Educator's Learning Guide

-Angels in America was first workshopped in 1990, but would open at Eureka Theatre Company in May of 1991, where it would still continue today where in 2003 it appeared as a film on HBO directed by Mike Nichols carrying a cast of Al Pacino
Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright starting in the film. It would be nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe awards, where it would win 11 of the 21 nominations breaking the record held by "Roots".

"Embracing All Possibilities in Art and Life" by Frank Rich May 1993

But even as Mr. Kushner portrays an America of lies and cowardice to match Cohn's cynical view, he envisions another America of truth and beauty, the paradise imagined by both his Jewish and Mormon characters' ancestors as they made their crossing to the new land. "Angels in America" not only charts the split of its two central couples but it also implicitly sets its two gay men with AIDS against each other in a battle over their visions of the future. While the fatalistic, self-loathing Cohn ridicules gay men as political weaklings with "zero clout" doomed to defeat, the younger, equally ill Prior sees the reverse. "I am a gay man, and I am used to pressure," he says from his sick bed. "I am tough and strong." Possessed by scriptural visions he describes as "very Steven Spielberg" even when in abject pain, Prior is Mr. Kushner's prophet of hope in the midst of apocalypse.
What has really affected "Angels in America" during the months of its odyssey to New York, however, is not so much its change of directors as Washington's change of Administrations. When first seen a year or so ago, the play seemed defined by its anger at the reigning political establishment, which tended to reward the Roy Cohns and ignore the Prior Walters. Mr. Kushner has not revised the text since -- a crony of Cohn's still boasts of a Republican lock on the White House until the year 2000 -- but the shift in Washington has had the subliminal effect of making "Angels in America" seem more focused on what happens next than on the past.

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“Marching Out Of The Closet” by Frank Rich November of 1992
As a political statement, "Angels in America," a two-part, seven-hour epic subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," is nothing less than a fierce call for gay Americans to seize the strings of power in the war for tolerance and against AIDS. But this play, by turns searing and comic and elegiac, is no earthbound ideological harangue. Though set largely in New York and Washington during the Reagan-Bush 80's, "Angels in America" sweeps through locales as varied as Salt Lake City and the Kremlin, and through high-flying styles ranging from piquant camp humor to religious hallucination to the ornate poetic rage of classic drama.
When the going gets truly heavy in Part 2, Mr. Kushner must share responsibility. The writing retreats to conventionality as he sorts out the domestic conflicts of his major characters. Long debates about the Reagan ethos and the hypocrisies of gay Republicans seem unexceptional after this year's Presidential campaign. But just when "Angels in America" seems to bog down in the naturalism and polemics Mr. Kushner otherwise avoids, it gathers itself up for a stirring cosmic denouement in which Mr. Spinella's Prior, having passed through a spiritual heaven and five years of physical hell, addresses the audience directly from the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Envisioning a new age of universal perestroika in which "the world only spins forward," Prior foretells a future in which "this disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all," in which "we will not die secret deaths anymore," in which love and "more life" will be the destiny of "each and every one."

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Past Productions

Mark Taper Forum

Los Angeles, CA October 1992

Director: Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone
Sets: John Conklin, Lights: Pat Collins, Costumes: Gabriel Berry, and music by Mel Marvin

Walter Kerr Theatre

New York City, NY April 1993

Director: George C. Wolfe
Sets: Robin Wagner, Lights: Julie Fisher, Costumes: Toni-Leslie James


Boston Works Theater

Boston, MA Jan 18 - Feb 10, 2008

Director: Jason Southerland and Nancy Curran Willis


Citizens' Theatre

Glasgow, UK May 1- 2, 2007

Director: David Kramer
Sets: Soutra Gilmour; Costumes: Mark Bouman; Lighting: Charles Balfour; Sound, Carolyn Downing


The Hypocrities, Bailiwick Repertory Theatre

Chicago, IL Through May 7, 2008 with Part II on April 8, 2008

Director: Sean Graney
Lights: Jared Moore, Designed: Michael Griggs & Mikhail Fiksel