Warehouse Theatre Presents Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA, Beginning Today

Warehouse Theatre continues its 2016 Season today with Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner and directed by Kristofer Green.

The recipient of the 1993 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and hailed by The New York Times as "The most thrilling American play in years!," Angels in America is one of the most honored plays in a generation. Angels in America will play the Columbus Performing Arts Center Van Fleet Theatre opening Friday, June 17, 2016 and running for six performances before closing Sunday, June 26, 2016.

Critics and members of the press are invited to attend Press Night on Friday, June 17, 2016 at 8:00pm. For ticket arrangements, contact Kristofer Green at kgreen.wtc@gmail.com or 614-984-6974.

The year is 1985. Reagan is backing a culture of ruthless self-interest. The cold war is ending. The ozone layer is melting. Americans are learning how to survive a plague. It's at this tipping point that the great work begins.

In New York City, Roy Cohn, the politically powerful right-wing lawyer, angrily denies his diagnosis of AIDS, while his protégé, a court clerk and Republican Mormon, struggles with a Valium addicted wife. Simultaneously, an ailing yet spirited gay man begins to hear messages from a supernatural being that build to an exhilarating conclusion.

Told with exuberance, wit, energy and an almost apocalyptic sense of play, Tony Kushner's wild fantasia carries the audience headlong through an astonishing theatrical landscape populated by communists, capitalists, Mormons, rabbis, mothers, homos and ghosts.

"The AIDS crisis in the 1980s provoked Tony Kushner to write a play of scope and complexity that, I believe, we had not seen before in this country," director Kristofer Green states. "Kushner gives the play the subtitle 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,' and asks profoundly existential questions that reverberate throughout the whole play and concern all the characters. Gays, Jews, Mormons, WASPs, African-Americans, those with and without power: Where did we come from? What are we doing? Where are we going?"

"I personally count Angels in America among the great classics, and, as any great classic, the play engages these questions on personal, philosophical, political, and cosmic levels. Now, twenty five years after its first production, as I work on the play, I find its themes as relevant and urgent as ever."

Millennium Approaches was commissioned and first performed in 1990 by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles as a workshop. It received its world premiere in May, 1991, in a production by the Eureka Theatre Company of San Francisco. It debuted on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993. Angels in America has been produced extensively throughout the world since.

About the Playwright

Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures. He wrote the libretto for the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, also with Ms. Tesori. He has adapted and translated Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the English-language libretto for the opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels in America, and Steven Spielberg's Munich. His books include Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award and an Oscar nomination, among other honors. In 2008, he was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

About the Cast

The cast will feature Andrew Trimmer (The Last Night of Disco, Psycho Beach Party - Short North Stage) as Prior Walter, Cody Shope (Avenue Q, Forever Plaid - Catco) as Louis Ironson, Mike Writtenberry (The Breakfast Club - Warehouse Theatre, A View From the Bridge - Gallery Players) as Joe Pitt, Camille Bullock (theatre is a blank page - SITI Company, Dedalus - Available Light) as Harper Pitt, Susan Gellman (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Les Miserables - Gallery Players) as Hannah Pitt, Brent Alan Burington (Jackie & Me - Columbus Children's Theatre, The Temperamentals - Evolution Theatre) as Roy Cohn, Kevin Tate (Gruesome Playground Injuries, The Breakfast Club - Warehouse Theatre) as Belize and Kaitlin Descutner (Cats - Columbus Children's Theatre, A Chorus Line - Short North Stage) as The Angel.

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