Angels in America

Angels in America (1993) a drama in two plays by Tony Kushner. [Walter Kerr Theatre, Part I: 367 perf.; Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award; Part II: 216 perf; Tony Award.] This ambitious panorama of America during the age of AIDS took two long full‐length plays to tell its sweeping and often surreal story. In Millennium Approaches, HIV patient Prior Walter ( Stephen Spinella) loses his male lover, the Jewish activist Louis ( Joe Mantello), to the conservative Joe Pitt ( David Marshall Grant), a Mormon lawyer who works for the bombastic and infamous legal whiz Roy Cohn ( Ron Leibman). Joe refuses to leave his mentally unstable wife Harper ( Marcia Gay Harden) but confesses his homosexuality to his mother, the unsentimental Mormon Hannah ( Kathleen Chalfant) who leaves Salt Lake City to talk some sense to her Manhattan‐based son. As the play builds, various characters experience visions: the drugged Harper converses with Mr. Lies ( Jeffrey Wright), Cohn berates the Jewish “spy” Ethel Rosenberg (Chalfant) whom he helped execute decades before, and Prior sees an angel ( Ellen McLaughlin) break through the ceiling of his bedroom and announce the coming of a new age. Part II, called Perestroika, followed the various relationships that develop between these varied characters, such as the torrid romance between Louis and Joe and the unlikely friendship between Hannah and Prior. Cohn, a closet gay though he vehemently denies it, is dying of AIDS and bribes the drag queen‐turned‐male‐nurse Belize (Wright) to get him the rare drug AZT. But he dies (as Ethel Rosenberg looks on) and Belize uses the drug to (temporarily) save Prior. Louis leaves Joe when he discovers his politics, and years later the survivors gather to reflect on the end of the cold war and the arrival of a new century. The lengthy saga, which had been produced first in London and at the Mark Taper Forum, was highly praised by the press, Jack Kroll in Newsweek calling it “the broadest, deepest and most searching American play of our time.” Yet Angels in America was not a financial success on Broadway. Part II opened at the Walter Kerr five months after the first part premiered, the two halves playing in repertory for ten unprofitable months. Tony KUSHNER (b. 1958), a native New Yorker who grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, was educated at Columbia and New York University and began writing plays in the 1980s. His other works include A Bright Room Called Day (1991), Slavs! (1994), adaptations of Corneille's The Illusion (1988) and The Dybbuk (1995), and Homebody/Kabul (2001).