CJ 222: News Reporting & Writing
Play personal for UWEC professor
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See the expanded, newspaper-style story
Reading a plot summary of Angels in America may help viewers understand the production.
Brown has a professional website that details his acting and directing.
The Eau Claire Theater Department webpage lists upcoming productions.
By Laura Szymanski
CJ 222 News Reporting & Writing student
Monday, Dec. 6, 2010
Listen to the audio version of this story as you read the script here:
 F. Reed Brown works with the cast and crew of Angels in America. |
Angels really will be in Eau Claire this Christmas.
Brown... a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire theater professor…along with his cast and crew will perform their rendition of Tony Kushner’s [KUSH-ner] Angels in America on Dec. 2.
Brown is an actor… director… producer and choreographer who came to the university about two years ago.
Aaron Sluggs, one of Brown’s actors says that this play has personal value to Brown. While living in New York Brown worked as a dancer in a traveling production group. He was the only heterosexual male dancer in the production. Brown spent his free time with the homosexual male dancers and got to know them well. A year after he left the production Brown was the only male dancer still living. Sluggs says that the others died from AIDs.
Although Angels in America focuses on the AIDs epidemic that exploded in the 1980s… Brown argues that this play should not shock viewers.
F. REED BROWN, SOT: (“I don’t think of it as a controversial piece and it surprises me when it is perceived that way.”) runs: 7.5
Instead…Brown places this production in the American canon of theater.
The university’s theater department’s website of current productions listed Angels in America with a disclaimer. Assistant stage manager Marissa Aprill realizes the challenge of advertising for this play.
MARISSA APRILL, SOT: (“We definitely have to stress that it’s a ‘Gay Fantasia on National Themes.’ It’s not a Christmas pageant.”) runs: 7.5
Although the cast and crew expect mixed responses from the audience… they say they are optimistic and hope that the audience will also be able to find personal meaning in the play, says Aprill.