Eyes bleary, shoulders hunched, director Joel Hammer looks chronically sleep-deprived. And it's no wonder. For weeks, Hammer and his cast and crew have been wrestling with Tony Kushner's highly acclaimed play "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" and its epic challenges.
Ever since the Dobama season announcement, Cleveland theatre professionals have been whispering the same question: how the heck is Dobama, a small basement black box in Cleveland Heights, going to stage this massive theatrical event? As we talk in the lobby before an evening rehearsal, the conversation is punctuated by the sound of power tools and the squeak of casters as set designer Ron Newell deconstructs the Dobama stage.
"It hasn't been an easy one", Hammer laughs wryly, in what may be the understatement of the year. "When Joyce [Casey, Dobama Artistic Director] said she wanted to do 'Angels', both Ron and I first told her "Don't do it. You don't have the bucks. We don't have any fly space." This, we agree, does initially seem problematic for a play whose famous climactic scene includes an angelic messenger with giant silver wings thunderously crashing through the plaster ceiling. He smiles another wan smile. "Well, here we are."
The special effects challenge aside, "Angels" is a huge artistic and financial risk for Dobama, but that's nothing new. Throughout its 38 years it has always been the kind of place driven less by box office and more by the passion of local artists to connect with meaningful work. And "Angels in America", one of the late 20th century's most brilliant and deservedly-honored plays, certainly provides plenty of that.
Kushner's Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning work, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes", is pulsing with all the issues that Dobama has grappled with in its history of socially-conscious theater: politics, religion, love, disease, sexuality, corruption, reconciliation, destruction, and renewal. Yet its clarion messages are always carried along through the clash of fascinating characters and Kushner's biting and often hilariously outrageous dialogue.
Hammer has assembled a strong and experienced company of area talent, with several Equity performers within the eight-member ensemble. Scott Plate, who recently sizzled in Dobama's production of "For Reasons That Remain Unclear", plays Prior, abandoned by his frightened lover when he is diagnosed with AIDS. Doug Rossi, who starred as Renfield in Michael Sepesy's black comedy at Cleveland Public Theatre this year, plays the guilt-ridden Louis. Kenn McLaughlin, who shone in Hammer's recent revelatory Halle Theatre revival of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons", plays the closeted Mormon lawyer Joe. Laura Stitt plays his pill-popping wife Harper, who hallucinates trips to Antarctica with trickster travel agent Mr. Lies -- played by Tony Sias, who also doubles as the black drag queen/nurse Belize.
Jerry Zafer, who brightened comedies at the Cleveland Theatre Company with his manic attacks, plays the demonically manipulative Roy Cohn, with Marji Dodrill as his ghostly nemesis Ethel Rosenberg and Joe's Mormon Utah mother, and Jennifer McGowan as the eponymous Angel. And let's not even count the cast's cross-dressed transformations into a dozen minor characters, from a homeless man to an Orthodox rabbi to an 13th century Yorkshire farmer.
Kushner's play is both an actor's dream and a technical nightmare. You can tell that everyone, from cast to crew, is being stretched -- not just by the demands of the material, a 3-hour-plus extravaganza with lightning-fast character and set changes, but by the mostly-evenings rehearsal schedule designed to fit in with people's day jobs.
"Luckily we auditioned and cast early in the fall," says Hammer. "I told everyone: come in knowing it. We're going to need all the time we have. So in March everyone came in mostly off book." Hammer, who is respected around town as an actor's director, finds himself working a lot on tempo and rhythm. Playwright Kushner is a formidable intellectual who wields a machine-gun-like torrent of words with the grace of a hyperactive Jewish comic. His work bulges with rich, dense, rapid-fire monologues as operatic as arias, which depend as much on timing and breath control as on internal work with objectives.
"I don't like to be the kind of director who says 'Faster-Louder', but I'm saying 'Faster, Louder'", admits Hammer. "This piece has to barrel along, and keep the audience's attention at every moment -- including through cinematic set changes with no blackouts."
We step onto Newell's stripped-down set, where the designer begins showing off all the hinges and casters that allow the set's sparely-built contraptions to transform into their many parts. Hammer tentatively steps onto the newly built revolve, which on its rumbling casters currently resembles nothing so much as a giant skateboard. The space is bare and looks bigger than usual. It's not an illusion: Newell has stripped the front pillars down to their bare metal, partly for the effect of deterioration that underlies the play's theme, and partly to create better sightlines.
As Hammer tests the revolve for creaks, it wobbles slightly on the uneven Dobama floor, and he teeters a moment mid-stage. I can still see him there: conjuring the effect of an Angel, imagining her barreling from deep back stage toward the audience, wondering just how this revelation is going to play.
[Dobama Theatre presents "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches", a play by Tony Kushner. Opening April 24 at 1846 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights. Call 932-6838 for reservations and tickets.]
Originally published in the Plain Dealer, April 1998.
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