To wrap up this miniseries on AIDS dramas, today we’ll look at HBO adaptations of two towering plays — The Normal Heart and Angels in America.
I’d love to see both of these live, though the odds are low that’ll ever happen. I’m still hoping to see the National Theatre’s recent staging of Angels, which screened over two nights in theaters a year or so ago. It screened in Lubbock, but only on consecutive Thursday nights, and that didn’t work out for me, unfortunately.
I still feel like I’m missing out on some of the magic of Angels, though I’ve read the script and seen the HBO version a few times. Rewatching it now, I’m again swept away by the cast (unlike And the Band Played On, the famous faces aren’t distracting; these are huge roles, and towering talent is called for). And as the New York Times’ Ben Brantley says in his review of the 2018 Broadway revival, the play has taken on “the marbleized patina of something stately and grand, a work to be approached with reverence and a dictionary.” I can keep up with most of the historical references and certainly the gay cultural ones, but there’s a particularly Jewish spirit that is beyond my base of knowledge. But that’s something I probably worry about too much. As Brantley continues, “Don’t be thrown by the God business or by the celestial messengers of the title who choose Prior (descended from a long line of Anglo-Saxon ancestors with the same name) to be their prophet on earth. It is all utterly of a piece with Mr. Kushner’s vision of a universe that seems to be coming apart on every level.”
That much, I get. (And I think I’ll soon understand more: My friend Marley bequeathed me her copy of The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history about the play’s origins that I’ll soon dive into.)
And still, as accomplished as this film version is, I don’t think it’s the perfect vehicle for the piece. Even as phenomenal as the work done by director Mike Nichols and actors like Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman and others, I just feel like it’s such a creature of the theater that only seeing it in its natural habitat would totally do it justice.
The same, I think, is true for Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s incandescently angry epic about the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic. Mark Ruffalo, who stars in Ryan Murphy’s 2014 version for HBO, does righteous rage better than just about anyone, but being with the room with that kind of energy must be absolutely electric.
But again, Murphy (like Nichols) pulled together an astounding cast — Ruffalo, of course, but also Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts, Joe Mantello and a never-better Jim Parsons — and Murphy does some of his own best, most focused work. This one’s definitely worth checking out now, both in memory of the recently deceased Kramer and as a reminder of how anger can help change the world.
Up next: Die, Mommy, Die and Pink Flamingos
Entertainment with Chip Chandler 