Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Judging from the popular response to the Common Era's fast-approaching 2000th birthday, the Two-Thousand-Year Old Man must marvel at how little we have changed. With only three or four years to go (depending on whom you ask) until the dawn of the next millennium, the commotion is already reaching a fever-pitch...
Clearly, the millenarian fuss is not attributable to any one thing. But one of its sources has long fascinated me: the prophecies of Nostradamus. Nowadays, every pulp television program on the millennium seems to place this enigmatic 16th century French citizen at center stage. He is touted constantly as the predictor of the Kennedy assassinations, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, AIDS and just about everything else. Finally, my curiosity compelled me to sit down and read his main work, Les Propheties...
Nostradamus does indeed seem to predict a major catastrophe on the verge of the millennium...
...subtitle Millennium Approaches refers not only to the mid-1980s setting of the play, but, more trenchantly, to an imminent judgment--divine, humane, you name it. The numerous personalities in Angels in America are all fending off the scourges of their particular moment in history: AIDS, bribery, addiction, isolation. Prior Walter (Jesse Hawkes '99) announces early in the play that he has HIV, or as he terms it, with typical flamboyant humeur, "The Foreign Lesion; I'm a Lesion-aire, Lesion-aire's disease...
Whatever the future of Millennium Approaches on film, the play is currently in the best of hands. Do not let the dopey advertisements with the Ziggy-faced Men-In-Suits keep you away; do not let anything keep you away. Enough cannot be said in praise of Kushner's play, where malignancy--both medical and personal--is more terrifying for being so unfixed, but where courage is always a choice. With this focused, challenging, inspiring production, Altman and her colleagues have made that choice