Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell will stage Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and a newly revised Angels in America: Perestroika which will run in repertory through June 3, 2012.
Resnik, who most recently appeared in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Follies, will play Hannah, with Goodman Candide veterans Packard as Joseph Porter Pitt and Yando as Roy Cohn. The cast will also include Eddie Bennett as Louis Ironson, Mary Beth Fisher as the Angel, Heidi Kettenring as Harper, Rob Lindley as Prior and Michael Pogue as Belize.
According to the Court, "'The Great Work Begins.' The year is 1985: Ronald Reagan has just been reelected to a second term, and the deadly AIDS epidemic is at its height in New York City. Tony Kushner’s two-part epic historical drama captures the lives of the HIV-positive Prior; Louis, his lover who abandons him; Joe, a closeted gay Mormon; his Valium-addicted wife Harper; Roy Cohn, a notorious lawyer from the McCarthy hearings, dying of AIDS; Belize, his African-American nurse; Hannah, Joe’s mother from Utah; and the Angel, a terrifyingly beautiful herald of the apocalypse. As these characters discover, confront, and seduce each other during a time of death, hypocrisy, and tumultuous change, Kushner summons a restless pastiche of the historical and the supernatural, the theological and the political—all told with surging theatricality by a company of eight actors."
Angels in America was recently revived Off-Broadway by the Signature Theatre Company. Kushner also penned Short Talks on the Universe, A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydriotaphia, Homebody/Kabul and the book to the Tony-nominated musical Caroline, or Change. His play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures was seen at the Public Theater last spring. His adaptations include Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage.
Subscriptions for the Court Theatre season are currently on sale. Single tickets for Angels in America go on sale Dec. 1. Visit CourtTheatre.org. The Court Theatre is located at 5535 S. Ellis Ave in Chicago, IL.
