Ensemble’s ‘Angels in America’ offers compelling storytelling

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

 

Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” – which premiered in 1991 and is the winner of a Pulitzer for drama, a Tony for best play, and 11 Emmys – is set in the mid-1980s as AIDS ravages the nation and escalates the preexisting discrimination aimed at gay men.  Thirty-year-old New Yorker Prior Walter, the play’s key protagonist, is one of them and this play takes us on his personal journey. 

 

That is the short version of what is actually a landmark theatrical marathon; an audaciously ambitious work that is at once imaginative and unpretentious, uncompromising and affable, hard to watch and impossible to ignore.  

 

The play, in its entirety, is told over two separate performances:  “Part One: Millennium Approaches,” which is currently on stage at Ensemble Theatre under Celeste Cosentino’s superb direction, and “Part Two: Perestroika,” which will open there in April.

 

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