By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer, Photographer

It’s tempting to view Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America — Part 1: Millennium Approaches,” set in the terrifying early years of the AIDS crisis in New York, as a period piece, at least somewhat distant from our own time. For all this sprawling play’s ambition, size, scope and impact — it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for its 1993 Broadway production, soon followed by Part 2, “Perestroika” — the world it dramatizes is, in at least one crucial aspect, a thing of the past. The existential force that drives much of the story is HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In the time frame of “Angels,” an HIV diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence for many if not most people, including two gay men in the play. Now, because of advances in medicine over the past three decades, people with HIV can stay healthy and live normal lifespans. At least in the developed world — it’s a different story in Africa and elsewhere — AIDS has faded as a pressing national concern.

Then again, “Angels in America,” whose subtitle is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” was never just, nor even principally, about AIDS. It follows two couples: Prior Walter, recently diagnosed with AIDS, and his increasingly estranged lover, Louis; and Joe Pitt, a young Mormon attorney whose faith (and his marriage to his wife, Harper) is endangered by his sexual awakening as a gay man. The play’s vast web of intersecting ideas encompasses American history, religion, spirituality (not the same thing), the complications of love and the uses (and misuses) of power. 

And as viewers of ActOUT Theatre’s new production will have occasion to reflect upon, the play’s portrait of the Reagan era — featuring right-wing conservatives exulting in their power to set the country’s political and cultural agenda — both predicts and mirrors our current political reality. “By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench — Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn,” a character named Martin gloats as he tries to recruit Joe to join Reagan’s Justice Department in Washington. “Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate. We have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond…. It’s really the end of Liberalism.”

“What's really compelling about working on the play today is to find ourselves in a position where not only has the world spun forward into a kind of repetition, both in terms of the language and the practices and the manipulative tactics of Roy Cohn; but to find ourselves in a world where the conservatism of the Reagan administration seems to be trying to take an even stronger hold,” says director Drew Barr, whose production of “Angels” opens on June 6 at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center. “The play is very much about that conversation between an attempt to break free of that conservatism and the forces [working to make the characters] stay put.”

While Kushner’s vision was ultimately optimistic — “the world only bends forward,” Prior asserts at play’s end — our current situation is that many of Martin’s prophecies have come substantially true. Conservative Republicans now control the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. For the first time in half a century, abortion is now totally banned in 12 states, and illegal with only limited exceptions in another 29 states, including Kentucky. Affirmative action and the related DEI movement have been all but snuffed out. After years of existing largely off the national radar, transgender people have been banned from the military, from many public bathrooms and from playing on sports teams, even becoming a key issue in the 2024 presidential campaign. Gay marriage, legalized in 2015, now hangs by a thread, with two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, having indicated a desire to ban it again. The world may yet bend forward, but at the moment, it seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

And in the character of Roy Cohn, Kushner found a crucial dramatic link between the various eras, events and themes of the story. The play’s fictional Cohn is closely based on the real-life archconservative lawyer who worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; who secretly (and unethically) urged a judge to sentence to death the convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (the latter of whom appears as a ghost at Cohn’s side at critical moments); and who later mentored the young Donald Trump in the dark arts of conquest in business and politics, which became the subject of the 2024 film “The Apprentice.” Deep in debt and facing disbarment in the play’s time frame, Cohn died of AIDS in 1986 after a lifetime of denying his homosexuality. But in a crackling early scene with his doctor, Henry, he’s still reveling in his role as a well-connected power broker in Republican circles.

Roy Cohn: Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a piss-ant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?

Henry: No.

Roy: No. I have clout. A lot. I can pick up this phone, punch fifteen numbers, and you know who will be on the other end in under five minutes, Henry?

Henry: The President.

Roy: Even better, Henry. His wife.

“Roy Cohn’s fingerprints are all over the world that we live in now,” Barr says. “Particularly in his role as mentor of Trump — in the president’s personality and temperament, his never-apologize, never-admit-defeat thing — we’re just sopping in the Cohn mentality. The stakes of doing the play now are very high. It feels bittersweet in the moment.”

And yet Cohn is the play’s juiciest, most startling and most entertaining role, much coveted by actors at the top of their game. These have included Ron Liebman (who won the Tony as Best Actor), F. Murray Abraham, Jonathan Hadary,  Al Pacino (in the 2003 HBO adaptation), Nathan Lane (who appeared in award-winning revivals in London and on Broadway in 2017-18) and local actor Joe Gatton, who gave a memorably explosive performance at Actors Guild of Lexington in the mid-90s.

To prepare for this major acting challenge at ActOUT, veteran local actor Shayne Brakefield began by educating himself in the real-world Cohn’s life, including not only his infamous public career but also his private life in childhood and later years. In documentaries, books (including Nicholas Von Hoffman’s 1988 biography “Citizen Cohn”) and more recent accounts, Brakefield found several friends of Cohn’s who, while condemning much of his conduct, also testified to a surprising number of positive (if not quite redeeming) qualities.

“I’m trying to find his humanity and what made him this way — the psychology behind it,” Brakefield says during a break in rehearsal. “He knew a lot of powerful people in New York who to this day say that 95 percent of the things he did, they did not agree with, but they’ve also been quoted as saying he was one of the funniest men they ever knew. He was so charming and witty, you couldn’t help but laugh. And if you were loyal to him, he would shower you with gifts. He would give you his full attention. So, all these multiple things can be true. Certainly, I have no interest in playing it like he’s just an evil villain.”

For these reasons, Brakefield found Pacino’s scenery-chewing turn in the HBO film less influential than Lane’s more nuanced performance in 2018. “It really fucked with my head that I could watch that and have moments of compassion for the character,” he recalls. “What Lane found was that eight-year-old boy inside of Roy Cohn. The way I’m approaching it, he’s this stunted, terrified, angry boy, and in my opinion, the root of all anger is fear.”

Other performers in the ActOUT show have similarly immersed themselves in research and reflection. Kiefer Adkins, who plays Joe Pitt, watched several documentaries about the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons, and read Jon Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” later adapted as a drama series on Hulu. Just as important, perhaps, Adkins has drawn on his own personal story, which includes growing up in a conservative (religiously and politically) family in Somerset, Kentucky. He vividly recalls reading the play while a student at Western Kentucky University and being seized by a desire to act in it, specifically the character of Joe. When ActOUT announced plans to produce the play, Adkins saw his chance.

“I recently realized that I am queer — I’m bisexual — and when I saw that the show was being done, I thought, ‘I have to audition for it.’ I had to be a part of this show,” he says. “You draw on your past life experiences to connect to moments in the play, and I identify with Joe so much — his family, his conservative background. I don’t want to say that I am Joe, but there are similarities, yes.”