In the second scene of the second act of “Perestroika,” the concluding play of Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America, an angel appears to Prior Walter, a young man dying of AIDS, and informs him that he is the prophet chosen to receive this divine message: Human progress must stop lest reality itself unravel. “Before life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible,” she tells him, “it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”
In 1996, a 15-year-old Matt Cosper sat in the audience of the Booth Theater, watching the Charlotte Repertory Theatre’s production. It was a revelation that opened his eyes to the possibilities of theater that was simultaneously political and emotional and absurd, and it sent him down the road to directing plays and co-founding the XOXO theater company. “In some ways,” he says 28 years later, “I’m a little mad about it, because I was just the right age to see that and think that Charlotte would be a good place to try to make a life in professional theater, and that stuck with me well into the years where I should have known better.”
That production marked more than a creative watershed for Cosper. Despite the good intentions of its creators, it proved to be a body blow to the Charlotte creative scene, one that local theater and film is still recovering from. So Cosper has another way of remembering that evening: “It’s weird when you can point to the moment that doomed a city’s art culture.”
To understand how Angels transformed Charlotte, it helps to know at least a little about the play—even if its seven and a half hours (divided into “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”) defy easy summary. Subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” it centers on the AIDS epidemic and queer identity. But its major themes include Jewish tradition, mental illness, Mormonism, forgiveness, and the state of American conservative politics. One of its eight lead roles was Roy Cohn, the closeted and rabidly right-wing attack-dog lawyer who died of AIDS, not yet famous for being the consigliere who molded a young Donald Trump.
While Angels in America addresses tragic and epochal topics, it’s also thrilling and extremely funny. It debuted on Broadway in 1993 to general acclaim, plus multiple Tony Awards and a Pulitzer for Kushner. The 1994-95 national tour skipped Charlotte because a local theater company, the Charlotte Repertory Theatre, had passionately lobbied the producers for the rights to mount a local production. It became one of only six regional companies granted permission in the U.S.; Director Steve Umberger (also artistic director of the Charlotte Rep) and Charlotte Rep Producer and Managing Director Keith Martin proceeded with a massive $215,000 budget.
Two weeks before opening night in March 1996, the show found itself in a maelstrom of controversy. The Rev. Joseph Chambers, of Paw Creek Ministries and the lobbying group Concerned Charlotteans, who had previously campaigned against Barney & Friends (“clearly occultic”) and The Lion King (“voodooism”), turned his attention to Angels. “This is a play filled with vulgarity, filled with explicit scenes, filled with unsafe sex,” he claimed in The New York Times. He faxed the City Council, asking for a roll call vote to see who supported it.
Counter-protesters outnumbered protesters outside the Booth Playhouse at Blumenthal Performing Arts Center before the first preview in March 1996. Courtesy, Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Other than the play being pervaded by gay characters and themes, the flashpoint was a seven-second sequence where the AIDS patient/prophet—Prior Walter, played by Alan Poindexter—was nude. It was full-frontal, but it wasn’t a sex scene: He was undergoing a medical examination, and a nurse counted the number of Kaposi Sarcoma marks on his body. “You’re supposed to get compassion for someone who’s covered in lesions,” complains local fabric designer Wesley Mancini. “The religious right said everything gay-related is all about sex. Meanwhile, two blocks away from the theater, there were two topless bars.”
District Attorney Peter S. Gilchrist III threatened prosecution for indecent exposure, and the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center enjoined the production from proceeding unless the scene was modified. The producers instead got a judge’s restraining order just before 5 p.m. on opening night that prevented anyone from shutting down the show. They served notice to everyone from the Police Department to the Alcohol and Beverage Control board before the curtain rose at 7:30 p.m. Chambers and his followers picketed the opening, but their 15 protesters were outnumbered roughly 10-to-1 by counter-protesters who supported the play.
