That Kushner unapologetically presented homosexuality not as a dramatic problem but as a normal part of the human condition was by no means the only thing that sets Angels apart from its predecessors. Part of what makes this question hard to answer is that Angels is unlike any other American play previously thought to be of enduring value. The question that arises from the revival is this: Is Angels in America really the masterpiece that nearly everyone quoted in The World Only Spins Forward believes it to be? Does it measure up to such American classics as The Glass Menagerie and Long Day’s Journey into Night? Or might it best be understood less as a living work of art than as a document of its fast-receding historical moment? Its immediate success was in part a result of its then-salient subject matter, the AIDS crisis, as well as the unprecedented frankness with which Kushner portrayed gay life (and sex) on stage. One of them, Ben Brantley of the New York Times, observes with only minor exaggeration that “ Angels brought theater back into the national conversation.” So it did, if only for a time. The inception and reception of Angels have been chronicled in The World Only Spins Forward, a book-length oral history compiled by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois.* Based on interviews with 250 people who took part in or saw its early productions, it documents the impact that Angels had on its first viewers.
Now it has returned to Broadway in a production from the National Theatre in London, where it was greeted with near-universal acclaim, much of it from critics who were not yet born when the real-life events depicted by Kushner took place. Taken together, the two parts of Angels in America-running seven-and-a-half hours in all-were widely thought to constitute the most important American play of the late 20th century. It brought Kushner a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony, and that Tony was followed by another when its second half, Angels in America: Perestroika, opened six months later.
When Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway a quarter-century ago, it became the most talked-about theatrical event of its day.
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