Angels in America

Widely considered to be the definitive work about the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America is a two-part, roughly eight-hour play by American playwright Tony Kushner that premiered in the early 1990s. It was originally produced as two stand-alone works that opened on Broadway in 1993 six months apart following a successful run in London. The play follows the intersecting lives of a group of people living in New York City in 1985.

Kushner has said that the idea for the play came to him in a dream in late 1985 after the death of the first person he knew personally who had AIDS. He dreamed that his friend was lying in bed dying and an angel crashed through the ceiling into the room. He wrote a long poem about the dream, which ultimately became Angels in America.

Part One: Millennium Approaches

In Part One: Millennium Approaches Prior Walter, a descendant of an old stock American family, faces the demise of his relationship with his long-term boyfriend, Louis, when Prior is diagnosed with AIDS. Louis, a rather high-strung Jewish intellectual who works as a word processor at the federal courthouse, is overwhelmed by Prior’s decline and leaves him while Prior languishes in the hospital. As his health deteriorates, Prior is stalked by supernatural occurrences that tell him to prepare to receive a visit from an angel, who has identified him as a prophet with a grave message to deliver to the rest of humanity.

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A straitlaced member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Joe Pitt is a law clerk trapped in a marriage with Harper, an anxious woman who is addicted to Valium. Joe comes to grips with his closeted homosexuality and navigates the ethical strings attached to a job offer he receives from his mentor, power-broker attorney Roy Cohn (the character is based on the real public figure). Roy might be disbarred for allegedly taking money from a client and seeks to place Joe in the U.S. Department of Justice. Roy hopes that Joe will be able to acquire leverage over the attorneys officiating his disbarment hearings and get them to make the charges disappear, a prospect that Joe finds morally repugnant. Roy is also diagnosed with AIDS, which he forcefully refuses to acknowledge, claiming instead that he has liver cancer. At the same time, he begins to be haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed as a result of Roy’s ruthless prosecution for espionage in the early 1950s.

Harper, meanwhile, experiences a variety of drug-fueled hallucinations, in which she meets and talks with Prior and is transported to Antarctica. After Joe comes out to his mother, Hannah, on the phone, she immediately sells her house in Salt Lake City, Utah, and rushes to New York City. She tries in vain to locate Harper, who disappeared after Joe came out to her as well.

Part Two: Perestroika

In Part Two: Perestroika Prior recounts the story of his first encounter with the Angel to his good friend and former lover Belize, who works as a nurse. Belize does not believe Prior’s encounter with the Angel actually happened. In a flashback, the Angel tells Prior that he must deliver a message to humankind: that it must stop moving, migrating, and progressing.

Against his will, Belize is also assigned to care for a declining Roy, who has been hospitalized. Roy has managed to get himself into an early trial for the antiretroviral drug AZT, which he hoards in a refrigerator in his hospital room. Belize seeks to get his hands on the precious drugs so he can redistribute it, as Roy’s supply is much more than he could ever need.

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Meanwhile, Joe and Louis have started an affair. But as Louis learns the extent of Joe’s conservative Republican beliefs and of his connection to Roy, he begins to withdraw from the relationship. Louis begs Prior’s forgiveness for abandoning him, but Prior does not give it.

Intrigued by Louis’s new lover, Prior and Belize go in disguise to the courthouse to spy on Joe. After meeting him, Prior becomes obsessed with following Joe, sacrificing his health to do so. After having followed Joe to the LDS visitors’ center where Hannah now volunteers, Prior collapses, and Hannah takes him to the hospital.

Louis finally breaks up with Joe after reading the conservative legal opinions Joe has written. In response to Louis’s berating him for his work and for his association with Roy, Joe punches Louis repeatedly and leaves.

Ethel appears at Roy’s bedside to deliver the news of his disbarment and to tell him that she has struggled over whether to forgive him. Disoriented, Roy addresses her as though she were his mother and begs her to sing him a song, which she reluctantly does. After first feigning his death to scare Ethel, Roy dies.

The Angel visits Prior in the hospital, angry that he has not delivered the prophecy. To make the Angel go away, Hannah suggests that Prior wrestle with the Angel as Jacob did in the Bible. After Prior defeats the Angel, a ladder descends from heaven, and Prior climbs it.

Before notifying anyone of Roy’s death, Belize brings Louis into the hospital to steal some of Roy’s AZT stash. Belize demands that Louis say the mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, to thank Roy for the expropriated medicine. Louis balks and hardly remembers the words to the prayer, but Ethel, who is still sitting with Roy’s body, helps Louis through it. After the prayer, both Ethel and Roy depart to the afterlife.

Prior ascends to heaven and demands that the group of angels he meets allow him more life, a request they grant. The play ends five years later, in 1990. Harper has left Joe and moved to San Francisco. With the help of Roy’s AZT, Prior is in much better health. Louis and Prior have reconciled but are not dating. Hannah has become friends with Belize, Louis, and Prior, and the four sit in the park and discuss the fall of the Soviet Union, the healing powers of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, and the possibilities for the world’s future.

Development

Kushner was commissioned to write Angels in America in 1988 by Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, and was funded with a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The first part of Angels in America was well into rehearsals for its world premiere as Kushner finished writing Perestroika; Millennium Approaches premiered at Eureka Theatre in 1991. Its first Broadway production had a budget of $3 million, which was the highest amount ever budgeted to a non-musical production on Broadway.

Legacy

Angels in America has received extensive critical acclaim and has been credited with catalyzing a historical shift in American theater and offering path-breaking representations of gay men and of the AIDS epidemic. Millennium Approaches won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and both parts of the original Broadway productions won Tony Awards for best play. The play has been staged professionally in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

In 2003 the play was adapted into an HBO miniseries, which starred Emma Thompson as the Angel, Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep as Hannah/Ethel Rosenberg, Justin Kirk as Walter, Jeffrey Wright as Belize, and Mary-Louise Parker as Harper. As in the play, the actors who portray the main characters each also perform several minor characters. The miniseries received 21 Emmy nominations and 11 wins, including for the performances of Pacino, Streep, Parker, and Wright.

A high-profile Broadway revival in 2018 directed by Marianne Elliot featured Andrew Garfield as Prior, Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn, and Lee Pace as Joe Pitt (both Lane and Garfield were cast members of a London revival and reprised their performances). With 11 Tony nominations, that revival of Angels in America was at the time the most nominated play in the history of the Tonys. The production won for best revival of a play, and Garfield and Lane won for their performances.

Criticism

The play has been criticized for its racial politics, which include a near-exclusive focus on white men and the extent to which the play’s two Black characters (both played by the same actor), conform to the “magical Negro” stereotype. The play has also been criticized for the lack of development of its women characters compared with their male counterparts. In the decades since the play’s debut, the play has also faced conservative backlash because of its topic and themes.