Angels in America

Guide Note

Written by Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a two-part, Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play centered around several characters including Prior Walter, who has AIDS, and his ex-lover Louis Ironson, who leaves Prior because he is unable to cope with the progress of Prior's illness.

The play, which stretches over seven hours in total, is divided into two parts - Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The play is written for eight actors, each of whom plays two or more roles.

The play was adapted into a television miniseries for HBO by Kushner and director Mike Nichols in 2003. The series was the most watched cable movie in 2003 and won both the Golden Globe and Emmy Award for Best Miniseries.

The play was also translated for the stage as an opera. Angels in America: The Opera made its debut on November 23, 2004 at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, France.

Fast Facts

1. Opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993
2. Workshopped at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles before Broadway debut
3. Both parts won Tony Awards for Best Play
4. Miniseries on HBO
5. Director of Broadway version: George C. Wolfe
6. Director of miniseries: Mike Nichols

• Louis: There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.

• Belize: I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

• Angel: Greetings Prophet! The great work begins! The Messenger has arrived!

• Prior: This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.