The following day’s front-page article in The Charlotte Observer about the play included reporting by Tommy Tomlinson (now a commentator for WFAE). “That might have been my weirdest assignment ever,” Tomlinson says. “I was sent to opening night just to make sure the lead actor did, in fact, go full-frontal. As soon as that happened, I hustled to the office to write it up. Saw the dick, left the theater.”
Playwright Kushner flew down to Charlotte in support of the production. In the 2018 book The World Spins Only Forward, authors Isaac Butler and Dan Kois quote him: “They stopped the plane on the runway, and suddenly all these policemen came on, and the stewardess asked if I was me, and they helped me off the plane because they were worried about a death threat or something. It was nonsense, but it was exciting.”
The cast. Front row: Mary Lucy Bivins and Alan Poindexter. Middle row: Tamara Scott, Graham Smith, and Barbi Van Schaick. Back row: Angus MacLachlan, Kevin R. Free, and Scott Helm. Courtesy, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Scott Helm, who played the Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt in the 1996 production, says he was only vaguely aware of the show’s legal travails. He credits Umberger for shielding the cast and letting them focus on their work. He remembers how his mother-in-law discomfited Poindexter: Because she had macular degeneration of her vision, she sat in the front row with opera glasses. After Poindexter’s nude scene, he says, the actor came offstage and complained, “There is a woman looking at me with binoculars!”
The show had a monthlong, sold-out run. Kevin R. Free, who played the nurse Belize, recalls one of his favorite scenes: When his character asks Louis (the former lover of Prior Walter, who has abandoned him because of his illness) to say kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) over the body of Roy Cohn, he does it with help from the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who Cohn helped send to the electric chair. “To be the moral center of the play,” Free explains, “and then to be tasked with forgiveness, that was important to me.”
That message of reconciliation and understanding could have been the final word—but it wasn’t. The following year, the Charlotte Rep mounted a production of John Guare’s acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation—not a work about homosexuality the way that Angels in America was, but one with a central gay character. The Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners then took up the issue of defunding the Charlotte Rep. After a contentious meeting that lasted six hours, they slashed more than $2 million from the budget of the Arts & Science Council, which had used that money to fund more than 30 cultural institutions in Charlotte, from the symphony to children’s theater to the Charlotte Rep.
Democrats had a 5-4 majority on the board. But one Democrat, Hoyle Martin, sided with the four Republicans in favor of cutting the ASC budget, saying his religion had taught him that homosexuality was a sin. His voting bloc was dubbed the “Gang of Five.” Before the vote, Commissioner Parks Helms, who knew he was about to lose, said, “Please watch us and please forgive us for what we are about to do.”
After the 1998 elections, most of the Gang of Five was gone and the ASC funding restored, but the damage was done. Charlotte liked to envision itself as a cosmopolitan exemplar of the New South, but the whole episode made clear that it was still hemmed in by Bible Belt morality and banking-town conservatism. Free objects, “You can’t bill yourself as the New South if you’re not taking on new experiences!”
“It was overt citywide prejudice,” Mancini says. “Any kind of gay parade was always picketed by religious people calling names.” Seeing the growing hostility to gay people, Mancini started a foundation to advocate for freedom of speech, LGBTQ artists, and other causes.
In the post-Angels environment, many arts institutions steered clear of programming that could run afoul of the town’s bluenoses. In 1999, the Charlotte City Council started investigating the nationally renowned Charlotte Film & Video Festival because of gay content in its programming. Its sponsoring organization, the Mint Museum, responded by cutting ties with the festival (and its director, Robert West). The festival soon disappeared.
By 2002, both Umberger and Martin were gone from their leadership roles at Charlotte Rep. They weren’t fired because of Angels, but the contretemps had made it harder for them to do their jobs. The company announced that its priority was winning a regional Tony in the next five years—it did not happen—and hired new leadership from New York in pursuit of that goal.
The theater staggered on for three years, and deficits grew steadily larger. A production of The Miracle Worker starring Hilary Swank, sponsored by New York producers as an out-of-town tryout, failed to make it to Broadway. In 2005, the Charlotte Rep abruptly shut down. “We had just started the first or second rehearsal for Private Lives,” Helm says. “We were told to go home.”
