UW School of Drama Presents ANGELS IN AMERICA PART II: PERESTROIKA

This spring, UW Drama students will take on Tony Kushner's seminal, era-defining play about AIDS and homosexuality in 1980s America, Angels in America-at least, they'll take on half of it.

Director Mark Valdez explains why he believes the second half of the epic is speaks to this moment in time: "Part one is very well structured, foundational, tight. Kushner's doing this thing where he sets up this world, only to have it fall apart in part two. And when we get there, everything is kind of a mess: communities are falling apart, structures are falling apart, and God is gone, and there's a plague, and people are dying, and storms are brewing, and we just don't know what to do. So, the journey of the play is about figuring out, when things are in chaos and falling apart and fraying, how do you move forward? And ultimately, the characters get through it together, but they have to make a community, they have to make a family, they have to make togetherness, and that's what lets them survive. And in order to do that they have to forgive and get past assumptions and they have to bridge religious and cultural and generational divides. It just seems like very much where we are now, in this time, and so, can we talk about it?"

Valdez is a Los Angeles-based director who has directed nationally at such theatres as Mixed Blood in Minneapolis and Teatro Visión in San Jose, and in LA at The Rogue Artists, East West Players' David Henry Hwang Institute, and the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre. Mark spent five years as Associate Artistic Director at Cornerstone Theater Company, where he directed the first-ever approved adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart classic, You Can't Take It With You, adapted to LA's Muslim community.

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of Angels in America's original Broadway run. The first half of the play, Millennium Approaches, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993, and both halves of the play won the Tony Award for Best Play (Millennium Approaches in 1993, Perestroika in 1994). The 2003 HBO miniseries version of the play won both the Golden Globe and the Emmy for Best Miniseries. The play's first Broadway revival, produced by London's National Theatre, opens March 25th at the Neil Simon Theatre in New York City.

Set, like part one, in 1980s New York, Perestroika picks up where Millennium Approaches left off: in Prior Walter's bed, where he is being visited by the Angel, who has just informed him that he is a prophet and the "great work" has begun. The play goes on to follow an interconnected web of characters who, having faced annihilation in part one, must now confront their own stubborn indestructibility. These include Belize, a registered nurse and former drag queen, and Belize's patient Roy Cohn, the McCarthyist lawyer and power broker who prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who is also a character in this play), and later represented Donald Trump. Prior's former lover Joe, Cohn's protégé, is here, along with Joe's ex-wife Harper, still attempting to recover from Valium addiction and abandonment, his lover Louis, and his mother Hannah, who surprises Prior by being the only one to take his angelic visions seriously.

This production is a masters thesis for costume designer Pamela Weinzatl and lighting designer Amber Parker, both members of UW Drama's MFA Design program. The set designer is 2nd year MFA designer Shin-yi Lin. The sound designer is undergraduate Kai Scheer. The design includes a rotating stage and extensive use of puppetry.

The cast is comprised of members of UW Drama's Professional Actor Training Program (MFA, Acting) and undergraduates. See full cast list below.

PERFORMANCES
Tuesday, April 24th at 7:30 PM (PREVIEW)
Thursday, April 26th at 7:30 PM (PREVIEW)
Friday, April 27th at 7:30 PM (OPENING NIGHT)
Saturday, April 28th at 7:30 PM
Sunday, April 29th at 2:00 PM (With pre-show lobby talk at 1:00 PM)
Wednesday, May 2nd at 7:30 PM (Pay-What-You-Can, day of show only)
Thursday, May 3rd at 7:30 PM
Friday, May 4th at 7:30 PM (UW Drama alumni night)
Saturday, May 5th at 7:30 PM
Sunday, May 6th at 2:00 PM

DATES TO NOTE:

Opening Night: Friday, April 27th at 7:30 PM
Pre-show Lobby Talk: Sunday, April 29th at 1:00 PM (show at 2:00 PM)
Pay-What-You-Can: Wednesday, May 2nd at 7:30 (PWYC tickets available day-of-show only, $1 minimum)
UW Drama alumni night: Friday, May 4th at 7:30 PM (pre-show reception at 6:30 PM)

TICKETS
$20 Regular
$14 UW employee or retiree, senior (62+), UWAA member
$10 Student
$5 TeenTix
Pay-What-You-Can, day of show only, Wednesday, May 2nd at 7:30
Available at drama.uw.edu or by calling the ArtsUW ticket office at 206.543.4880

LOCATION
Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse
4045 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98195
Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/8MujV62SW7C2

