The two couples' fates quickly become intertwined: Joe stumbles upon Louis crying in the bathroom of the courthouse where he works, and they strike up an unlikely friendship based in part on Louis's suspicion that Joe is gay. Harper and Prior also meet, in a fantastical mutual dream sequence in which Prior, operating on the "threshold of revelation," reveals to Harper that her husband is a closeted homosexual. Harper confronts Joe, who denies it but says he has struggled inwardly with the issue. Roy receives a different kind of surprise: At an appointment with his doctor Henry, he learns that he too has been diagnosed with AIDS. But Roy, who considers gay men weak and ineffectual, thunders that he has nothing in common with them—AIDS is a disease of homosexuals, whereas he has "liver cancer." Henry, disgusted, urges him to use his clout to obtain an experimental AIDS drug.

Prior's illness and Harper's terrors both grow worse. Louis strays from Prior's bedside to seek anonymous sex in Central Park at night. Fortunately, Prior has a more reliable caretaker in Belize, an ex-drag queen and dear friend. Prior confesses to Belize that he has been hearing a wonderful and mysterious voice; Belize is skeptical, but once he leaves we hear the voice speak to Prior, telling him she is a messenger who will soon arrive for him. As the days pass, Louis and Joe grow closer and the sexual tinge in their banter grows more and more obvious. Finally, Joe drunkenly telephones his mother Hannah in Salt Lake City to tell her that he is a homosexual, but Hannah tells him he is being ridiculous. Nonetheless, she makes plans to sell her house and come to New York to put things right. In a tense and climactic scene, Joe tells Harper about his feelings, and she screams at him to leave, while simultaneously Louis tells Prior he is moving out.

The disconsolate Prior is awakened one night by the ghosts of two ancestors who tell him they have come to prepare the way for the unseen messenger. Tormented by such supernatural appearances and by his anguish over Louis, Prior becomes increasingly desperate. Joe, equally distraught in his own way, tells Roy he cannot accept his offer; Roy explodes at him and calls him a "sissy." He then tells Joe about his greatest achievement, illegally intervening in the espionage trial of Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s and guaranteeing her execution. Joe is shocked by Roy's lack of ethics. When Joe leaves, the ghost of Ethel herself appears, having come to witness Roy's last days on earth. In the climax of Part One, Joe follows Louis to the park, then accompanies him home for sex, while Prior's prophetic visions culminate in the appearance of an imposing and beautiful Angel who crashes through the roof of his apartment and proclaims, "The Great Work begins."

-From Sparknotes.com-

By DAN BENNETT - Staff Writer | Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:10 AM PDT ∞

Among the most discussed plays of the past two decades, "Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches" presents challenges for both the production team and the audience. It's long, it's frequently complex, it's blessed with both poetic abstraction and straightforward honesty and it demands the complete attention of everyone in the room.

Tackling even half of Tony Kushner's much-admired, two-part work is a tall order for a community college, but the Palomar College theater department delivers a graceful, riveting and moving production of the play's first part, not all that far from the quality I saw in the original Broadway show more than a decade ago. With fine, sharp performances, and a solid though purposely unspectacular production design, this "Angels" flies with skill.

The twisting story concerns several characters living ---- in some ways barely surviving ---- in the Reagan-era mid-'80s. The AIDS epidemic is now in full force, and affects many of the characters, including Prior (Sean Hannify), who is in the mid-stages of the disease and is losing ground fast. This decline horrifies his longtime lover Louis (Alex Guzman), who sticks around as long as he can stomach before fleeing into the arms of Joe (Daniel Hannify), a Mormon and Republican attorney who has long stifled his homosexuality but can do so no longer. Joe's long-delayed admission emotionally damages his already fragile wife, Harper (Calandra Crane), who spends much of her time in an escapist fantasy world fueled by her depression and feelings of rejection.

Joe is tutored by the legendary attorney Roy Cohn (Jared Spears), the fiery Washington power broker who is himself dying of the disease, apparently believing he can deny all reality through sheer fury and bombast.

These characters converge in a series of scenes that advance the story, employ social and cultural commentary dealing with the mood and politics of the era, and span multiple subjects and themes. These include Judaism, Mormonism, politics, grief, anger and anguish. Also, somewhere in the din, big amounts of humor and unlikely but persistent hope, carried and distributed by a few of the characters in both subtle and overt ways. Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning script is regarded as among the most bold, audacious and well-crafted in theater.

The cast lives up to the challenge of those words, working cohesively, tempering the occasional anger sprees with quiet understanding. It's a strong ensemble, guided by director Michael Mufson, who shapes the nearly three-hour long show into a compelling entity. The college will present the second part of the piece, "Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika" in November.

Director's Notes

Listening to the opening monologue of Angels In America Part Two: Perestroika, one might think it was written during the 2008 presidential campaign.   The speaker proclaims, "The great question before us is: can we change? In time? And we all desire that change will come."   But the year is 1986 and the location is the crumbling Soviet Union.   Even in 1986, Tony Kushner saw the parallels between the unsustainability of a petrified, authoritarian, bureaucratic empire and the equally reactionary western political system. Through the urgent lens of the AIDS crisis,   Angels in America   expresses an epic hope that humanity will rise to the spirit of the 'better angels of our nature, '   and choose compassion, forgiveness and progress over xenophobia, materialism and the status quo.

These themes are introduced most clearly in the Angel's explanation of Prior's prophecy.   She instructs him to proclaim a new law for the new age - "Stop All Progress."   Human progress , it seems, is tearing heaven, earth and all creation apart. The angels are unable to solve the problem because they are, as Prior describes them, "Basically incredibly powerful bureaucrats, they have no imagination, they can do anything but they can't invent [or] create." And where is God in this scenario?   God has abandoned creation causing mankind to lapse into the series of horrific acts that have constituted the 20 th century.   

  The hope and the irony are intertwined in the explanation of why God left. God gave human's the ability to think, create, change, explore, migrate, progress. He became bored with his Angels and fascinated with man. God began to imitate his creation and finally went off exploring, never to return. In Kushner's vision, these qualities of humankind are a double edged sword.   They have the power to bewitch but they also have their destructive consequences .   A balance must be achieved.

This past summer, Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of Perestroika in the former Soviet Union, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, calling for a Global Perestroika. Perestroika means "restructuring." For Gorbachev the connection between the crisis in the former Soviet Union and today's global crisis, is the need for new thinking that will creatively discover, invent or create a way to maintain the balance that we need live together on this Earth. To progress.  

In the climax of the play, Prior confronts the Council of Angels and makes an impassioned plea for progress. In spite of the inevitable suffering of his illness and the unraveling of the order of creation, Prior's optimism and spirit of hope prevails. God has abandoned creation and it is up to all of us make the world a better place.

Angels in America balances flights of fantasy with intense reality as all the characters surrounding Prior overcome their personal flaws to realize the better angels of their nature.   Both the content and style of Angels In America creates a resounding   affirmation of the theatre's enduring power to ignite the human potential for transformation.