Audrey Brown, who frequently worked as a stage manager at Charlotte Rep, remembers getting the death notice after the Rep’s long decline: “It was sad, and it was shocking, but not too shocking and not too sad. Except now there’s nowhere to work in Charlotte, so I have to work out of town.”
The Charlotte Rep had been founded by Umberger in 1976, when the troupe was called Actors Contemporary Ensemble. In the 1980s, it started working with Actors’ Equity, the professional union. (Free, a North Carolina native, had moved to New York City, but he returned to Charlotte for Angels in America because the Rep could offer him an Equity contract.) In the 1990s, it gained official LORT status, meaning that the League of Resident Theatres recognized it as a viable regional theater.
Only two years before it went under, the Rep moved into an 18,000-square-foot facility in NoDa. The company had ups and downs over its four-decade run, but it represented the promise that Charlotte could support a significant theater, akin to the Goodman in Chicago or the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and that actors and technicians could make their living in North Carolina. It doesn’t diminish the achievements of local troupes like XOXO, PaperHouse, and Three Bone Theatre to observe that they’re not LORTs that can anchor an artistic community.
“It’s weird when you can point to the moment that doomed a city’s art culture.” – Matt Cosper, co-founder of the XOXO theater company. Photo by Herman Nicholson
For years after Angels, Charlotte arts funding operated on what Cosper calls the punitive principle of, “We don’t like your gay commie art, so we’re not going to fund it.” Although that no longer seems to be the case, the city retains its antipathy to arts funding in general.
Joan Zimmerman, who was the chair of the Convention & Visitors Bureau between 1984 and 1992, was instrumental in getting a hotel-motel tax (now called an occupancy tax) enacted in Charlotte. She had assumed that a significant amount of the revenue would be spent on the arts to attract visitors to Charlotte—only to discover that city officials wanted most of it to support pro sports. “I was personally disappointed,” she reflects, “but who’s to say they were wrong?”
The Arts & Science Council was designed to keep the City Council a safe distance from individual funding decisions—but as the Angels fallout demonstrated, no distance was safe. “The money that’s available is soaked up by the ASC, and they become the arbiter of what’s OK for people to see,” Helm complains. Recently, however, the ASC has cut back on sponsoring larger institutions in favor of grassroots support for individual artists.
“If I’m honest,” Helm says, “Angels was a high-mark moment in Charlotte theater, and it went downhill from there.”
Not everyone thinks Angels heralded the current state of Charlotte theater. Matt Olin, the Charlotte Is Creative co-founder who had a brief tenure as the managing director of the Charlotte Rep, believes Angels is ancient history. “It’s been a circuitous journey,” he says, “but I think the current commitment of arts funding from the city and the county is an amazing step in the right direction.”
Free, a Greensboro native who’s now the artistic director of the Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, New Jersey, points out that regional theater has huge challenges nationwide. “The pandemic ruined everything,” he summarizes. Subscriptions are down all over. There’s tension between audiences who want escapism and funders who want social awareness. Social and economic changes in the past four decades have left many people questioning the value of any governmental support for the arts at all. In addition, Charlotte, unlike some other cities, lacks a strong tradition of individual donors supporting favorite arts institutions. That makes those organizations more vulnerable to the whims of corporations and government boards.
Those challenges are real; Charlotte’s willful erasure of some of its leading cultural institutions a generation ago makes it that much harder to overcome them. The counterweight: The city keeps growing and is large and sophisticated enough to support professional theater beyond touring national companies—if that’s what it wants.
By the end of the play, Prior Walter has confronted the heavenly host, told an assembly of angels that he wants more life, and informed them that their demand for an end to human progress is impossible. He closes the play by addressing the audience, informing them that they “are fabulous creatures, each and every one,” and reminding them of a fundamental truth: “The world only spins forward.”
Gavin Edwards, a contributing editor, saw Angels in America in its entirety in New York City on New Year’s Eve 1993.
