Roy Cohns continue to proliferate in the 2000s, Kushner, with a laugh, remarks that all one needs to do is 'go to a meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans' for an answer.

Indeed, Kushner and Wright feel that Angels in America, a decade after its Broadway appearance, remains very much politically and socially topical. To Wright, Cohn represents the hypocrisy of the McCarthy era, of which 'Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld are the monstrous children, so clearly Angels in America is a commentary on what their leadership means for our society,' he says. 'Whose interests are served and whose are not. Who's considered an American and who's not. Or human being or not. Certainly my life as a Black man is devalued under their equation. Gay men's lives are clearly devalued. Just like the lives of children that happen to be dismembered by their bombs in order to gain access to material resources. So we're all targets for these people, you know? (laughs) We probably walk around with bulls-eyes on our foreheads or asses as the case may be.'

'I'm pleased with the way the play has straddled both the end of the first Reagan period and the present administration,' Kushner adds. 'I think a lot of what the play is pointing to is now, unfortunately, very much with us. The epidemic is still going strong, it's a horror, it's become a global pandemic although the demographics have changed terribly. In a certain sense the terror and disturbing level of governmental indifference that the play addresses is still very much [prevalent] ... the sort of scary world of Republican triumphalism that the play looks to with Apocalyptic dread is very much with us and explains our current disastrous adventure in Iraq. And I think, for gays, lesbians and transgender people, the end of the play is still saying we will become citizens, but we're sure not citizens now. The [movie is premiering just as the] Republican party is throwing its weight behind a constitutional amendment to disenfranchise us on a permanent basis ... we will never have equal rights as citizens. Let's not forget the partial abortion ban. The evangelical horrors sitting behind pseudo-president Bush.'

As for whether Central Park—a significant location in the film, which Nichols insisted be shot in NYC—remains the same swarming, sleazy place for gay sex Angels depicts it as during the 1980s? 'I don't know, I'm an old man!' Kushner laughs, confessing that he had 'already done that research' well before writing the play. 'You have to ask somebody who's younger. I'm not an exhibitionist and the idea of sex in public never appealed to me very much. I actually have an issue with it. I think parks are for people, I don't think anybody should have to run across anybody else [having sex]. Gay men having sex in parks was a manifestation of a period where there was no other way. When you were so outlawed it was our way of meeting. [That said], Central Park is one of the greatest works of art in the world.' ----------------------------------------