Angels in America

Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Written by	Tony Kushner
Characters	Prior Walter Roy Cohn Joe Pitt Harper Pitt Hannah Pitt Louis Ironson Belize Ethel Rosenberg Homeless Woman Angel
Date premiered	May 1991
Place premiered	Eureka Theatre Company San Francisco, California
Original language	English
Genre	Drama
Setting	New York City, Salt Lake City and Elsewhere, 1985–1986

Angels in America: Perestroika
Written by	Tony Kushner
Characters	Prior Walter Roy Cohn Joe Pitt Harper Pitt Hannah Pitt Louis Ironson Belize Ethel Rosenberg Homeless Woman Angel
Date premiered	8 November 1992
Place premiered	Mark Taper Forum Los Angeles, California
Original language	English
Genre	Drama
Setting	New York City and Elsewhere, 1986–1990

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.

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 Prior's illness progresses, Louis becomes unable to cope and moves out, leaving Prior to deal with his abandonment. Prior begins to receive visits from a pair of ghosts who claim to be his own ancestors, and hears an angelic voice telling him to prepare for her arrival. Prior does not know if these visitations are caused by an emotional breakdown or if they are real.

Meanwhile, closeted gay Mormon and Republican Joe Pitt, a law clerk in the same judge's office where Louis holds a clerical job, is offered a position in Washington, D.C., by his mentor, the McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn. Joe hesitates to accept out of concern for his agoraphobic wife Harper, who refuses to move. Harper suspects that Joe does not love her, which is confirmed when Joe confesses his homosexuality. Harper retreats into a drug-fueled escapist fantasy, including a dream where she crosses paths with Prior even though the two of them have never met in the real world. Joe's conservative mother Hannah arrives in New York, where she finds that in reality Harper has been wandering the streets of the city while Joe begins an affair with Louis. Denying her son's homosexuality, Hannah instead tries to force a reconciliation between Harper and Joe.

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