Angels in America by Tony Kushner — Analysis
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991–1992) by Tony Kushner is the most ambitious American play of the late twentieth century. It is a two-part epic — Millennium Approaches and Perestroika — that runs nearly seven hours in performance. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Tony Awards for Best Play. It is about AIDS, politics, religion, sexuality, and the future of America. It mixes realism with fantasy, farce with tragedy, and polemic with poetry.
The play is set in New York City in the mid-1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Ronald Reagan is president. The gay community is being decimated by a disease the government refuses to acknowledge. The play follows a group of interconnected characters — gay men, their lovers, their mothers, their lawyers, and a Mormon couple — as they struggle with love, loss, and the possibility of change.
The Characters
Prior Walter is a gay man with AIDS. He is the play’s central figure — the one who receives the visit from the angel that gives the play its title. Prior is witty, courageous, and terrified. His body is failing, but his spirit refuses to break. He is visited by an angel who tells him he is a prophet, chosen to stop the forward motion of history. Prior rejects this prophecy. He wants to live, not to be a symbol.
Louis Ironson is Prior’s lover, who cannot handle the pressure of Prior’s illness and abandons him. Louis is intellectual, guilt-ridden, and self-absorbed. He is Jewish, politically progressive, and incapable of the kind of commitment that Prior needs. His abandonment of Prior is the play’s central betrayal, and his attempts to justify it are the play’s most uncomfortable scenes.
Joe Pitt is a Mormon Republican lawyer who works for the Justice Department. He is gay and deeply closeted, married to a woman he loves but cannot desire. He represents the conservative forces that are destroying gay lives while being himself a gay man. His journey — from the closet to a tentative self-acceptance — is one of the play’s most hopeful threads.
Harper Pitt is Joe’s wife, an agoraphobic Valium addict. She hallucinates journeys to Antarctica and conversations with imaginary friends. Her fantasies are escapes from a reality she cannot bear. She is one of the play’s most sympathetic characters — trapped in a marriage to a man who cannot love her the way she needs.
Roy Cohn is the real-life lawyer and political fixer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. In the play, he is a monster and a force of nature. He has AIDS but refuses to call it that — he insists he has “liver cancer” because AIDS is a disease of homosexuals, and Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. He is a heterosexual man who fucks men. Roy represents power without conscience, and his death is one of the play’s most extraordinary scenes.
Belize is Prior’s friend and former lover, a Black gay man and former drag queen who works as a nurse. He is the play’s moral center — wise, compassionate, and fierce. He nurses Prior, and later Roy Cohn, with the same professional detachment. He delivers the play’s most direct political commentary.
The Angel
The Angel appears to Prior in the first part’s final moments, crashing through his bedroom ceiling with a terrifying and beautiful announcement. She is a colossal, androgynous being with multiple wings and an overwhelming presence. She tells Prior that God has abandoned Heaven, that humanity’s constant change and progress drove God away, and that Prior has been chosen as a prophet to stop the motion — to convince humanity to stay still.
The Angel represents the temptation of stasis. She offers rest, stability, and an end to suffering. The price is the end of progress, the end of change, the end of hope. Prior refuses. He wants more life. “I want to be a prophet,” he says, “but I want to stay alive.”
Major Themes
AIDS and Politics
The play is a direct response to the AIDS crisis and the Reagan administration’s refusal to address it. Kushner presents the epidemic as a political disaster, not just a medical one. The government’s silence, the church’s condemnation, the society’s indifference — these are as deadly as the virus.
Roy Cohn is the embodiment of this political cruelty. He brags about getting people killed. He understands power as the ability to destroy. His death scene — in which he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he helped execute — is the play’s judgment on him. He dies alone, unloved, and unrepentant.
Change and Stasis
The central philosophical conflict is between change and stability. The Angel wants stasis — an end to the ceaseless forward motion that drives progress and destruction alike. Prior wants change — the possibility of a better future, the chance to grow and love and suffer.
