By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

And just like that, the angels are back in Lexington. After its much-praised production of Tony Kushner’s epic play “Angels in America: Part 1 — Millennium Approaches” earlier this year, ActOut Theatre Group returns to the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center on Oct. 3 with “Angels in America: Part 2 — Perestroika.” Once again directed by Drew Barr with the cast largely intact (with one significant exception), “Perestroika” completes the complicated story of several interrelated characters on the cusp of radical change in their lives in the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the concurrent ascent of American political conservatism in the era of Ronald Reagan. 

The major characters include Prior Walter (Daniel Ellis), a young drag performer in New York City who discovers that he has AIDS; his boyfriend Louis Ironson (Mead Ryder), who has abandoned him; Joe Pitt (Kiefer Adkins), a conflicted Mormon attorney who has begun a romantic relationship with Louis; Harper Pitt, Joe’s estranged wife; Hannah Pitt, Joe’s Mormon mother, now relocated from Utah to New York; Roy Cohn (Shayne Brakefield), the Republican attorney, right-wing political operative and closeted homosexual who is dying of AIDS; and Prior’s friend Belize (Nick Porter), who becomes Cohn’s hospital nurse.

At the conclusion of “Millennium Approaches,” an angel appears in spectacular fashion at Prior’s bedside. “Greetings, Prophet!” she announces. “The great work begins! The Messenger has arrived!” In “Perestroika,” the work in question turns out to be surprising, to say the least, with a group of angels known as the Continental Principalities grappling with their desertion by God, who abandoned heaven in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The play’s most unusual scene finds Prior arguing with this council of angels about the future of human progress. 

I caught up with Barr recently for a conversation about the show, edited here for length and clarity.

Kevin Nance: One of the striking things about “Perestroika” is how it’s structured as a series of echoes of “Millennium Approaches.” It opens with a speech by an elderly person along with a funeral, which also happens in “Millennium.” Once again, Prior and Harper meet in a shared dream or hallucination. Once again, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg makes an appearance to comfort the dying Roy Cohn in crisis. And so on. 

Drew Barr: It’s almost scene for scene, yes. In “Millennium,” we start off with a particular actor, Catherine Gaffney, as the aged Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz embodying a culture, a people, a movement. And we have the same thing happening in “Perestroika” with Gaffney as Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the world’s oldest living Bolshevik. In fact, each play proceeds with the same pairing coming up next, with some interesting twists. Of course, Tony Kushner has re-written “Perestroika” over and over again, and they’re about to come out with another printing of the play, which incorporates changes even since the 2017 National Theatre production that transferred to Broadway. The echoes are intentional, and it feels like in the re-writes, Kushner is digging even deeper into them now. But I feel like while there is this structural repetition, in terms of how the characters come together and work through stuff, there’s also more of a sense of mad swirl, of chaos, of mess. If “Millennium Approaches” has a kind of bullet-train purpose that really delivers you to the Angel’s arrival at the end, “Perestroika” feels more like — to borrow from “The Wizard of Oz” — a whirling tornado that is taking these characters and really putting them through the mixer. So yes, there’s a sense of we’ve been here before, but in order to come out the other side, we have to go through stresses and tensions. We have to restructure.

KN: Which is what the word perestroika means: restructuring. 

DB: Exactly. 

KN: On the other hand, the angels convening in heaven feels like a new element — including the idea that heaven looks much like San Francisco, which I think of as a wonderful joke.

DB: I was in both San Francisco and New York in the 1980s, and on some level, there was that feeling that New York was still in so much trouble then, and was such a kind of mess, while San Francisco had the feeling of being a beautiful European city, a wonderful place, and kind of a gay mecca. But I’ve also thought about this in terms of it whether all the fantastical elements in the play are real or simply the product of Prior’s imagination and his hopes for his death to mean something. Of course, the whole play’s subtitle is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” so the idea of heaven looking like the gay mecca of the ’80s makes a certain sense. And when you combine the idea of earthquakes in heaven with the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when God is said to have abandoned the angels, it gets pretty, you know, What?

KN: It’s wild.

