By Tony Kushner. Directed by Kim Collier. Produced by the Arts Club Theatre Company. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, March 29. Continues until April 23

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is the most influential American play of the past 30 years.

Not only was it an essential voice for the AIDS crisis and gay rights, it revived a moribund Broadway theatre scene and redrew the boundaries of what was possible in contemporary drama. A thousand lesser plays have imitated its brash style and audacious scope.

The play defies tidy summation, but there are three couples at its heart. It’s 1985, and Joe (Craig Erickson) and his wife Harper (Celine Stubel) are Mormons living in a prehipster Brooklyn. Joe is deeply closeted, and Harper nurses his unspoken secret with valium-powered hallucinations. Professionally, Joe is being recruited by the Machiavellian Roy Cohn (Brian Markinson), who has “helped make presidents and unmake them". Law clerk Louis (Ryan Beil) and his boyfriend Prior (Damien Atkins) are the third couple, but they’re actually a trio. Prior has AIDS, and his sickness throws their relationship off-kilter.

Atkins is the standout amid a reliable, well-rehearsed ensemble. He understands that Prior refuses to be defined or confined by his illness, and yet shows a striking vulnerability when confronting his own mortality.

This is only Part One of the theatrical epic. Subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”, tonight’s show was Millennium Approaches, while Part Two, Perestroika, comes to the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre this fall.

Directing Angels in America is, like playing Sergei Rachmaninoff or attempting a quad-triple combination, high-risk and high-reward. Eight actors play 20 characters on a set that must accommodate everywhere from an abandoned lot in the South Bronx to an imaginary Antarctic snowscape. It’s a dense and shaggy script, full of complex ideas and themes. There are angels.

Director Kim Collier sticks the landing, maintaining a sprightly pace that almost made me forget the play’s three-hour length. Its constant shifts between the visceral and the mythic can be dizzying, but Collier keeps the audience on solid ground.

I was perplexed by Collier’s decision to cast Craig Erickson in the role of Joe. Joe is a young lawyer, clerking for a judge. Cohn refers to him as “my pretty young punk friend". Erickson does an admirable job in the role, but he’s in his mid-40s. The character of Joe seems much closer to 25 than 45. It wasn’t apparent why Collier chose to make Joe just 10 years younger than the manipulative Cohn.

Ken MacKenzie’s set, with its five towering columns in front of steep, marbled steps, suggests a Roman senate. Or maybe a Roman bathhouse. Practically speaking, it echoes the courthouse where Joe works, the park where Louis cruises, and maybe even Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, which is a setting in Perestroika. It’s also efficiently modular, full of hidden panels and trap doors to accommodate the play’s many locations.

Collier uses the set as a backdrop for a peculiar addition she makes to the play. In a few scenes, actors carry very modern cameras on-stage and point them at their fellow performers. Their live closeup images are projected across the back of the set. While this aligns with the play’s porous relationship with the theatrical fourth wall, it felt more distracting than additive.

I first saw Angels 21 years ago, as a 21-year-old. With its on-stage nudity, simulated sex, and frank talk of gay love and AIDS, it was the most transgressive play I’d ever seen. Today, it still feels relevant, but for different reasons. It’s Roy Cohn’s manipulation of American presidents and Louis and Prior’s debate about identity politics that resonates.

In his introduction to a recent edition of the play, Kushner writes, “I’ve always written, perched on the knife’s edge of terror and hope.” This is also how we watch his masterwork.