TT: Angels and demons

I’m filing two Wall Street Journal drama columns from Chicago this week. In today’s paper, I report on the Court Theatre’s revival of Angels in America and Next Theatre Company’s production of Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, in both cases with high enthusiasm. Here’s an excerpt.
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Like it or not, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is a landmark of postwar American theater. Opportunities to see it onstage are sufficiently rare that they should be seized with alacrity–especially in the case of the Court Theatre’s new production, which is a landmark in its own right. Charles Newell, the Court’s artistic director, has a knack for creating tightly focused small-scale productions of such sprawling works as “Porgy and Bess.” His galvanically staged version of “Angels in America” is very much in the same vein. Performed in the company’s 250-seat thrust-stage house, it puts Mr. Kushner’s desperate characters so close to the audience that their fear and trembling becomes as immediate as a whispered confession.
No small part of the credit for the potency of this production belongs to John Culbert, the scenic designer, who has shunned hospital-room naturalism in favor of an aggressively simple unit set (the centerpiece is a catafalque-like platform, the backdrop a grid of girders) that seems to float in the midst of infinite space. The sound design, by Joshua Horvath and Kevin O’Donnell, heightens to an alarming degree the atmosphere of encroaching disaster. Everything else is left to the imagination–and to Mr. Newell’s cast, led by Larry Yando as Roy Cohn. By turns horrifically gleeful and unexpectedly vulnerable, Mr. Yando’s Cohn steers clear of caricature, thus mitigating Mr. Kushner’s tendency to demonize his villains….
What would you do if you found out that your grandfather had been a Soviet agent–and that your family had lied to you about it? In “After the Revolution,” the 2010 “prequel” to “4000 Miles,” Amy Herzog asks this question, and the answer she gives, although fictionalized, is intensely personal. That stands to reason, since something closely similar happened to Ms. Herzog, whose grandfather was revealed in 2000 to have spied for the Russians during World War II.
Ms. Herzog has turned this harrowing experience into an incisive, impressively honest play about life in a red-diaper family. As in “4000 Miles,” which is playing at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater through June 17, she manages with near-miraculous skill to embed personal drama in a political framework, adding sparkle to the action with deft touches of satire….
This staging, finely directed by Kimberly Senior, features a letter-perfect performance by Christine Stulik as Emma Joseph, the starchily self-righteous young political activist who is jolted to the marrow when she learns the ugly truth about her grandfather….
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Read the whole thing here.