Word: leibman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cohn is at once the play's villain and hero. Ron Leibman, in the role of his career, makes the ruthless lawyer a delinquent child, waggling his tongue, mocking his superiors, cackling as he spews abuse, playing the telephone like an organ as he hypocritically curries or grandiosely dispenses favor. Stephen Spinella as the sick, saintly queen and Joe Mantello as his unhinged lover are endlessly watchable, nakedly real. Alas, David Marshall Grant and Marcia Gay Harden are ciphers as the Mormons, he as stolid as wood and she vibrating like Jell-O; neither offers insight into the pain that...
...cracked and waiting to split open. It did -- to reveal an avenging angel that was just one of the acts of theatrical and metaphysical daring in this brilliant if roughhewn jumble of politics, fantasy and farce. The full Angels debuted memorably at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, starring Ron Leibman as Republican dealmaker Roy Cohn...
...heartfelt "son of a bitch"). But for Kushner's polemical purposes, Cohn's greatest evil was his willingness to tolerate, in fact promote, discrimination against gays even as he secretly enjoyed boundless gay sex. He is embodied with robust humor and seductive malevolence by Kushner and actor Ron Leibman, who make Cohn a villain-one- loves-to-hate, like Richard III but slipperier and funnier. In the best passage, Cohn asserts he is not a gay man at all but a heterosexual who sleeps with men. Gays, he explains, know no one and have "zero clout...