Kushner starts right off by laughing us into the center of our ideological crisis. “Perestroika” opens in Moscow 1986 with the ancient figure of Prelapsarianov (Kathleen Chalfant), the “oldest living Bolshevik,” orating about the death of Marxist theory and its replacement by American cheeseburger capitalism. In a scene worthy of Shaw, Kushner both satirizes Marxist abstraction and warns about the lack of new ideas in our “sour little age.” A great crash and we move from the Kremlin to downtown New York, picking up the last scene of Part One, with the AIDS-stricken Prior (Stephen Spinella) cowering in his bed beneath the Angel (Ellen McLaughlin), who has crashed through his bedroom ceiling.
This kind of jump-cutting occurs all through the play, which ricochets from reality to dream, from earth to heaven, as it weaves its various strands. These include the gay couple, Prior and Louis (Joe Mantello), who has fearfully abandoned his stricken lover; the Mormon couple, Harper (Marcia Gay Harden) and Joe (David Marshall Grant), who leaves her to become Louis’s lover. Historical reality is represented by Roy Cohn (Ron Leibman), the McCarthyite lawyer and closet gay who himself is dying of AIDS, attended by Belize (Jeffrey Wright), a black male nurse whom the bigoted Cohn excoriates. As befits a fantasia, the play freestyles from one compelling scene to another, never losing its spiritual spine: an exploration of possibility and responsibility at a millennial moment when old orders are collapsing.
The Angel has come to draft the unwilling “prophet” Prior in a plan to stop the chaos of human history–so messy that it’s driven even God from heaven. How this proposal works out is both funny and revelatory. Kushner has the Aristophanic impudence to write a scene in which the Angel appears to Harper’s Mormon mother (Chalfant), throwing her into an amazed orgasm. But his couples, gay and straight, assert the primacy of loyalty over lust. Prior insists on the dignity of gays, not as a “lifestyle” but as a light in the human spectrum. And Louis says, “Forgiveness is where justice and love converge,” forcing himself to chant the Hebrew kaddish at the bedside of the vicious bigot Cohn, aided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Chalfant), the convicted spy whom Cohn had helped to execute.
All these moods are embodied by an amazing cast, every one of whom has gotten better since Part One opened. Ron Leibman’s bravura Tony-winning performance has deepened: his Roy Cohn is like some modem Richard III, enjoying his own evil. George C. Wolfe’s staging is now seamless, painting every emotional color with precision. And consider: Robert Altman’s film version is yet to come.
