‘Angels in America’ is back in fresh, provocative, exhilarating form

And we only want more, of the sort Kushner supplies in the concluding half, “Perestroika,” which Arena has yet to schedule. Part 1 of the playwright’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Gay Fantasia” leaves us hanging not only because, as the Angel informs us in her parting words, the great work is about to begin, but also because the great work has already begun, in a revival of “Millennium Approaches” that does justice to all of the emotional, dialectical and philosophical threads of the play.

“Angels in America,” first performed more than 30 years ago (if you can believe it), has as its own starting point 1985, when the AIDS epidemic was raging, and a Republican administration failed miserably at confronting it. (Sound familiar?) It unfolds in the collision of seven disparate figures (plus Billie Krishawn’s Angel) who interconnect over matters political, medical, romantic — and most malignantly, through the machinations of one of them, lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Edward Gero to the toxic T.

Szasz, a Hungarian stage and film director, does not so much bend the play to his will — as one might expect this noted experimentalist to do — as find a thoroughly arresting framework for its subplots and digressions. Onto Maruti Evans’s doughnut-shaped set on the Fichandler Stage, the largest of Arena’s spaces, Szasz has poured many thousands of pounds of fine sand, and keeps pouring: At various moments in the drama, sand rains down through holes in a loose plastic sheet that covers the ceiling.

The ordeals of Kushner’s characters play out in Szasz’s sandbox — the sands of time, it seems, intimations of the mortality that asserts itself harrowingly in the performance of Westrate’s Prior Walter, a gay man afflicted with the literal markers of AIDS, the lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma. It’s through Prior’s torment that the playwright channels his righteous anger over the government’s repeated failures to respond to the crisis. And in the denial of their sexuality by two of the play’s other gay men, Cohn and Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt (a bracingly conflicted John Austin), a case is made for how easily society turned its back on the first generation of AIDS patients.

If you’re seeking the contemporary relevance of a play birthed in 1991, look no further than how politicized the coronavirus pandemic has been made. As opposed, though, to Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” another great drama of the AIDS crisis that surgically took apart the policy failures, “Angels” is a postmortem on America’s dark soul. Through a hole in the circular set, an elevator rises with various set pieces, and most notably, the hospital bed on which Prior writhes in agony, and where he’s nursed by Justin Weaks’s marvelous Belize. (The office of Cohn, one of two characters based on real people — the other being Susan Rome’s hilariously vindictive Ethel Rosenberg — also materializes via the hydraulics.)

Prior’s suffering is the spiritual core of “Angels.” It has a hallowed (and haloed) quality, as if it had first been described in an illuminated manuscript. His fever dreams trigger one of the play’s illusory sequences, in which his ancestors, also named Prior Walter and played by the other principal actors, recount their own fates: It’s quite possible that Westrate’s Prior is the end of an ancient line. In scenes like these, costume designer Oana Botez really gets to show her range: Her fanciful get-ups truly are the stuff that dreams are made on. In this surreal sandscape, too, Joe’s frustrated, pill-popping wife, Harper (Deborah Ann Woll), finds medicated solace with a creature of her imagination, Mr. Lies (Weaks again), the ethereal travel agent from another dimension.

The hopscotching back and forth across the borders of reality might trip up some theatergoers, but the leaps into altered states that Kushner executes are what makes “Angels in America” so breathtaking. To satisfy an audience’s craving for meatier emotionality, there are melodramas embedded in this fantasia, too. Prior’s lover Louis — here played smashingly by Michael Kevin Darnall and physically resembling Kushner himself — is our touchstone for the feeling of failure anyone might experience in not being the best version of oneself.

In Westrate and Darnall’s scenes together, Kushner reserves some of his harshest judgment for Louis, who evinces selfish terror at the thought of watching Prior die, at the very moment that Prior needs him most. Similarly, Austin’s sexually confused Joe is incapable of filling the void in the damaged psyche of his wife, Woll’s deeply affecting Harper. Divine intervention may be the last resort for any of the play’s broken alliances.

Remarkably, Kushner’s augury of a world coming apart holds true three decades later, including his prognostications about the dangers of climate change and the radical partisanship of the judiciary. Even the evocations of drag, in costumes that Botez creates for Prior and Belize, feel as if they were minted yesterday. Indeed, Szasz and his superb cast tackle “Angels” as if it is a freshly uncovered text. That there’s so much more to say about this production may be the best thing about it that can be said.

Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, by Tony Kushner. Directed by Janos Szasz. Set, Maruti Evans; costumes, Oana Botez; lighting, Christopher Akerlind; music and sound, Fabian Obispo. About 3½ hours. Through April 23 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. arenastage.org.