The caveat is that while Society Hill Playhouse's Red Room offers a welcome degree of intimacy unusual for a work of this scale, it's a really terrible space. Multiple seats with obstructed sight lines force director Andrew Borthwick-Leslie to turn the actors' backs toward half the audience half the time. The Angel's initial showstopping appearance stops the show only because she has to be hooked up to clumsy rigging in full view. The Red Room undeniably makes an audience work hard to reap this show's rewards. But is it worth the effort? Well, as Prior (fine, fey G DeCandia), Angels' AIDS-stricken, unwilling prophet, tells his ex-lover Louis (an endearingly neurotic Brendan Norton): "It doesn't count if it's easy."

Angels in America was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Part 1: Millennium Approaches in 1993 and consecutive Tony Awards for best play for Part 1 in 1993 and Part 2: Perestroika in 1994, and has earned its rightful place in the pantheon of great American plays. As a Reagan-era period piece, it surveys gender, sexuality, race, power, love, loss, religion, capitalism, communism, nuclear jitters, and plain old power politics, using the specter of HIV as its humanizing lens. As theater, it's funny, smart, and moving, and somehow makes a glorious tapestry from the tangled threads of its many themes.

But let's get back to those performances. BorthwickLeslie uses an admirable amount of restraint with his actors, and the result is an ensemble that almost universally underplays its characterizations. Thus, James Ijames' Belize isn't a flaming queen in nurse drag, but rather a finely shaded gay black man who supports his white friends while carefully protecting the facets of his own identity. Paul Felder's Joe - a married, closeted Mormon Republican lawyer - is as internally taut as wife Harper (Kate Brennan) is outwardly slack. Felder reels Joe in and out of control with calculated finesse, a gentle plea exploding into violence without warning, and dissipating just as quickly. Conversely, Brennan gives lost, nomadic Harper an internal fortitude that keeps her far outside the realm of pity: She might talk crazy, but there's a solidity to her voice that never wavers.

The exception to this subtly modulated cast is Michael Byrne, tearing into the role of Roy Cohn - Joseph McCarthy's right-hand-man, who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and served as attorney for the likes of Donald Trump and John Gotti - like he's a steak, cooked rare-to-bleeding. Byrne starts at the top of the performance register, honking with a nasal New Yawka snarl, slamming telephones and cursing colleagues with equal relish. So where to go from there? Slowly, as the ravages of AIDS advance, he recedes. Still spraying fire, Byrne never softens; his eruptions just become less predictable.

As Maine repeals its gay-marriage law and President Obama moves the health-care bill over to the Senate, it's clear Angels in America's issues are still relevant. As Bckseet's production proves, even under less-than-ideal circumstances, there's just no substitute for live theater.