Dutch theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam will bring its "raw and incisive" bare-bones version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn for three performances October 23-25. Performed in Dutch with English titles, the production runs five hours and ten minutes with a 45-minute meal break.
The previous night, October 22, Kushner and director Ivo van Hove will give a 7PM talk at BAMcafé on the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic and its tapestry of stories about love, religion, sexuality and AIDS.
Van Hove has conceived a production with no scenery, placing all the weight of the story on the "acclaimed Toneelgroep Amsterdam actors as they struggle through the lives of their deftly drawn characters--the haunted Prior Walter and his boyfriend Louis, Reaganite lawyer Roy Cohn, and closeted Mormon Joe Pitt and his wife Harper."
The translation is by Carel Alphenaar, with dramaturgy by Peter van Kraaij. Set and light design is by Jan Versweyveld, costume design by Wojciech Dziedzic, video design by Tal Yarden and music by Wim Selles.
The play, whose full title is Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. Its world premiere in 1991 in San Francisco led to a London debut the following year and Broadway production in 1993 directed by George C. Wolfe. The original cast included Ron Leibman, Marcia Gay Harden, Stephen Spinella and Kathleen Chalfant, with later substitutions including F. Murray Abraham, Cynthia Nixon and Cherry Jones. Each part won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play (Millennium Approaches in 1993 and Perestroika in 1994). The scholar Harold Bloom included it in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Age (1994).
HBO's Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning miniseries version in 2003 directed by Mike Nichols starred Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Patrick Wilson, Mary-Louise Parker, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell and Michael Gambon.
Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands' largest repertory company, stages an average of 20 plays and over 350 performances a year for audiences adding up to 100,000. Its Angels in America cast includes Hélène Devos, Roeland Fernhout, Marieke Heebink, Fedja van Huêt, Marwan Kenzari, Alwin Pulinckx, Eelco Smits, and Hans Kesting as Roy Cohn, a role for which he received the Louis d'Or, Holland's annual Best Actor prize, in 2008.
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