Kushner does not resolve this conflict. Change brings AIDS and progress brings destruction, but the alternative is death. The play ends with Prior’s blessing: “The Great Work Begins.” The work of change is never finished. It is its own reward.
Forgiveness
Louis spends the play seeking forgiveness for abandoning Prior. He goes to synagogue, he consults a rabbi, he argues with Belize — but he cannot forgive himself. Joe seeks forgiveness from Harper for being gay. Harper must learn to forgive herself for not knowing.
The play’s most extraordinary scene of forgiveness is between Belize and Roy Cohn. Belize hates Roy but nurses him anyway. Roy asks Belize to read him the obituaries of people he helped destroy. Belize does. There is no reconciliation. There is only the grim necessity of care.
Structure and Style
Kushner mixes styles with extraordinary freedom. Realistic scenes are interrupted by hallucinations, fantasies, and direct addresses to the audience. Characters appear in each other’s dreams. The Angel descends from the ceiling. Ghosts of Ethel Rosenberg and the Mormon Mother walk the stage.
The language ranges from the profane to the prophetic. Roy Cohn’s dialogue is a torrent of abuse and political cynicism. The Angel speaks in biblical cadences. Prior’s narration is modern, ironic, and deeply felt. The play asks actors to sing, to fly, to transform before the audience’s eyes.
This theatricality is not decoration. Kushner is arguing that realism is inadequate for the reality he is describing. AIDS, plague, political corruption, sexual identity, the fate of America — these demand a form as large as their subject.
The Production History
Angels in America premiered in 1991 at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, then transferred to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the Royal National Theatre in London before opening on Broadway in 1993. The Broadway production, directed by George C. Wolfe, won the Tony Award for Best Play. The play’s journey from a small regional theatre to the Broadway stage was itself a testament to the play’s power and timeliness.
The play was adapted into an HBO miniseries in 2003, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep in multiple roles, and Emma Thompson as the Angel. The adaptation was faithful to the play’s spirit while taking advantage of cinema’s ability to create seamless transitions between realistic and fantastic scenes. The miniseries won five Golden Globe Awards and eleven Emmy Awards, introducing Kushner’s work to an audience far beyond the theatre.
Angels in America has been revived multiple times, including a 2017 Broadway revival directed by Marianne Elliott. Each revival has found new resonances in the play. The 2017 revival, coming after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, allowed audiences to see the play as a historical document of the AIDS crisis as well as a continuing call for justice. The play’s relevance has not diminished.
The Language
Kushner’s language in Angels in America is one of the play’s greatest achievements. Each character speaks in a distinctive voice. Prior’s language is ironic, literary, and self-aware. Louis speaks the language of ideas — he is a word processor at the courthouse who processes words in every sense. Harper’s language is poetic and hallucinatory. Roy Cohn’s language is the language of power — aggressive, profane, and manipulative.
The language is also profoundly theatrical. Characters break into extended monologues, addresses to the audience, and dialogues that move between realism and poetry. The Angel speaks in a heightened biblical register. The Rabbi speaks in a Yiddish-influenced English. The language is not naturalistic — it is deliberately theatrical, embracing the artificiality of theatre as a source of power.
The play’s language is often very funny. Kushner has a gift for comedy even in the darkest moments. Belize’s sarcasm, Louis’s self-righteousness, Roy Cohn’s wicked humor — the play is filled with laughter. The comedy does not undercut the seriousness. It makes the seriousness bearable.
The Ending
The play ends in Central Park, in 1990, beneath the statue of the Bethesda Angel. Prior, Belize, Louis, and Hannah Pitt — Joe’s mother, who has become a surprising ally — sit together. Prior speaks to the audience. He has not been cured. The Angel has not saved him. But he is alive, and he is blessed.
He says: “We will be citizens. The time has come.” It is not a triumphant ending. The disease continues. The politics continue. The struggle for justice continues. But the characters have chosen life, chosen connection, chosen to continue the Great Work. For Kushner, that is enough.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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