How to rebuild after a disaster is at the heart of Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner’s iconic play Angels in America.
The Cameri Theater, which presented Millennium Approaches last year, now makes history as the first theater offering Perestroika here, under director Gilad Kimchi.
Lauded by dramaturge Alisa Solomon as a profoundly Jewish play, with its angels raising an angry fist to God, Angels in America was quickly placed within the Western canon of theater by no other than late literary critique Harold Bloom.
The show's storyline
Perestroika includes Roy Cohn (Yoav Levi) who has AIDS. His considerable pull allows him to present the disease to the world as liver cancer. Nurse Belize (Matan Onyameh) endures his racist insults and claws back.
Belize has a friend, Prior (Elad Atrakchi). Prior has visions in which an angel (Maya Landsmann) informs him that humanity must stop moving forward and that God is missing.
It is this struggle between Prior and heaven that theater scholar Yair Lipshitz suggested is a retelling of the biblical clash between Jacob and the angel. Only now the gay, diseased man fills the space of a mythical father to a yet to be born nation.
Prior’s ex-partner Louis (Shoham Sheiner) left him during Millennium Approaches, after Prior was infected with HIV. Louis is a Jewish-American gay man, a fact we learn right from the start when he attends a funeral and gets a frown from Rabbi Chemelwitz (Landsmann) for having such an un-Jewish name.
Louis finds comfort in the arms of a gay Mormon, Joe (Nadav Nates). Joe abandoned his wife, Harper (Avigail Harari). Louis and Joe are both betrayers, and they anguish over these choices.
When Harper roams the streets of New York, the police call Joe’s mother in Utah. Hannah (Irit Kaplan) comes to the Big Apple to rescue Harper and starts working at the Mormon Visitor’s Center. Cohn is visited at night by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Dudu Niv), whom Cohn described as “the Jewish mother we all had.” Cohn, a brutal conservative, used his influence to execute Ethel.
The intimate set created by Eran Atzmon, with its broken walls, allows members of the Revolution Orchestra to walk to the stage for a musical send off to an old queen in a magnificent drag funeral.
Angels in America – Millennium Approaches will be offered on Thursday, March 14, at 7 p.m. with English subtitles. Perestroika will be offered on Friday, March 15, at 7:30 p.m. with English subtitles. Each performance is roughly three hours long with one intermission. The Cameri Theatre, 19 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, Tel Aviv. Call (03) 606-0900 to book. Perestroika contains nudity.