Performing now at Tempe Center for the Arts<\/strong> through May 16, Stray Cat Theatre<\/strong> takes on the formidable challenge of mounting both halves of Tony Kushner\u2019s play, a work that resists modest ambition. The first half, MILLENNIUM APPROACHES<\/strong>, opened earlier this month; the second, PERESTROIKA<\/strong>, completed the epic this past weekend. In the coming week, the company will present the two plays in repertory, offering them back-to-back, yet Kushner\u2019s vast, unruly fantasia was never meant to be consumed in fragments. Seen whole, its architecture is unmistakable. That Stray Cat Theatre <\/strong>has chosen to embrace that scale rather than dilute it is not merely ambitious, it\u2019s fearless.<\/p>\n Set in 1985 and 1986, when AIDS was still spoken of in euphemisms and fear, the first part begins with a rabbi eulogizing a generation of immigrants who crossed oceans to build something sturdier than themselves. Before we meet the living, we are reminded of the dead; before the fantasia, the roots. From there, the play fans outward into Manhattan apartments, court offices, hospital rooms, and the chill corridors of political power.<\/p>\n Under director Ron May\u2019s deft command of its many moving parts, the play\u2019s emotional center rests with two couples, both unraveling. The unusually named Prior Walter (Marshall Glass), descendant of an old American line, discovers lesions on his body that signal AIDS. His lover, Louis Ironson (Nathan Spector) finds that his love falters in the face of Prior\u2019s bodily decay. Spector makes Louis\u2019s guilt operatic; he dissects his own cowardice in speeches that glitter with intellect and self-loathing. Glass, meanwhile, makes Prior grow luminous in suffering, visited by ancestors from centuries past who flutter in like emissaries from history itself.<\/p>\n Across town, Joe Pitt (Devon Mahon), a Mormon and a rising Republican legal mind, is locked in a marriage to Harper (Courtney Weir), whose Valium-softened loneliness gives her a kind of clairvoyance. Mahon makes Joe\u2019s crisis one of identity: sexual, spiritual, political. Weir\u2019s pitch-perfect Harper drifts through hallucinated travel brochures and Antarctic dreams, as if the only way to survive America is to leave it in the mind.<\/p>\n The hinge binding these stories is the despicable real-life character Roy Cohn (a ferociously effective Louis Farber), mentor to Joe and an avatar of ruthless power. When he learns he has AIDS and faces disbarment, he insists the disease is something that happens to other men, not him. In Kushner\u2019s audacious stroke, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Nina Miller) arrives to observe his decline. It is both a theatrical joke and a moral reckoning: history personified, refusing to be buried.<\/p>\n And finally, there\u2019s Belize (an entertainingly broad Michael Thompson), a former drag queen, once Prior\u2019s lover and, in time, Roy Cohn\u2019s nurse. The heated exchange between Spector\u2019s Louis and Thompson\u2019s Belize is among the most accomplished confrontations in the production.<\/p>\n MILLENNIUM APPROACHES<\/strong> <\/strong>closes with one of modern theater\u2019s great coups: an angel (Megan Holcomb) crashes into Prior\u2019s bedroom, wings unfurled, proclaiming him a prophet. It\u2019s a moment poised between the absurd and the sublime, at once preposterous and genuinely thrilling. Here, however, whether due to budgetary limits or theater logistics, the arrival doesn\u2019t quite deliver the shattering impact audiences might expect. Still, the staging finds a measure of ingenuity in the angel\u2019s entrance into the Arts Center\u2019s studio theater in a way that feels both creative and inventively realized.<\/p>\n If the first part burns with urgency, PERESTOIKA<\/strong> is stranger and more wayward, beginning with a speech in Moscow by the world\u2019s oldest Bolshevik condemning progress itself. \u201cThe only way forward is to not move,\u201d he declares, a parody of reactionary logic that echoes the American resistance to change. Yet the play argues against it. Progress, it insists, however painful, is preferable to paralysis.<\/p>\n The second half is more overtly metaphysical. Heaven, we learn, is in disarray. The angels are bureaucrats of stasis, furious that humanity\u2019s migrations and inventions have driven God away. Prior is summoned to halt the ceaseless motion of history.<\/p>\n What makes ANGELS IN AMERICA<\/strong> endure is not only its political audacity but its theatricality. The ensemble takes on multiple roles, some more successfully than others. Eight actors play both mortals and spirits. Identities are porous: the nurse may also be an angel; a mother, a ghost. Gender bends. Authority dissolves. Dori Brown\u2019s set design is anchored by a series of metallic filing cabinets, their purpose ambiguous, though they might suggest the machinery of Washington bureaucracy where lives, deaths, and the nation\u2019s inconvenient histories are cataloged, then quietly filed away. The otherwise spare stage is given shape and pulse through Stacey Walston\u2019s lighting, which shifts with crisp, moment-to-moment precision, while Pete Bish\u2019s atmospheric sound design presses in from all sides, at times bombastic, even startling in its force.<\/p>\n ANGELS IN AMERICA<\/strong> is often described as being one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. Such canonization can fossilize a work, but here the opposite occurs. Stray Cat<\/strong>\u2019s revival seems to rediscover the volatility in the text and the humor that snaps like electricity. At heart, this \u201cgay fantasia\u201d is a love letter to survival. \u201cThe great work begins,\u201d the angel proclaims.\u00a0 That great work is not prophecy but persistence; caring for the sick, confessing cowardice, and choosing to love again.<\/p>\n Seen whole, the work feels like standing inside the symphony of a storm. It is unruly, excessive, occasionally uneven. It is also exhilarating. For several blazing hours, director May has taken Kushner\u2019s work and turned Tempe Center for the Arts<\/strong> into a place where history and hope argue in full view of a local valley audience. You leave the theater feeling not bludgeoned but enlarged, as if you were permitted to eavesdrop on the republic arguing with itself. In an era that preferred silence about AIDS, ANGELS IN AMERICA<\/strong> insists on complexity.<\/p>\n The play may feel softer now than it did during the nineties. Time, education, and hard-won awareness inevitably reshape our reactions. But in this exemplary Stray Cat Theatre<\/strong> production, its radiance remains undimmed.<\/p>\n ANGELS IN AMERICA runs through May 16th at:<\/p>\n The Tempe Center for the Arts —\u00a0https:\/\/www.tempecenterforthearts.com\/<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0833-ATC-SEAT —\u00a0700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ<\/p>\n Stray Cat Theatre —\u00a0https:\/\/straycattheatre.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n Graphic credit to Stray Cat Theatre<\/p>\n Reader Reviews<\/p>\n To post a comment, you must register<\/a> and login<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n 2026 Theater Fans’ Choice Awards – Live Stats\n <\/p>\n \n Best Touring Production – Top 3\n <\/p>\n \n 1.<\/strong> \n 11.9% of votes\n <\/p>\n \n 3.<\/strong> \n 8.3% of votes\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Local Shows<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \t\t\t Herb Paine ~ Herb has served as Senior Contributing Editor and lead theatre critic for BWW’s Phoenix Metro Region since 2014. He was acclaimed\u00a0as BEST THEATRE CRITIC by\u00a0PHOENIX magazine … (read more about this author)<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n
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