Research Guide to American Literature

Fisher, 2001). Despair over the reelection of President Ronald Reagan in 1984
inspired his first significant play. He set A Bright Room Called Day (1985) in
1930s Berlin during the rise to power of Adolf Hitler but used “Interruptions”
between certain scenes to criticize the Reagan administration’s conservative
policies. In 1987 Kushner was commissioned to write a play for San Francisco’s
Eureka Theatre about the impact of AIDS on that city’s gay community; the
disease had been first recognized in 1981. After workshops and productions in
California, London, and New York, Angels in America was produced on Broad-
way in 1993. Part One: Millennium Approaches opened in May and received the
Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
Part Two: Perestroika opened on Broadway six months later and won the 1994
Tony for best play. Angels in America established Kushner as a preeminent
American playwright.
Kushner called his play a fantasia, describing, as in music, a work in which
the composer’s imagination, or fantasy, moves unrestricted by a specific form.
In that spirit, Kushner, using a nonlinear structure, shifts easily, often quickly,
between and among intersecting plots, styles (realism, surrealism, farce), tones
(serious, comic), and staging techniques (single locales, simultaneous settings
with overlapping dialogue, visible scene changes, spectacular theatrical effects).
The “National Themes” of the subtitle comprise the political and religious con-
servatism of the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan as well as the
gay culture and the AIDS epidemic in that decade. Critic John Lahr observed in
his review in The New Yorker (31 May 1993) that Kushner “honors the gay com-
munity by telling a story that sets its concerns in the larger historical context of
American political life.”
Angels in America has been called an epic play for both its thematic breadth
and its structural scope. Its two parts have a combined running time of seven
hours. The action spans more than four years (October 1985–January/February
1990), in such disparate settings as a funeral home, bedrooms, offices, hospital
wards, New York, Salt Lake City, a hallucinatory Antarctica, Moscow, heaven,
and, briefly, hell or purgatory. The twenty to twenty-five characters in each play
are interpreted by eight actors taking several roles. The play’s four main stories
focus on the gay couple Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, the married couple
Joe and Harper Pitt, the devious New York lawyer Roy Cohn, and God and his
angels. Each plot illustrates the complete work’s principal theme of change.
Part 2 of Angels in America—Perestroika—takes its title from the Russian
word for “restructuring,” used to describe Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s
economic and political reforms in the mid 1980s. In the opening scene, set in the
Kremlin in January 1986, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, “the World’s
Oldest Living Bolshevik,” acknowledges “we all desire that Change will come,”
but, until he reads the new political “Theory” that will “reorder the world,” he
exclaims, “we MUST NOT move ahead!”
In the celestial realm God, “Bewitched by Humanity” and its “Potential
for Change,” has deserted his angels and disappeared. Prior Walter, whom
the Angel of America greets as “Prophet,” is charged with telling humanity
to cease moving so that God will return to his rightful home. Prior refuses,

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