ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Designer Wendall Harrington

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

"In the early 80's, I started to lose people to something called "the gay cancer." Mostly there was silence, punctuated by funerals for young formerly vibrant men. No one knew - if they did they weren't talking. In 1986 (in need of a real job) I went to work for a major men's magazine. At many an editorial meeting I'd ask, as we prided ourselves on investigative journalism, ‘where was this story.’ I was told, 'gays did not read this magazine', and ‘it’s not a story for us.’ When Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On, I couldn't get it reviewed in the men’s magazine. I could not get Silence = Death and Act Up into the magazine. More men were dying, and now some of them very dear. Everyone was afraid. Eventually the men's magazine and I had a parting of the ways - it was about 1988. The last thing I did was edit a piece by Randy Shilts that got into the men’s magazine and then into Best American Essays of that year. Still there was more silence than action.

Some time later, I think it was John Conklin who gave me the script to read after he designed it on the west coast. He praised it, and Conklin praises few of this century's writers. Reading it, my ceiling cracked and an angel came in to touch me. I was opened. To this day, I can’t entirely say what it is about, but it is not silent, it is not cracking wise about Rock Hudson; it takes something serious seriously and I am grateful.

It made a stir, it made people confront, it broke the silence. I am forever indebted.

To have the chance to participate in this production is a great gift (no matter what my agent says). I owe this play something - it confuses, confounds, and makes me rich, for I do not believe in silence, I believe in thrashing one’s way forward into illumination, and this play lets me feel not alone."

-Wendall Harrington

Wendall Harrington is the projection designer for Signature Theatre Company's production of Angels in America

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Student Blake Pruitt

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

"I received a copy of the Angels in America play from a friend a few months ago as a 17th birthday gift. I'd heard her rave about, I'd heard about Tony Kushner, and I'd heard about the HBO special. What I hadn't heard about was how much of an impact the words Tony Kushner wrote would have on me. I never thought I would be able to feel, and cry, just from reading a play as much as I did while reading Angels in America. I'm so glad that my first experience with the play was reading it, which was of course followed by watching the HBO movie with the same friend. Both of us will be seeing the Signature Theatre production in January."
-Blake Pruitt

Blake Pruitt is a 17 year-old high school student.

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Director Leigh Silverman

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

"In 1993 I was in college, and seeing Angels made me, and scores of theater students like me, believe in the vitality, the urgency, and the possibilities of theater. Angels existed on Broadway with such brazen theatricality and gayness and guts, it seemed like the most thrilling night of theater imaginable. It was a rally and a revelation. Oh, but now, all these years later, what really gets me excited is the structure! Oh the mechanics! Now I can see the bones, the way the writing teases and delights, all the while holding tight around your throat. Angels has become an icon, and the standard against which plays are measured."
-Director Leigh Silverman

Leigh Silverman is a director whose credits include Well on Broadway and Coraline at MCC.

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Actor Billy Porter

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

1982.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I sit down to dinner with my family, as I always do just in time for the six o’clock news. I’m twelve years old and usually completely uninterested in anything the newscaster has to say. This day is different. This day feels complicated. Insistent. Serene. Terrifying.

The sun is setting after a long day of summer rain hashing it out with the Ms. Humidity. The result; a gray high sky filled with clouds that resemble patches of cotton candy with mauve shafts of light seeping through to earth below.

“There’s a new deadly disease that seems to be afflicting homosexual men mainly in New York City and San Francisco,” the newscaster reported. “No one knows what’s causing the outbreak or why the syndrome seems to be targeting homosexual men…” Homosexual? I had never heard the term before, but some how I knew exactly what it meant and that I was going to…

Oh, God! What have I…? Cold sweat.

I excused myself from the table and retreated to my closet.

Literal. Metaphoric.

For you see, my bedroom closet was the place of solace for me.

My closet was a sanctuary where I could try on my Aunt Sharon’s high-heels without being judged. Or experiment with the neighborhood boys curious about the touch. Or refine my solo for Sunday morning service.

My Closet. My Secret. My Shame.

And now my hiding place was in jeopardy of being exposed. Obliterated. I was a homosexual and I was going to die!

I continued for the next decade living in faggot-limbo. Never being “butch” enough to actually “hide” in any structured “closet,” in plain sight, and way too afraid and confused to stand inside my own terrifying yet glaringly transparent truth.

And then I wandered into a preview performance of Angels In America: Millennium Approaches at The Walter Kerr theatre in 1993. From the moment the curtain rose, I was in utter shock. Disbelief. Speechless. Breathless. FINALLY, someone had distilled into three-and-a-half hours of exquisite art what I had been trying to express all my life.

Harper:
When you pray, what do you pray for?

Joe:
I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

Harper:
Oh. Please. Don’t pray for that.

Joe:
I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling – just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is… a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m… It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

As the tears gushed from my eyes like an illegally unplugged fire hydrant, I felt the weight of a thousand Sunday’s lifting off my shoulders. This piece gave me language, encompassed my pain and spoke my truth to the world when I could not. I’m a better artist, a better HUMAN BEING. I’m proud to be Black, Gay and Christian in America. I’m braver than I ever thought I could be. Thank you Mr. Kushner – you saved my life!

Billy Porter plays Belize in Signature Theatre Company's production of Angels in America

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Playwright Romulus Linney

This is the first in a series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Continue checking back for words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, more of Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

"The soaring theatricality of Angels in America is justly celebrated. What I celebrate most is its sane good humor as it hits its targets with devastating force, targets that until Tony Kushner showed them to us, we did not know existed."
-Playwright Romulus Linney

Romulus Linney was the founding Playwright-in-Residence at Signature Theatre Company during the 1991-92 season.

Love ANGELS IN AMERICA? We Want to Hear From You!

Starting next week we will begin to share thoughts people have on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America – words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community.

But that’s not all – we want to hear from you!

Were you in a college production of the show? Did seeing the national tour or a regional production deeply affect you? Was the HBO miniseries your first exposure to Tony Kushner’s landmark work? Let us know! We would love for you to send in your thoughts, be they in text form, photos, videos, artwork, or however else you would like to express them. We’ll be posting some of the material we receive on the blog, alongside the folks discussed above. We will also randomly select 3 individuals who submit to receive a special prize!

Please send all submissions to angelsinamerica@signaturetheatre.org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Revealing the Artwork for Signature's Production of ANGELS IN AMERICA

We are proud to reveal the show art for the Signature Theatre Company production of Angels in America, which begins performances on September 14. The art for our production was created by noted designer Milton Glaser, who also designed the art for the original Broadway production!

Be sure to check back next week when we launch our Angels in America microsite. And don't forget -- single tickets go onsale August 3 at 10AM!