Cameri Theatre offers 'Angels in America'

• Published date: 11 March 2024
• Author: HAGAY HACOHEN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The Cameri Theater, which presented Millennium Approaches last year, now makes history as the first theater offering Perestroika here, under director Gilad Kimchi

Lauded by dramaturge Alisa Solomon as a profoundly Jewish play, with its angels raising an angry fist to God, Angels in America was quickly placed within the Western canon of theater by no other than late literary critique Harold Bloom.

The show's storyline

Perestroika includes Roy Cohn (Yoav Levi) who has AIDS. His considerable pull allows him to present the disease to the world as liver cancer. Nurse Belize (Matan Onyameh) endures his racist insults and claws back.

Belize has a friend, Prior (Elad Atrakchi). Prior has visions in which an angel (Maya Landsmann) informs him that humanity must stop moving forward and that God is missing.

It is this struggle between Prior and heaven that theater scholar Yair Lipshitz suggested is a retelling of the biblical clash between Jacob and the angel. Only now the gay, diseased man fills the space of a mythical father to a yet to be born nation.

Prior's ex-partner Louis (Shoham Sheiner) left him during Millennium Approaches, after Prior was infected with HIV. Louis is a Jewish-American gay man, a fact we learn right from the start when he attends a funeral and gets a frown from Rabbi Chemelwitz (Landsmann) for having such an un-Jewish name.

Louis finds comfort in the arms of a gay Mormon, Joe...