DB: It’s bizarre, and to be honest I’ve never been satisfied with the council-of-angels scene when I’ve seen it live. It’s often a group of actors in judges’ robes, which tends to lead to a staid, formal scenario. Of course, there’s this echo of the Supreme Court, but especially in this day and age, I was like, “I do not want to be thinking about the Supreme Court right now.” So rarely do you understand in productions of the play that these angels are listening to a broadcast in the future about the Chernobyl meltdown. And rarely do you have a sense of why, of what that means to them, and what we’re supposed to feel about it. But it reminded me of what that period of the ’80s and ’90s was in the world: watching the fall of the Berlin Wall, watching what was happening to the Soviet Union. This play is really steeped in Tony Kushner’s — and at that time, the world’s — fascination with the fall of this great social experiment.

KN: Which was happening not far from the time when he was writing the plays.

DB: Yes. In 1990 there was an attempt to oust the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev — a little bit of a coup that was quickly put down — and then within a year, Gorbachev was deemed a failure, and Boris Yeltsin was in as president of Russia. There was all this excitement and possibility and hope for what Gorbachev meant, and then shortly afterward, he was out, and chaos was about to take over in Russia. And so, if in “Millennium Approaches” there was a kind of underlying sense of Jewish culture and community, centered on that Jewish funeral at the beginning, “Perestroika” is really focused on the metaphor of Russia as a society that had struggled from the fall of the czar, all the way through the 20th century, with this problem of people not knowing what to do in the aftermath. In “Perestroika,” it would be so much easier for the angels if God — the czar — would just come back and give them an organizing principle again. So, the play is about a world with no central authority figure or collective system, and everybody’s just groping, trying to figure out what to do.

KN: How does the metaphor of post-Soviet perestroika manifest itself in what happens with the characters? It feels like some of them are coming to grips with their true nature, and coming to recognize and accept certain truths, especially about their relationships, that they’d been avoiding. Harper, for example, is disabused of any lingering notion that her marriage to Joe can be saved. The play may be a whirling tornado, but it does move, at least gradually, toward clarity.

DB: Yes. In “Perestroika,” all the societal norms that might have bound the characters together get ripped apart. I’ve seen footage of people in grocery stores fighting over a piece of bread — and in the play, the characters are at each other’s throats. If “Millennium Approaches” is about the characters having their worst fears revealed to them — and about their efforts to resist or deny those fears to preserve their sense of normal life — “Perestroika” is about, as Hannah tells Harper, “going into the lion’s den with your fear and fighting it out.” It’s a vicious, angry play — and wildly funny, so much funnier than “Millennium Approaches” — because it’s people who are not holding back. They are fighting for survival.

KN: Is it reasonable to expect that you’ll have about the same production style this time around at the Downtown Arts Center — scene transitions using mirrors that roll around the stage, for example?

DB: There are familiar elements — you’ll still see the crew, for example — but it demands a different approach. It’s kind of important that it feel like a different play; Kushner says it should feel like a different world. 

KN: You have a new member of the cast: Laurie Genet Preston, who played the Angel in Actors Guild of Lexington’s terrific production of the play way back in the 1990s. She’s replacing Jenny Fitzpatrick, who was your Angel in “Millennium Approaches.” Jenny’s performance as the Angel was closely tied to her being a dancer; will you continue that with Laurie?

DB: Well, we start with that. But the interesting thing is that the Angel is a completely different character, really, in “Perestroika.” Her relationship with Prior is so much more explored in this play. With Jenny, we talked a lot about embodiment — what happens when an energy without a human body comes to Earth, and what having a body feels like. In “Perestroika,” the Angel has a ridiculous amount of text — an amazing, Shakespearean, Aristotelian amount of text, so it’s so much about voice. It’s about how an ethereal being who doesn’t normally communicate through words must discover what words are in relation to breath, how word becomes identity and so on. That’s what is great about having Laurie, who has such a beautiful voice. It becomes about how language communicates and creates experience — which is also so much what the play is about. In the beginning was the word, you know, and this play is such a celebration of the word as the creation of life, ideas and how we get caught up in the battle over the meaning of words. It’s a thrilling thing to see meaning created through breath. It leads to conflict, but it also leads to profound connection. 

KN: “Perestroika” ends, famously, with a burst of optimism about the future of humanity — which was important when the play was written and still is, maybe more today than ever.

DB: Tremendously.

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“Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika” by ActOut Theatre Group opens at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 3 at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, 141 E. Main St. Performances continue at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 4, 10 and 11 with a 2 p.m. matinee on Oct. 12. Click here for tickets ($25).