Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

Winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Winner of the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play. In the first part of Tony Kushner's epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel. "Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least the absconding of God." —Jack Kroll, Newsweek "A vast miraculous play … provocative, witty and deeply upsetting … a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama …" —Frank Rich, New York Times "Something rare, dangerous and harrowing … a roman candle hurled into a drawing room …" —Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard "An epic theatrical fever dream … a three-hour cliffhanger that leaves you wanting more." —Variety "A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." —John Lahr, New Yorker "Establishes Kushner as a poet and moral visionary in love with the theater yet awake in the world." —Don Shewey, Village Voice Read more