”Angels in America’ is a play that explores themes of love, homosexuality, politics, relationships, death, drug abuse and religion,’ said Andrew Shekter, a College of Communication sophomore who plays a Mormon struggling with his sexuality in the Boston University Stage Troupe production of the play.
Considering the difficult, controversial nature of ‘Angels in America: Millennium Approaches’ (the first of Tony Kushner’s two plays written the early 1990s), it seems an unlikely choice for a student-run theater group especially considering BU’s reputed conservative climate.
‘I picked this play last year because it seemed meaningful at a time when the issue [of] homosexuality was so big, [and the thing] with Silber happened,’ said director Jonathan Schmidt, citing when Silber cut the Gay-Straight Alliance at the BU Academy.
At first glance, Schmidt, a short, scraggly haired sophomore, seems more like a fan in awe of Kushner’s work than one up to the task of staging the challenging play. ‘I read the play in WR150, and I heard Kushner speak last year,’ he said.
Schmidt, along with two other student directors, had the task of breathing life into one of the last century’s most difficult and complex plays, convincing a student cast to take them seriously and then making that cast understand their vision.
This task has not been an easy one. ‘Angels’ has won a Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as several Tony Awards. An all-star HBO film version with Meryl Streep and Al Pacino will air in early December.
When presented correctly, the play has the onerous role of showing its audience that ‘we are all messed up in some way but also capable of loving,’ according to Julie Janson, who plays Harper in the production. As difficult and acclaimed as ‘Angels in America’ is, having students put it on might seem like the artistic equivalent of having a beginning piano student perform Mozart.
‘It has been a very long and arduous task,’ co-director and College of Arts and Sciences senior Rebecca Hirota said. ‘But we have all worked very hard to get this far. We wanted a challenge.’
Perhaps the very reason student directors would seem unqualified to take on
‘Angels’ has helped in some areas: the directors brought a fresh, youthful ingenuity to the arduous task of budget problems as well as a close, un-intimidating relationship with their cast.
‘We have had to be very creative about the play and its set design. It cannot be like the original Broadway show it is more abstract but I think it is still technically interesting,’ Hirota said.
The cast spent ‘almost an entire month,’ familiarizing themselves with their characters, Schmidt said. In order to keep the cast’s regular life out of their characters’ personalities, they spend 45 minutes warming up before the rehearsal begins, and end with a wind-down session.
The warm-up session takes on the feeling of a mini-support group. The cast sits in a circle and, one by one, explain ‘what they did for the day.’ Beside the story-sharing intimacy at warm-up, the cast regularly goes out on weekends and jokes around between scenes.
The mood of the cast has changed since Stage Troupe first started rehearsing, Shekter said.
‘The student directors were able to help share an overall vision,’ he said ‘We saw how dedicated they were to the show and then our dedication grew from the excitement.’
Janson also said even though ‘this has been the hardest show’ she has ever done and that understanding the play can be frustrating: ‘once the directors and cast came together and began to make things happen, we all began living up to each others standards.’
Now that the directors have successfully made the cast aware of their characters and readied them to tackle the challenging material, they must step up to the task of convincing audiences this weekend without a support circle.
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