ANGELS IN AMERICA — THE GREAT SCENES AGAIN

GENDER IS JUST A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT Glenn Close, in bed, as Roy Cohn in “The Great Work Begins: Scenes From ‘Angels in America’ “ with S, Epatha Merkerson as the nurse.

THE THING ABOUT “ANGELS IN AMERICA,” which arrived (Part I, at least) on Broadway in 1993, is that it’s too dense with meaning to take in all at once. I’ve seen both parts onstage twice (on and off Broadway) and on screen (HBO) several times, yet this latest encounter struck me between the eyes several times. I could swear I’d never heard (or understood) the lines before.

Here are a few notes on “The Great Work Begins: Scenes From ‘Angels in America’,” created by amfAR (originally the American Foundation for AIDS Research) as a live-streaming October to benefit its fund to fight Covid-19. (The plague years. Again?) The last time we checked, you could still watch” https://www.thegreatworkbegins.org

SCENE 1. Andrew Rannells as Prior Walter, the protagonist of “Angels in America,” a single 30-year-old gay man dying of AIDS. “One wants but one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?” Prior reflects. “You know you’ve hit rock bottom when even drag is a drag,” . And then suddenly Harper Pitt (Villa Lovell), an unhappy Mormon wife who doesn’t know her husband is gay, walks into his dream. Or does he walk into her hallucination?

SCENE 2. Now Paul Dano, left, plays Prior, recalling the night he saw the angel. “I think it really happened,” he says. “I’m a prophet.” His friend Belize (Larry Owens) begs to differ: “This is not dementia. And this is not real. It’s just you,” Belize later becomes Roy Cohn’s nurse and is played by S. Epatha Merkerson.

SCENE 3. The angel who visits Prior in his bedroom is not a single mind or entity, and some grandly evocative technology conveys that. She is played by Patti LuPone, Nikki M. James, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Linda Emond. And she reveals (with LuPone’s voice)), “Heaven is a city much like San Francisco.” Additional angelic wisdom: “Maybe the world has driven God from heaven.” “There is no Zion — stay where you are.”

SCENE 4: They put morphine in the drip. “The boogeyman is here,” says Glenn Close as Roy Cohn, the vicious attorney connected with the Communist-baiting senator Joe McCarthy and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn never acknowledged being gay and denied that he had AIDS.

SCENE 5. The character Harper Pitt is a young wife with mental problems, but here she’s played by the veteran stage actress Lois Smith. Waiting for takeoff on an evening flight to San Francisco, Harper observes: “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress, longing for what we’ve left behind and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.,”

SCENE 6 The epilogue takes place with four actors at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, gazing on the angel’s image. Brian Tyree Henry plays Prior; Brandon Uranowitz is Louis, Prior’s ex; Jeremy O. Harris is Belize; and Laura Linney is Hannah Pitt (Harper’s mother-in-law). “This disease will be the end of some of us,” Prior says. But then: “We will not die secret deaths anymore.”