In times of panic, people are judgmental of what they don’t understand.
Amidst the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s, New Yorkers tried to deal with the uncertainties of life and death, eternal damnation and salvation and the affairs of the heart. That’s what WCU’s School of Stage and Screen will show us with its season opening performance.
The program presents Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning epic play, “Angels in America – Part One: Millennium Approaches.”
Credit to WCU’s School of Stage and Screen.
It is the first of a two-part political drama being performed four times from Sept.20-23 in the Hoey Auditorium. The first three days’ performances will be at 7:30 p.m. and the last performance will be 3 p.m Saturday. The play will be broken down into three one-hour segments with two intermissions in between.
The price for admission is $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and faculty/staff.
Part one focuses on the symbolic examination of AIDS and the impact it has on the homosexual religious community of New York during a conservative Reagan administration.
The play revolves around a white Anglo-Saxon protestant named Prior, his Jewish lover Louis, Louis’ mentor Roy Cohn and Republican law clerk Joe Pitt. The battle for acceptance among each other and their families is a challenging ordeal. Also, supernatural beings are set to appear in the form of ghosts and angels.
Director Dustin Whitehead hopes to invoke empathy in the audience because he said this play does a good job of presenting situations that people may not see every day.
“A lot of themes in this play, for me, are completely relevant today because we still have people that are less open-minded than they should be. There’s still racism. There’s still sexism. There’s still a political climate that is unsafe,” said Whitehead.
Furthermore, he said it is hard for him to find the words to truly describe the play because the meaning is so much bigger than him, which is why he loves it.
