Though it’s hard to believe, “Angels in America” is 30 years old this year, having premiered on Broadway in 1993 and been revived in 2018. Steven Barkhimer took over the role from Tucker on Sunday, and he will portray Cohn for the rest of the production’s run. Tucker played him from April 20 through Saturday night, and made that ultimate string-puller repellent but fascinating. There she meets a homeless woman in the South Bronx (played by Helen Hy-Yuen Swanson, who also plays the angel), who tells Hannah: “In the new millennium I think we will all be insane.’’

Several characters in “Angels in America” feel trapped - in their bodies, in a country that reviles them, in a state of dread about a seemingly unstoppable disease - and the constant, hectic movement feels like an attempt at escape. That meant, in a bravura early sequence, when uber-sleazeball attorney Roy Cohn, played by Tucker, carried on several telephone conversations at once, he was literally wheeling and dealing.Ĭharacters also spend a lot of time sitting in swivel chairs in the current, Jessica Chastain-starring Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” but Tucker makes fuller atmospheric use of the device. Perhaps to underscore how many lives were lived in the shadows as AIDS wrought its destruction, Tucker has shrouded a number of scenes in semi-darkness, the only illumination provided by cast members who wield hand-held stage lights as they stand near, crouch near, or encircle the characters who are speaking.įor a play that reaches a fever-dream intensity and is steeped in a sense that things are hurtling out of control, Tucker has sped up “Angels” to maximum velocity by having cast members rapidly crisscross the stage on swivel chairs with wheels. And let’s not forget the law, with an emphasis on how its precepts can be twisted toward partisan ends - something that resonates in our post-Dobbs moment. But Kushner’s X-ray of the American psyche also encompasses matters of sexuality, faith (and faithlessness), family, politics, hypocrisy, ethics, history, medicine, and ancestral ghosts.

Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner