‘Angels’ to descend on a small stage

Apocalyptic and hallucinatory visions of flying angels and ghosts. Time-traveling. AIDS and homophobia. Racism. Political, social and religious hypocrisy. Love and death, redemption and transformation.

Tony Kushner’s teeming, two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Angels in America,” is unquestionably epic. The challenge for two local theater companies: how to fit the whole thing onto a 20-foot-wide stage in a 99-seat theater.

Running Friday through April 10 at NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood, the joint effort by lilybeau productions and Open at the Top Productions marks the L.A. area’s first full staging of “Angels” under the Actors’ Equity 99-seat theater plan, according to Actors’ Equity.

Audiences can see “Part 1: Millennium Approaches” and “Part 2: Perestroika” separately or, on Sundays, together in a marathon session.

“I don’t want to do what somebody else’s expectation of 99-seat theater is,” said Kevin Bailey, Open at the Top co-founder and co-owner of the NoHo Arts Center. “I’m not going to be told by anyone that you can’t do a show of this size and scope in a small theater. A great show like ‘Angels’ works because of Tony Kushner’s incredible words.”

And yes, there will be a flying angel -- made possible, Bailey said, by the theater’s 22-foot-high ceiling and a stage and film rigging company, Showrig, that has donated and installed the flying apparatus.

NoHo Arts Center isn’t the smallest theater to tackle “Angels.”

“Millennium Approaches” was mounted recently by Ohio’s 46-seat Weathervane Community Playhouse. And Kushner (who has no involvement with the NoHo production) remembers a “really splendid production” at the low-ceilinged basement theater at Houston’s Alley Theatre.

“The first-ever production, actually, of the Part 1,” he noted, “was at the Taper, Too when it was in the basement of the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.” (That 99-seat staging took place in 1990.)

“I like seeing the show done in intimate spaces,” Kushner said. “I think the play, in spite of its epic qualities, is really a very intimate play.”

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-- Lynne Heffley