Two Plays, Seven Hours, One Nation
Angels in America is a two-part epic. Part One, Millennium Approaches, and Part Two, Perestroika, can each be staged on its own. Together they are more than seven hours long and contain more than thirty characters, eight acts, fifty-nine scenes and an epilogue.
Two couples are breaking apart in Reagan-era New York. Prior Walter learns he has AIDS, and his partner Louis Ironson, terrified, leaves him. Joe Pitt, a Mormon Republican law clerk, is being courted for a Justice Department job by the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, while Joe’s wife Harper drifts on Valium into imagined Antarctic landscapes. Joe is hiding that he is gay. Roy is hiding that he is dying of AIDS. Then an Angel crashes through Prior’s ceiling and names him a prophet.
Kushner called the play “a gay fantasia on national themes.” It mixes kitchen-table realism with hallucination, ghosts and Heaven, and it uses the private crises of a handful of New Yorkers to ask large questions: Can people change? Does history move forward? Who gets to be an American, and who gets left behind?
The Characters
Prior Walter
A gay man from an old WASP family that traces its line back centuries. He is diagnosed with AIDS in the first act. Funny, frightened and fierce, he becomes the unwilling prophet the Angel has chosen.
Louis Ironson
Prior’s partner, a Jewish word processor at the federal court. Brilliant at arguing politics and bad at living up to his principles. He abandons Prior, then has to reckon with it.
Joe Pitt
A Mormon, a Reagan Republican and chief clerk to a federal appeals judge. Roy Cohn’s protégé, and a closeted gay man trying to stay faithful to God, his party and his marriage.
Harper Pitt
Joe’s wife, agoraphobic and dependent on Valium. Her hallucinations take her to Antarctica and into Prior’s dreams, and she senses the truth about Joe and the world before anyone says it.
Roy Cohn
A fictionalized version of the real lawyer (1927–1986) who helped send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel. He has AIDS and insists it is liver cancer.
Belize
A former drag queen, now a nurse, and Prior’s best friend. He is the play’s moral center and its sharpest critic of American hypocrisy. He ends up caring for Roy Cohn in the hospital.
Hannah Pitt
Joe’s mother, a stern Salt Lake City Mormon. She sells her house and comes to New York after Joe’s late-night phone call, and she becomes Prior’s unlikely ally.
The Angel
A Continental Principality, a messenger from a Heaven that God has abandoned. Her prophecy tells humanity to stop moving.
Ethel Rosenberg
The ghost of the woman executed for espionage in 1953. She comes to watch Roy Cohn die.
When the Play Happens
The action runs from late October 1985 to February 1986, followed by an epilogue in February 1990. Kushner titles every act. The dates below are the months the script assigns to each act.
Part One: Millennium Approaches
Oct 1985 – Jan 1986“Bad News”
A rabbi buries Louis’s grandmother, Sarah Ironson, and with her a generation of immigrants. Roy Cohn offers Joe Pitt a Justice Department job in Washington. Prior shows Louis his first Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion. Harper hallucinates Mr. Lies and Antarctica. Roy’s doctor tells him he has AIDS, and Roy orders him to call it liver cancer.
“In Vitro”
Prior collapses and is hospitalized, and Louis walks out. Joe, drunk and desperate, phones his mother in Salt Lake City in the middle of the night and tells her he is a homosexual. Louis and Joe begin to circle each other. Roy pushes harder to place Joe in Washington.
“Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning”
Two ghostly ancestors, Prior 1 and Prior 2, announce that something is coming. Ethel Rosenberg appears at Roy’s bedside. Hannah arrives in New York. Louis delivers his long argument about democracy and race to Belize. The Angel crashes through Prior’s ceiling.
Part Two: Perestroika
Jan – Feb 1986 · epilogue Feb 1990The Hall of Deputies, the Kremlin
Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, “the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik,” warns that no one can live without a grand theory. The prologue frames Part Two as a play about change: perestroika means “restructuring.”
“Spooking,” “The Epistle,” “Borborygmi,” “John Brown’s Body”
Prior tells Belize about the Angel’s message: humanity should stop migrating, mixing and progressing. Roy is hospitalized, and Belize is his nurse. Joe and Louis begin an affair. Hannah takes a job at the Mormon Visitors’ Center, where Harper keeps watching a pioneer diorama. Louis discovers what Joe has written as a clerk. Roy dies, and Louis and Ethel say Kaddish over him.
“Heaven, I’m in Heaven”
Prior wrestles the Angel the way Jacob does in Genesis, climbs to a Heaven that looks like San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, returns the prophecy, and asks the Council of Principalities for more life. Harper takes a night flight to San Francisco.
“Bethesda”
Four years on, Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah sit at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. They argue about Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Prior, still living with AIDS, speaks to the audience directly.
History vs. the play: Roy Cohn’s death
The real Roy Cohn was disbarred on June 23, 1986, and died on August 2, 1986. Kushner moves his death up by about six months so that it falls inside the play’s winter. The disbarment, the hidden diagnosis and the fight over AZT are all based on fact. The scenes around them are Kushner’s invention.
Why 1985?
Rock Hudson died of AIDS on October 2, 1985, a few weeks before the play opens. His death was the first openly acknowledged AIDS death of a major celebrity, and it changed how much attention the press paid to the epidemic. Reagan had first mentioned AIDS in public only weeks earlier. No treatment existed yet. AZT would not be approved until March 1987.
Glossary of References
- Millennium
- The year 2000, and in religious thought the thousand-year reign of Christ after the apocalypse. Harper and the Angels both sense an ending coming.
- Perestroika
- Russian for “restructuring.” Gorbachev’s reform program, launched in 1985–86.
- Mr. Lies
- Harper’s imaginary travel agent, a figure born of Valium and loneliness.
- Valium
- A widely prescribed tranquilizer in the 1970s and ’80s, often called “mother’s little helper.”
- Ozone layer
- In 1985 scientists reported a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, which is why Harper fixates on it and escapes there.
- Moroni
- The angel who, Mormons believe, appeared to Joseph Smith. A golden Moroni with a trumpet tops many LDS temples.
- Diorama
- At the Mormon Visitors’ Center in Manhattan, a mechanical display of a pioneer family crossing the plains. Harper watches it repeatedly.
- Kaddish
- The Jewish prayer recited for the dead, said in Aramaic.
- Bethesda
- The healing pool in Jerusalem from John 5, and the fountain in Central Park named for it.
- Prior 1 & Prior 2
- Prior’s ancestors, who died in earlier plagues (in plagues of the 13th and 17th centuries), returning to herald the Angel.
- Clout
- Roy’s word for power: who answers your phone call. It is how he defines identity.
- Disbarment
- Being stripped of one’s license to practice law. The real Cohn was disbarred in June 1986.
- The Justice Department / Ed Meese
- Reagan’s Attorney General from 1985, a leader of the conservative legal movement. Roy wants Joe in Meese’s department.
- Continental Principalities
- Kushner’s council of Angels, one for each continent, who govern Heaven in God’s absence.
- Prophet / the Epistle
- Prior’s role and the prophetic “book” the Angel gives him, modeled on Joseph Smith’s plates.
- The Eskimo
- A figure in Harper’s Antarctic fantasy, played by the actor who plays Joe. The word is period language; many Inuit and Yupik people consider it outdated.
- Slurs in the text
- Characters use homophobic, racist and antisemitic language that was common in 1985. Kushner uses it to show who the characters are, not to endorse it.
- “The Great Work”
- The play’s refrain, spoken first by the Angel and last by Prior. It points to the ongoing collective labor of repairing the world.