Not “Very Steven Spielberg”?: Angels in America on Film

Abstract

Set in the mid-1980s at one of the worst moments in the ongoing war against AIDS, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Part I: Millennium Approaches (which opened on Broadway in 1993) marked a crucial moment in the American theatre, one in which a Brechtian epic vision dared to be juxtaposed with the “theater of the fabulous,” to create a world that is at once an exposure of the political realities of the Reagan era and an amazing opening of theatrical possibilities for angels to fly, ancestors to reappear, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg to haunt a dying Roy Cohn. Critics greeted Kushner with a hailstorm of accolades; it seemed nearly impossible that a moribund Broadway would embrace a gay political drama of epic proportions (combined with Angels in America Part II: Perestroika,¹ some theatre goers took in all seven or so hours of the show in one day), but the production flourished, and regional and international performances of Angels continued over the next decade. The work has also been anthologized in a range of college drama textbooks and taught in a wide variety of classroom settings.