RSVP : ‘Life Is Short, but Art Is Long’

The crowd that relaxed late Saturday night in the Doolittle Theater’s lobby, spilling out the entrance onto Vine Street, had earned its champagne and white chocolate-dipped strawberries. Except for a 2 1/2-hour dinner break, they’d been at the theater since early afternoon for a marathon performance of “Angels in America.”

The two-part Tony Kushner drama received its first fully staged production at the Mark Taper Forum three years ago. It went on to garner a Pulitzer Prize and consecutive Tonys. As anyone in the lobby for the post-show reception could attest, the play is as good as it is lengthy.

“Life is short, but art is long,” pronounced producer Gordon Davidson. In this case, the art came in at around seven hours.

It was enough time for the crowd to fully experience Kushner’s epic tale of love in the time of President Ronald Reagan and AIDS, venomous right-wing attorney Roy Cohn, Mormons in Manhattan, Judaism, reality, hallucinations and spiritual mumbo jumbo.

While the audience watched, the understudies of this touring company sat on metal chairs outside in the shade rehearsing. The scripts they held looked like telephone books from a not-so-small town.

Fittingly, the crowd at this reopening had a distinctively L.A. look. Most wore casual summer clothes--pink Bermuda shorts, Birkenstocks, sun dresses, T-shirts from the Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge tour, zoris, loose khakis and the like. In all, there were perhaps a dozen suits worn by traditionalists who believe in dressing for the theater even on a 90-degree afternoon.

As eclectically dressed as they were, there was a uniformity of positive opinion about the play. “Phenomenal theater,” said one woman. “It’s life and death, good and evil and in between,” said another. Considering that it was Hollywood, it wasn’t a particularly star-studded crowd. Lynn Redgrave, Louis Nye, Kathy Najimy, Richard Thomas and Jo Anne Worley were among the notables on hand. Most of the cast dropped by the lobby, and they had a distinctly workman-like aura. A few had black duffel bags over their shoulders. They all wore casual street clothes. There wasn’t the feeling of say, Glenn Close coming to the party after the opening of “Sunset Boulevard.” This was a crew of working actors having a drink on the way home.

As the crowd thinned, there was one classically Hollywood response about the play from a woman more attuned to films than plays. “Forget about the ‘Batman’ villains,” said Lynda Keeler. “Roy Cohn is the evilest of them all.”