The harrowing, uproarious and magical Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America” has become a landmark of the American stage. The New Yorker once described it as “a victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty.” If you haven’t seen it yet, the UD’s incomparable Residential Ensemble Players performs it through Oct. 12. “Angels” is an epic tale that ranges between heaven and Earth, fantasy and reality, outrageous comedy and total despair. Set in 1985, Ronald Reagan has been elected to a second term, New York City is in the clutches of a mysterious plague that people are grasping to understand, and Prior, a young man in the trenches of this health crisis, discovers devastating news that his lover, Louis, just cannot accept. Mormon couple Joe and Harper struggle with his identity crisis and her self-medicating Valium habit. Roy Cohn, a notorious lawyer from the McCarthy hearings, is in blustery full-blown denial of his own life-changing predicament. And the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to distill it all down to one prophetic statement: “History is about to crack wide open.” Poetic, heroic, human, “Angels” is not to be missed.
