Heavenly Angels exhibit takes wing

This Al Hirschfeld drawing of the Broadway Angels in America cast is on display at San Francisco's Museum of Performance and Design in the exhibit More Life: Angels in America at Twenty. Below, Milton Glaser's artwork for the Broadway production of Angels.The millennium approached, then quickly fell behind us. Time marches on, but Tony Kushner's Angels in America remains a landmark achievement of 20th-century theater.The legacy of the play that got its start at San Francisco's Eureka Theatre is on display at the Museum of Performance and Design, one of San Francisco's best kept museum secrets. The exhibit hall may be filled with memorabilia from Angels' humble beginnings on a red Formica table filled with scribbled-in notebooks to its domination of world stage (with the Pulitzer Prize and international posters to prove it), but what you really feel in this display is the extraordinary power of theater.It doesn't happen very often, but when a play or a musical really taps into the American psyche, imaginations are ignited and artists are pushed to do work they didn't know they could do. MPD's curator of exhibitions and programs, Brad Rosenstein, has created a testament to the evanescence of theater. Plays may come and go, but sometimes in their wake, the world changes because people's imaginations were truly engaged.At a press preview for More Life! Angels in America at Twenty, (the exhibit opens to the public Saturday, Nov. 6), Rosenstein talked about his connection with the play from the first time he read it then described how enthusiastic everyone was when he contacted them for information or artifacts for the exhibit. No one had time, he said, but just about everyone made time, including Kushner, whom Rosenstein accurately described as "the busiest writer in the world."Kushner was there for the preview, as were original Broadway cast members Joe Mantello and David Marshall Grant. The Eureka production was represented by Tony Taccone, who, along with Oskar Eustis, ran the Eureka and had the foresight to produce the world premiere of Angels, along with cast members Lorri Holt and Anne Darragh.The ever-present image in the exhibit, not surprisingly, is wings. There are angels' wings from numerous productions, including the original Sandra Woodall wings from the Eureka (beautifully restored), the only surviving wings from Broadway, the American Conservatory Theater wings (metal and fabric and strangely beautiful) and the hyper-realistic wings worn by Emma Thompson in the HBO movie. There's also a set piece from Broadway of the Angel of Bethesda Fountain that looks like it just fell off the beloved Central Park landmark. There are angels in photos and on posters, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to sense a few actual angels hovering among the artifacts.Kushner was saving his speech for the big pre-opening gala, but in accepting a proclamation from San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty proclaiming Angels in America Day, Kushner said, "The only thing left is to climb in a box and shut the lid." He described himself as "overwhelmed" and "out of my head." And he described the experience of the exhibit as if someone had opened his closet and out spilled posters and wings and people.Rosenstein conducted about 50 interviews with artists involved with Angels over the last two decades, and he said he will continue to add new audio and visual material into the exhibit. Among that material will be footage from a number of different productions. Toward the end of the exhibition, there will be a screening of Freida Lee Mock's Kushner documentary, Wrestling with Angels at a Lucasfilm screening room, and there's talk at the San Francisco Opera of unleashing the Adler Fellows on a concert presentation of the Angels opera.The exhibit is so inspiring you want to head immediately into a nearby theater and see Angels in its entirety. You'd have to head to New York's Singature Theatre Company to do that right now, but Supervisor Dufty mentioned a local theater company he's helping, Theatre Shark, as they try to find a Castro neighborhood storefront in which to produce the entire two-part epic. Until then we can wallow in the wing-fluttering glory of More Life!.More words!I wrote about the contents of the exhibit in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the article here. You can also read Rob Hurwitt's interview with Tony Kushner and his piece on the legacy of Angels.FOR MORE INFORMATIONMore Life! Angels in America at Twenty continues through March 26, 2011 at the Museum of Performance and Design, 401 Van Ness Ave., Veterans Building, Fourth Floor, San Francisco. Suggested donation is $5. Call 415 255-4800 or visit www.mpdsf.org.