Two guiding lights for 'Angels'

Co-directors stay true to their cast of characters

Nancy Curran Willis and Jason Southerland are codirectors of the two-part "Angels in America." Each is following a set of characters over the course of the two plays. (Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff)

Two plays make up Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning epic, "Angels in America." And the Boston Theatre Works production, opening this weekend, has two directors.

But Jason Southerland and Nancy Curran Willis, who are in charge of the production, decided not to divide the duties by play. Instead, they divided the work by relationships.

"I got the old folks and menopausal women," jokes Willis.

"And I got the young gay men and sexy relationships," says Southerland.

"Really what we're doing is following a character's journey throughout the two plays," he says, "which improves the sense of continuity."

"Angels" follows two couples - gay lovers Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, and Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt and his wife, Harper - as their relationships fracture during the politically conservative climate of the 1980s, when AIDS has become a health plague. The lives of these disparate characters intersect in unexpected ways, with Kushner's grand themes woven through personal experiences. Along the way, Kushner also looks at recent history as a time of critical change and asks if we are ready to let go of the past and move on to something new.

With eight actors, some playing multiple roles, "Angels" is a complicated endeavor, especially for a small theater with a small budget. That's why Southerland, the company's artistic director, turned to Willis. In 2001, she had been his co-director on "The Laramie Project," a documentary-style play exploring the impact of the killing of Matthew Shepard on a Wyoming town, which also had a large cast. Willis was also assistant director on Tennessee Williams's "Not About Nightingales," which helped put the company on the local theatrical map.

Willis says working with Southerland again has been easy.

"Even though I've had many more years experience directing, when we teamed up for 'The Laramie Project' I was a little intimidated and was probably more cautious about expressing my opinion," says Willis, who is a guest director at Newton South High School. "But now we know how to work together and we know what has to be done."

It was one thing to agree on how to manage the plays, the co-directors say. It was another to find the right actors to pull it off.

"We spent more than four months casting eight actors," says Willis. "The advantage we had was that every actor in the business wanted to audition. These characters are rich, complicated, and demanding and we had to make sure the actors would fit together, even as they took on multiple roles.

"It wasn't until the first table reading when we all sat down together," she adds, "that Jason and I were able to breathe a sigh of relief and say, 'We think we got it right.' "

The ensemble includes Elliot Norton award-winning actor Richard McElvain as lawyer Roy Cohn ("He's just crazy enough for it," says Southerland); Shakespeare & Company veteran Elizabeth Aspenlieder; Maurice Parent, last seen at the New Repertory Theatre; Publick Theatre regular Susanne Nitter; and Boston University undergraduate Tyler Reilly, who takes on the intense role of Prior Walter.

Despite the challenge of putting on "Angels," Southerland says it's the kind of production the company's audience has come out to support. "As an organization, we went through an examination of our mission and found our audiences really responded to our stripped-down, actor-driven productions," he explains. Ironically, they ended up being ambitious plays, like "Nightingales," "Laramie," and last year's "Midsummer Night's Dream," but done without all the bells and whistles. "Critics and audiences loved their simple aesthetic," Southerland says.

The key was to pay extra attention to actors as they develop their characters and keep them anchored to the story. At a recent rehearsal, it's clear the cast has created a comfortable camaraderie, finding as much humor as pathos as the characters whirl through fantastical dreamscapes and starkly real moments of truth. During Prior's heart-wrenching plea for "more life," the angels surrounding him create an atmosphere of amusing befuddlement, adding to the absurdity.

"I think what makes 'Angels in America' so great," Southerland says, "is that it's not about a particular moment in history. Like Shakespeare, I think its meaning changes depending on what's going on at the time people see it. I also think the plays are so layered, different elements come out depending on the production. Aspects [director] Mike Nichols emphasized for the HBO movie aren't the same as the ones [director] George C. Wolfe chose for the Broadway production, or what we might highlight for our production."

Willis says when she reread the plays before taking on the project, she was struck by how contemporary they felt.

"When I first saw it, in '93, I thought it was about the disease and how it affects a particular community. I was a suburban, Republican housewife from a conservative Baptist background," she says. "But when I look at it now I see a middle class that feels disenfranchised and disempowered, and it's not about being a Republican or Democrat. When Kushner says God has left and people are scared because we don't know how to fix things, it feels all too real."