Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a 1993play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. The work won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.
The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.
The two parts of the play are separately presentable and entitled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, respectively. The play has been made into a television miniseries, and an opera by Peter Eötvös.
Plot
Set in New York City in 1985, the play opens with Louis Ironson, a gay Jew, learning that his lover, WASP Prior Walter, has AIDS. As the play and Prior's illness progress, Louis becomes unable to cope with the emotional stress and moves out. Meanwhile, closeted homosexual Mormon and Republican Joe Pitt, a law clerk in the same judge's office where Louis holds a clerical job, is offered a major job opportunity by his mentor, the McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn. Joe doesn't immediately take the job because he feels he has to check with his Valium-addicted, agoraphobic wife, Harper, who is unwilling to move. Roy is himself deeply closeted, and soon discovers that he has AIDS.