ARTISTS

PLAYWRIGHT: Tony Kushner
DIRECTOR: Mark Valdez

CAST (PATP = Professional Actor Training Program, MFA in Acting)
Hannah/Ethel/The Angel Asiatica Alyssa Franks (1st year PATP)
Harper/The Angel Africanii Hailey Henderson (1st year PATP)
The Angel/Henry Brandon Pascal (1st year PATP)
Roy/The Angel Antarctica Xavier Bleuel (1st year PATP)
Joe/The Father/The Angel Europa Semaj Miller (1st year PATP)
Louis/The Angel Australia Phillip Ray Guevara (2nd year PATP)
Prior Taylor Jones (2nd year PATP)
Belize/Mr. Lies/The Angel Oceania Allyson Brown (2nd year PATP)
Aleksii/Nurse Emily/The Mother Annie Willis (undergraduate Drama major)
Angel Posse Anna Noelle Kassing (undergraduate Drama major)
Angel Posse Elliot Chinn (undergraduate Drama major)
Angel Posse Emma Halliday (undergraduate Drama major)
Angel Posse Anais Gralpois (undergraduate Drama major)

DESIGNERS
Costume Designer Pamela Weinzatl (3rd year MFA designer, masters thesis)
Lighting Designer Amber Parker (3rd year MFA designer, masters thesis
Set Designer Shin-yi Lin (2nd year MFA designer)
Sound Designer Kai Scheer (undergraduate)

MORE ABOUT Tony Kushner
Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, Homebody/Kabul, as well as a musical Caroline, or Change, and opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, both with composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage and Her Children, and the English-language libretto for the children's opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels in America, and Steven Spielberg's Munich. In 2012 he wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's movie Lincoln. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Chicago Film Critics Award, and several others. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising and Brundibar: the Libretto, 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. His recent work includes a collection of one-act plays entitled Tiny Kushner, and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. In addition, a revival of Angels in America ran off-Broadway at the Signature Theater and won the Lucille Lortel Award in 2011 for Outstanding Revival.

is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, two Oscar nominations, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, the 2012 National Medal of Arts, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater Award, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, among many others. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony , made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock.

In "After Angels," a profile of Tony Kushner published in The New Yorker, John Lahr wrote: "[Kushner] is fond of quoting Melville's heroic prayer from Mardi and a Voyage Thither ("Better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals"), and takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history - among them, AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution (Angels in America), Afghanistan and the West (Homebody/Kabul), German Fascism and Reaganism (A Bright Room Called Day), the rise of capitalism (Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne), and racism and the civil rights movement in the South (Caroline, or Change). But his plays, which are invariably political, are rarely polemical. Instead Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls "a dialectically shaped truth," which must be "outrageously funny" and "absolutely agonizing," and must "move us forward." He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances - a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans - and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized - a humanizing act of the imagination." He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

MORE ABOUT MARK VALDEZ
Mark Valdez is a director, writer, producer, and organizer based in Los Angeles. Directing credits include world premiere productions of plays by Erik Ehn, Jose Cruz Gonzalez, Peter Howard, Tom Jacobson, Will MacAdams, Tracey Scott Wilson, Tanya Saracho, Molly Smith Metzer, Octavio Solis, and others. Valdez directed the first-ever approved adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart classic, You Can't Take It With You (adapted to the American-Muslim community) and a bi-lingual (English-Spanish) adaptation of the musical comedy, The Pajama Game. In 2017, Mark worked with 15 Latino artists of various disciplines to create DJ Latinidad's Latino Dance Party, a performance that explores latinidad in contemporary U.S. culture, through the lens of a dance party. The show toured nationally. Other recent projects include a commission from the Alliance Theater to create a new play with and for people living and working along the Buford Highway, home to one of Atlanta's largest immigrant/New American communities, and a new play with playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez, Curious, which encourages young Latinas to pursue careers in the sciences. From 2007-2015, Valdez was the Executive Director of the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET), a national community of artists and arts organizations dedicated to collaborative creation. He is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award for Directing and for Special Projects, a MAP grant, and a NALAC Artist Grant.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF DRAMA
The UW School of Drama develops innovative and courageous artists and scholars poised to be the creative leaders of tomorrow.

For 76 years it has served as one of this country's leading training institutions for theatre artists and scholars. The School of Drama offers MFA degrees in acting, design, and directing, a four-year undergraduate liberal arts education in Drama, and a PhD in theatre history and criticism. Faculty and alumni have founded theatres such as ACT Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Empty Space Theatre, Jet City Improv, and more recently, the Washington Ensemble Theatre, Azeotrope, and The Horse in Motion. The School of Drama is a laboratory for leading-edge performance research, attracting internationally renowned guest artists like Anne Washburn, Daniel Alexander Jones, Erik Ehn, Meiyin Wang, Chay Yew, Whit MacLaughlin, and PearlDamour, offering students the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from masters in their field and forge critical connections to the world of professional theatre.

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