CSUN Will Be First Campus in West to Bring Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ to the Stage

Cal State Northridge is about to be the first university in the West to stage part of Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Angels in America.”

Tony Kushner’s epic play focuses on five gay men in the 1980s, including Roy M. Cohn, the outwardly gay-hating lawyer and one-time aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy.

CSUN is producing “Millennium Approaches,” the first of the two-play series. Professor Peter Grego is directing the all-student cast. The play opens Friday and will include a flying angel.

If you missed “Angels in America” at the Taper in 1992, or the Doolittle in 1995, this is an opportunity to see the play that even the “Butcher of Broadway,” New York Times critic Frank Rich, called “one of the most important plays of my time.”

* “Angels in America,” CSUN’s Campus Theatre, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. Wednesday, 7 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 5 p.m. though Nov. 23. $5-$9. (818) 677-3093.

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End of Romance: Valley theater seems to be good for one or two hits a season, and the Road Theater certainly found one of them in “American Romance.”

The play--about a start-up Transcendentalist commune--also helped put the Road on the map. Since moving into the Lankershim Arts Center from a Van Nuys warehouse less than three years ago, the 6-year-old company has grown in strength and reputation--and financial security, thanks to “Romance.” The show has been selling out about 95 percent of the time since it opened in mid-July.

Artistic director Taylor Gilbert said “Romance” also raised the Road’s profile among writers and actors. “Quite frankly, we had a company audition this month and the quality of actors who want to attach themselves to the company is really tremendous,” she said.

The Road also has potential subscribers--every company’s dream--but can’t sell a full season. The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs oversees the Lankershim Arts Center, and contracts with the current tenants--including the Road--expire in July.

The Road’s next show is “Yuletidings!,” opening Nov. 29. The Road performed this collection of short works by Elias Stimac in a workshop last year and hopes to make it an annual tradition.

* “American Romance” runs Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. The final performance is Sunday at 7 p.m. (818) 761-8838.

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Latino Teatro: CSUN is also making a move to become the Valley’s hub for Latino artists. The new Latino/a Arts Collaborative started bringing performances to campus last month with the Latino comedy group Culture Clash.

Next up is Harry Gamboa Jr. A writer and artist who works in many media, Gamboa has been teaching in CSUN’s Chicano studies department for three years. “Frame of Relevance,” a conceptional multimedia performance he wrote and directed, will be at the CSUN Performing Arts Center on Friday.

“Frame of Relevance,” which Gamboa calls an absurdist commentary on the human condition, integrates text, live performance, video, slides and sound.

“It’s an experimental narrative following the life of a person caught in the nether world of self-discovery or self-denial,” Gamboa said.

Since 1972, Gamboa’s works have documented and interpreted the contemporary Chicano experience. His video piece, “L.A. Familia” was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1995 and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

* “Frame of Relevance,” CSUN Performing Arts Center. Friday, 8 p.m. $10. (818) 677-2488.

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Radio Mysteries: California Artists Radio Theatre, which has been staging live radio shows at the Cinegrill in Hollywood, has started Mysteries in the Air at the Beverly Garland Hotel in North Hollywood.

CART started taping scripts from the 1950s CBS series “Crime Classics” in October. Peggy Webber directs a cast that includes David Warner, Louis Nye, JoAnne Worley and Rene Auberjonis. And, of course, Beverly Garland.

The series has been sold to National Public Radio to air in some markets starting this spring. Its second monthly taping is Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 at the door, $15 in advance, and $10 for students or seniors. (213) 683-3422.

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Edmund Who? A few theater-savvy readers caught a serious slip-up in my Oct. 30 review of “The Flipside of L.A.” I attributed the all-too-true remark, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard,” to the 19th-century English actor Edmund Kean. It was, in fact, Edmund Gwenn who uttered these words--more or less.

Gwenn acted in dozens of movies and is perhaps best known for playing Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th Street.”

Particular thanks to reader Mary Willard, who tracked the line to the Macmillan Dictionary of Quotations. It reports that Gwenn, on his deathbed, responded to the comment that dying must be hard by saying, “It is, but not as hard as farce.” But a book of movie anecdotes purports that actor Jack Lemmon was at Gwenn’s side when he said of death, “Oh, it’s hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy.”

Willard nailed the source. Now if we could just confirm the wording.

Jack?