Entertainment

Complex characters help ‘Angels’ take wing

Nearly two decades after it opened on Broadway — and seven years after the HBO miniseries with Al Pacino and Meryl Streep — Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is considered a modern American classic. And it is, no doubt about that.

But the work’s delirious genius shines through only intermittently in the uneven off-Broadway revival that opened last night.

Made up of two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” this epic play careers between quasi-documentary naturalism and hallucinatory dreamscapes to explore the intersection of the personal and the political.

Needless to say, it’s a bitch to stage.

We’re in 1985, the age of Reagan and AIDS, when we meet two couples. One is made up of a closeted Mormon lawyer, Joe Pitt (Bill Heck), and his pill-popping wife, Harper (Zoe Kazan). The other is word-processor Louis Ironson (Zachary Quinto, Spock from the “Star Trek” reboot) and his WASP boyfriend, Prior Walter (Christian Borle).

In these unsettled times, chance and necessity create odd connections.

Louis — a verbose, liberal Jew better at great ideas than small mercies — abandons the AIDS-stricken Prior and ends up bedding Joe. The Mormon’s strait-laced mother, Hannah (Robin Bartlett), visiting from Salt Lake City, unexpectedly proves kinder to Prior than his cowardly lover.

Meanwhile, fact and fiction rub elbows when a nurse called Belize (Billy Porter) looks after a pair of very different AIDS patients: Prior, engulfed in mystical visions, and the real-life destructive lawyer Roy Cohn (Frank Wood).

What elevates “Angels in America” is its outsize, erudite ambition, which is accompanied by deliberately abrupt mood and stylistic swings — from rage to tenderness, from screed to aria.

Director Michael Greif smoothly handles the tricky set changes, but while he and his cast are fine with intimacy, they tend to fall short when things get cosmic.

Quinto and Porter fare best, crafting perceptive portraits of complicated men. The first, fully committed to his part, avoids sweetening his unsympathetic character, while the second beautifully underplays Belize, who can be a finger snap away from mannered.

On the other hand, Borle lacks the necessary angry charisma, and Wood seems to willfully hold back — his Cohn is never as poisonously nasty as he needs to be. Kazan opens her eyes wide and scrunches up her face whenever she needs to express trouble.

This imbalance makes the show feel disjointed, and some of the key scenes underwhelm.

“Angels in America” is an apocalyptic play, drenched in End Times anxiety. Aside from some isolated instances — Kushner’s writing has an irresistible pull — the Signature production offers more of a Y2K frisson.

elisabeth.vincentelli@nypost.com