Angels in America
Tony Kushner · 1991
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.
The case against
On the page you get seven hours of dialogue without the staging that makes the angel crash land. Everyone speaks in the same brilliant Kushner aria, from Roy Cohn to a Valium hallucination, and Perestroika sprawls where Millennium Approaches snaps shut; Kushner kept revising part two for years because he knew it. Read it after you have seen it.
Drama · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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