Welcome to the Magical World of Tony Kushner's 'The Illusion'

Amanda Quaid, Peter Bartlett, and Finn Wittrock

Here’s a trivia question for you.

What do these two plays have in common: A Free Man of Color, John Guare’s off-kilter take on US history that played last fall at the Vivian Beaumont, and Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, now on display at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space?

The answer is, they both give a nod to a 17th century French playwright by the name of Pierre Corneille, prolific and successful in his time but rather less well-known nowadays than his contemporaries Molière and Racine.

In Guare’s play, Corneille is the supposed father of the title character, Jacques Cornet. For his part, Kushner based The Illusion on Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique, in which Corneille wove elements of classicism and commedia del’arte into a kind of tragi-comedy along the lines of one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” say Measure for Measure or A Winter’s Tale. (Come to think of it, that tragi-comedy motif does seem to run through Guare’s work as well.)

The Illusion is the third and last of Kushner’s plays being presented by Signature this season (following Angels in America and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.) Originally produced in 1988, three years before Angels was unveiled, The Illusion is unlike pretty much everything that Kushner has written since, a work that owes as much to Shakespeare as to Corneille (I detected references to Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest) and one that uses heightened language, poetry, and romantic imagery, while throwing in a mix of modernism, all to great effect.

Being unfamiliar with L’Illusion Comique, I can only discuss The Illusion based on its own merits, of which there are plenty, despite Kushner’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge that pencils have erasers as well as points (which is to say the play, which does sag occasionally, could stand a 20-minute trim).

The Illusion opens very dramatically and spookily in the dark (the spookiness is splendidly aided and abetted by Bray Poor’s just-right sound design that includes creepy echoes and hawk screeches). The elderly Pridamant of Avignon (depicted here most magnificently by David Margulies, one of the production’s three terrific stage veterans) has entered the grotto of the magician Alcandre.

Pridamant is desirous of finding out what has become of long-estranged son, whom he kicked out of his home 15 years previously. It seems that time has softened some of the edges, and Pridament wants to bring about some sort of reconciliation before he dies. Alcandre (the resplendent Lois Smith, veteran actor #2, in a role usually played by a man) agrees to help, and as the play unfolds, Alcandre shows Pridamant various scenes from the son’s life.

In the three scenes, which shift in style and mood, the son’s personality runs the gamut from callow romantic to callous womanizer. Finn Wittrock does a fine job in the shifting roles, as do Sean Dugan as his chief rival, and Amanda Quaid and Merritt Wever as the women in his life. Wever plays a spunky maid of the type often found in a Molière play, though I must confess she is so modern in her outlook that at one point I half expected her to start singing  "The Miller’s Son" from Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Peter Bartlett, veteran actor #3, does a laugh-out-loud star turn in the wildly comic role of Matamore, another would-be rival, who transforms over time into a dreamy and lost soul seeking to find his way to a life of solitude...on the moon, no less


While I am handing out praise, I want to recognize the splendid original music by Nico Muhly, the costume design by Susan Hilferty, the set design by Christine Jones, and the best swordplay I have seen in a very long time, thanks to fight director Rick Sordelet. All of the strange and powerful proceedings are well-directed by Michel Mayer.

On many different levels, this lovely play is infused with magic, in which Alcandre is assisted by her (sometimes) deaf and mute servant (the excellent Henry Stram), who offers his own touch of strangeness and shape-shifting to the goings-on.

But ultimately, it is the magic of theater that prevails—a wonderful message for any dedicated theater buff to walk away with, and a splendid way to bid adieu to the old Peter Norton Space as the Signature Theatre Company prepares to move to its new home (designed by architect Frank Gehry) down the street. 

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Hosannah for Angels in America!

Let me be unequivocal. The Signature Theatre Company’s production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork Angels in America is astounding.

“Astounding” is not a term I use loosely or often, so let me provide some context.

Let me begin by saying that I am unencumbered by memories of the legendary original Broadway production from 1993. I did not see it and had to settle for reading the published script and then, later, watching the HBO film version. Neither of these experiences prepared me the play’s sheer theatricality.

I do not have a clue as to how Kushner pulled off such an astonishing juggling act, brilliantly weaving together so many complex ideas: the AIDS crisis, sexual identity, gender roles, the nature of God, U. S. history in the second half of the twentieth century, legal ethics, Judaism, Mormonism, race relations, the healthcare industry, medical ethics, damage to the ozone layer, prescription drug abuse, mental instability, co-dependent behaviors, marriage, loyalty, friendship, and others I am sure I am leaving out. Somehow, all of these come together within a rich tapestry of reality and fantasy, punctured clichés, surprising turns, unexpected humor, and deep, raw, and keenly felt emotions.

This is especially true in Part I of the two-part play, Millennium Approaches. In it, Kushner manages to pull everything into breathtakingly perfect balance and offers a most extraordinary yin and yang of intellectual content and human heart, comparable, in my view, only to Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Arcadia, which debuted in London, interestingly enough, the same year as Angels in America made it to Broadway.

Given the play’s many intertwined themes, it would be difficult to parse the plot. Angels in America takes place mostly in New York City in 1986-1987. The central characters are Prior Walter, a thirty-year-old gay New Yorker who has just learned he has full-blown AIDS; Roy Cohn, the real-life right-wing attorney best known as Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, who also has gotten AIDS through sexual contact with men but who adamantly eschews the “homosexual” label; and Harper Pitt, whose mental stability is collapsing along with her marriage to a closeted gay Mormon.

Now would probably be a good time to declare that Christian Borle as Prior Walter, Frank Wood as Roy Cohn, and Zachary Quinto as Prior’s conflicted boyfriend Louis give three truly indelible performances. This is a play that portrays ragged emotions at their most heightened and unvarnished, and one can only imagine the great sense of trust that had to have developed among the actors, and between the actors and director Michael Greif. There is not a false note to be found.

Zoe Kazan seems to me to have been miscast as Harper—looking too young and sounding more like a ditzy California blonde than a Salt Lake City Mormon---but she and all of the rest of the cast perform with all the love and attention and mutual respect anyone could ever hope to see on stage. The rest of this wonderful company is made up of Robin Bartlett, whom I loved as Harper’s mother-in-law Hannah and as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who has come for a deathwatch over her prosecutor, Roy Cohn; Bill Heck as Harper’s lost soul of a husband, trying and failing to keep himself and Harper on what he believes to be the “straight” and narrow path; Billy Porter as Belize, gay friend to both Prior and Louis and a nurse working with AIDS patients; and Robin Weigert as The Angel.

Without the budget of a major Broadway production, the Signature Theatre Company has done some wonderful work through the use of movable sets, projections, and black-clad stagehands. It is only in Part II of Angels in America, Perestroika, that things get a little muddy, especially with the introduction of a new plot element about heaven and the struggle of the angels to keep things together after God has taken off for parts unknown. For me, this is where the juggling fails to keep all of the balls in the air, and the connections are unclear. Still, Part II has some of the play’s most transcendent scenes, focusing as it does on love, forgiveness, and acceptance. Robin Bartlett shines in several of these scenes, and I wish we could have had more of her and fewer angels in Perestroika.

Still, Tony Kushner and all involved with the Signature Theatre Company have given us a wonderful gift with this production of Angels in America.

Did I mention that it is astounding?

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