Facts: Basics

TITLE: ANGELS OF AMERICA

AUTHOR: Tony Kushner

LANGUAGE/TRANSLATOR: English and some French
YEAR OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Written and workshopped in 1989-1990, Premiere in 1991, but published in 1992.

GENRE/LENGTH/STRUCTURE: Political drama (preoccupied with themes of democracy, community and personal responsibility)/Three Acts within scenes

AGENCY CONTROLLING LICENSE: The Gersh Agency

ROYALTY FEE: Will be there next week by Kandice

CAST BREAKDOWN: 21 Characters- 8 actors- 5 male, 3 female and double casting if possible

TIME AND SETTING: October-November 1985-January 1986 New York City with a few scenes in Salt Lake City, Moscow and an airliner flying to San Francisco, along with others in Heaven, Hell, dream sequences and places imagined by the characters.

BRIEF BIO OF AUTHOR:
Born in Manhattan in July 16, 1956, Tony Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana where his family moved after inheriting a lumber business. He earned a bachelors degree from Columbia University and later did postgraduate work at New York University. In the early 1980s, he founded a theater group and began writing and producing plays. In the early 1990s, he scored a monster hit with the epic, seven-hour, two-part, Broadway blockbuster Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes which earned for Kushner a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, two Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Liberty Award for Drama. This groundbreaking play focuses on three households in turmoil: a gay couple, one of whom has AIDS; a Morman man coming to terms with his sexuality; and the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, a historical figure who died of AIDS in 1986, denying his homosexuality all the way to his deathbed. NEWSWEEK wrote of Angels in America:
"Daring and Dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least the absconding of God."
Kushner has also written A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs! (from material not used in Angels in America), as well as several adaptations including Goethe's Stella, Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, Corneille's the Illusion, and S. Ansky's The Dybbuk. His work has been produced at the Mark Taper Forum, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Hartford Stage Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Los Angeles Theatre Center as well as theatres in over 30 countries across the globe. He is the recipient of a 1990 Whiting Foundation Writers Award and playwriting and directing fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Kushner is currently an adjunct faculty member of New York University's Dramatic Writing program.
www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc51.html

Plot Summary
Angels in America focuses on the stories of two troubled couples, one gay, one straight: "word processor" Louis Ironson and his lover Prior Walter , and Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt and his wife Harper . After the funeral of Louis's grandmother, Prior tells him that he has contracted AIDS, and Louis panics. He tries to care for Prior but soon realizes he cannot stand the strain and fear. Meanwhile, Joe is offered a job in the Justice Department by Roy Cohn , his right-wing, bigoted mentor and friend. But Harper, who is addicted to Valium and suffers anxiety and hallucinations, does not want to move to Washington. The two couples' fates quickly become intertwined: Joe stumbles upon Louis crying in the bathroom of the courthouse where he works, and they strike up an unlikely friendship based in part on Louis's suspicion that Joe is gay. Harper and Prior also meet, in a fantastical mutual dream sequence in which Prior, operating on the "threshold of revelation," reveals to Harper that her husband is a closeted homosexual. Harper confronts Joe, who denies it but says he has struggled inwardly with the issue. Roy receives a different kind of surprise: At an appointment with his doctor Henry , he learns that he too has been diagnosed with AIDS. But Roy, who considers gay men weak and ineffectual, thunders that he has nothing in common with them—AIDS is a disease of homosexuals, whereas he has "liver cancer." Henry, disgusted, urges him to use his clout to obtain an experimental AIDS drug.
http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/angels/summary.html