Angels in America
Subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and it earns every word. AIDS, Mormonism, Roy Cohn, angels crashing through ceilings: Kushner wrote the great American epic play of the late twentieth century. It runs seven hours across two parts and never drags. The play insists that history hurts but progress is real.
On the cold page, without a director supplying pacing and sound cues, the overlapping dialogue and rapid scene-cutting go flat fast, and even fans concede Perestroika, the second part, sags compared to Millennium Approaches: one reader calls it “still too meandering and arduous.” Detractors argue the allegory gets laid on thick, characters standing in for abstractions like Death or the Individual, and one puts it sharply, “every heavy-handed symbol is announced by a klaxon.” Some readers finish the acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning text simply lost, writing “I neither enjoyed this play nor understood it,” while a critic dismisses the whole project as an “overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess.” The political targets, closeted Mormon Republicanism chief among them, strike unimpressed readers as broad rather than sharp.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
