Meike's Reviews > Angels in America

An almost eight-hour-long play about the AIDS crisis in 80's New York? Yes, please, if it's written like that! The Pulitzer- and Tony-winning text/production is a captivating illustration of the time, rendered in a deep, moving, and frequently very funny tone. Part 1, Millennium Approaches, introduces main character Prior who hails from an old American family. When his health deteriorates due to his AIDS diagnosis, his lover Louis abandons him. Louis, who comes from a Jewish family, then starts a relationship with Joe, a Mormon and Republican who has a Valium-addicted wife and works for lawyer Roy Cohn (a real historical figure who worked for McCarthy and Trump and died of AIDS).

Kushner plays with ideas of transcendence and paranoia when he shows his characters driven to the edge because of fear, shame and anger. Dying Prior, pushed aside by both his lover and society at large, has visions of his ancestors and an angel; Louis wrestles with his guilt and spirals; closeted Joe outwardly submits to his religious and political affiliations while hurting his loved ones and himself, which puts him in constant psychological limbo; Joe's wife, who senses that something is wrong, lives in a Valium-induced haze; and Cohn is haunted by his own ruthlessness: Closeted and unwilling to admit that he has AIDS, he has visions of Ethel Rosenberg, a woman who was, along with her husband, executed for espionage at Cohn's recommendation.

Part 2, Perestroika, then strongly focuses on the idea that change for the better is possible, which, considering that the main character Prior is suffering from AIDS in the 1980's, is quite the strong message (this second part premiered in 1992). Sure, it's messier than part 1, but considering that at the grim time the play was first produced, AIDS-patients came to see how Prior wrestles the angels in order to be allowed to stay on earth and witness a re-structuring of society (which is what Perestroika means and what happened at the time in the former Soviet Union), these are minor flaws. (FYI: Putin is of course ignoring the AIDS pandemic, so much for the motherland of the political Perestroika.)

I listened to the award-winning audio production of the National Theatre, starring the likes of Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, which was great. Here's a clip of the stage version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJT1i...
And here's the famous bench scene in which Prior tells Louis that he has AIDS, starring the fantastic Andrew Scott and Dominic Cooper in an earlier production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRkC6...