The MET’s ‘Angels in America’ cast hopes COVID shifts views of AIDS crisis

BY ERIK ANDERSON Special to The News-Post

When the Maryland Ensemble Theatre’s production of “Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches” was canceled before its first performance in March 2020 due to the pandemic, the cast and crew had to cope with stinging disappointment and uncertainty.

As Jeremy Myers, who portrays the lead role of Prior Walter, explained, the cast “put so much effort and love into this and had that work evaporated and didn’t know if we were ever really going to have the opportunity to come back to live theater.”

Three years later, all that effort and love will finally get to prove itself to a live audience on Feb. 10, and Myers believes the show’s politically inflected message about the AIDS crisis of the 1980s will come through all the stronger because of the adversity the production and audiences have survived.

“We are changed people coming out of these past three years,” Myers said. “We all have new sets of experiences that we’re all bringing to these roles and to this storytelling, and I think the audience will feel that, having had this collective experience with COVID and politics.”

Calling his character “sort of an everyman who just happens to be gay,” Myers said the Tony Awardwinning play by Tony Kushner follows Prior’s journey after receiving an AIDS diagnosis at the height of its epidemic in the late ’80s. The audience sees him struggle with the disease’s resulting physical limitations and relationship woes against a conservative cultural backdrop embodied by the Reagan Administration’s handling of the AIDS crisis.

“It’s just interesting to see some of the parallels with the Trump administration and their handling of the COVID pandemic,” Myers reflected. “COVID certainly affected a greater amount of people [than AIDS] in terms of a variety of backgrounds, but I do think [the pandemic] will affect the way the audience can look at the story.”

Myers said he embraced the role of Prior in part because of the “beautiful language” and “smartly crafted” relationships of Kushner’s script, but also because it affords him his first opportunity in 20 years as a professional actor to portray an openly gay character.

“As a proud gay man myself, that’s something that’s really special for me,” he said.

Though he loves the production, he admits a certain amount of exhaustion comes with his part.

“For as much time as I spend laying in a hospital bed, it is a very emotionally and physically demanding role,” he said. “There is a level of fear, a heightened emotion involved. If you sit with that breath for so long as an actor, being in that heart space, in that headspace, with that emotion, that can be very physically taxing, even though you’re not really moving a lot.”

While Myers doesn’t move a lot, the play is far from static. It is rife with quasi-supernatural activities that swirl around stage with technical complexity.

“A large piece of this play is in a dream-esque state, and there are moments when I think the audience is going to have to decide for themselves what is reality and what is not,” he said. “There are many moments when Prior is working through external things that he can’t really answer for — voices and physical things appearing, seeing things, ghosts visiting him and premonitions and things like that.”

Tad Janes, producing artistic director at the MET and the show’s director, describes Kushner’s script as “an intimidating play” because of its technical challenges. He said Kushner himself has indicated he doesn’t mind if productions take a barebones technical approach to the fantastical elements of his script. Kushner once said one of his favorite performances involved the angel character being wheeled onstage on a step ladder. But Janes sees the production as an opportunity to find the limits of the small black box theater’s technical

(See ANGELS 18)