Religion: Angels, Prophets and an Absent God
Angels in America is soaked in scripture: Mormon, Jewish and Christian. It doesn’t ask the audience to believe. It asks what faith is for when the institutions that hold it have failed.
The American religion
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in upstate New York in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Smith said the angel Moroni had led him to golden plates, which he translated as the Book of Mormon. After Smith was killed in 1844, the Saints crossed the plains to found Salt Lake City, a story of migration and endurance the play stages in the Visitors’ Center diorama. The Pitts are Mormons. Prior’s visitation deliberately mirrors Smith’s: an angel, a hidden book, special spectacles, a reluctant prophet. When Hannah tells Prior that Smith saw his angel only a few miles away, it is the first time anyone takes Prior’s vision seriously.
Scholars disagree about how fair Kushner is to Mormons. Some read the play as mocking. Others, including Mormon critics, argue that it treats Mormon theology more richly than almost any outside writer has, and that it separates the radical, restless energy of Joseph Smith’s faith from the social conservatism of the 1980s church.
Kaddish for Roy Cohn
The play opens with a rabbi eulogizing an immigrant grandmother and the Old World she carried with her. Louis is Jewish and crushed by guilt, and he cannot remember the prayers. Roy Cohn is Jewish too, and helped send Ethel Rosenberg, also Jewish, to her death. In one of the play’s most extraordinary scenes, Belize persuades Louis to say Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, over Roy’s body. Ethel’s ghost feeds him the words. It is mercy extended to an enemy who never asked for it. Critics often read Louis, the play’s main Jewish character, as Kushner’s stand-in.
Jacob, Bethesda and the Principalities
- Jacob wrestles the angel (Genesis 32) and refuses to let go until he is blessed. Prior does the same, and demands a blessing of more life.
- The pool of Bethesda (John 5): an angel stirs the water and the first sick person in is healed. Emma Stebbins’s Angel of the Waters (1873) in Central Park depicts this angel, and it is where the play ends.
- Principalities is a Pauline term for an order of angels. Kushner’s Angels are Continental Principalities, one for each continent, bureaucratic and paralyzed.
God has left
In Perestroika, Heaven is falling apart because God abandoned it on April 18, 1906, the day of the great San Francisco earthquake. The Angels blame human restlessness, migration and invention. Their prophecy is to stop moving so that God might come back. Prior’s answer is to refuse the prophecy and choose life, with all its pain and change. Against an absent or indifferent God, the play puts its faith in people: in community, in continuing, in the “painful progress” Prior describes at the fountain.
Politics: “National Themes”
The subtitle is a promise. Kushner’s characters argue constantly about power, law, race, democracy and what America owes its people. The play also argues with itself. No single character speaks for Kushner.
Reagan’s America
The play is set at the high point of the Reagan revolution, just after a 49-state re-election landslide. Conservatives were reshaping the federal courts and the Justice Department. Joe’s job as chief clerk to a federal appeals judge, and Roy’s plan to place him in Washington, put him at the center of that project. Joe believes in Reagan as a source of moral clarity and national renewal. Harper, meanwhile, frets about the ozone layer and the end of the world, and Louis rails against what he calls the politics of selfishness. In Perestroika Louis discovers the legal opinions Joe has ghostwritten, and the political and the personal collapse into each other.
Roy Cohn, McCarthyism and the Rosenbergs
The real Roy Cohn (1927–1986) helped prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Cohn later claimed he had privately urged the judge to sentence Ethel to death. They were executed on June 19, 1953, the only American civilians executed for espionage during the Cold War. Decades later, Ethel’s brother David Greenglass admitted that he had lied about her role. Cohn went on to serve as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the anti-Communist and anti-gay purges of the 1950s, known as the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. He then spent three decades as a New York fixer for mobsters, politicians and real-estate developers.
He was also a gay man who publicly opposed gay rights. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, he told everyone it was liver cancer. He was disbarred in June 1986 for unethical conduct, including trying to defraud a dying client, and died five weeks later. In the play, Roy tells his doctor that “homosexual” is a word for men with no clout, and that he therefore cannot be one. That scene is Kushner’s sharpest analysis of the closet as a system of power.
Ethel at the bedside
Kushner brings Ethel Rosenberg back from the dead not for revenge but to witness. She watches Roy die, delivers the news of his disbarment, and finally helps Louis say Kaddish for him. The scene stages the play’s hardest political question: can justice and forgiveness exist together? Belize later puts it plainly: forgiveness is where love and justice finally meet.
Democracy, race and Belize
In Millennium Approaches, Louis delivers a long, dazzling, self-serving monologue to Belize about democracy and why race matters less in America than ideas. Belize, a Black gay nurse and the only character who does steady, practical care, demolishes it. In Perestroika Belize describes America as a country whose freedom anthem was pitched so high that no one can reach the note. The play gives the eloquent white liberal the most words and the Black caretaker the clearest sight. Many productions and critics read this tension as one of the play’s sharpest self-critiques.
Perestroika: change at a cost
Part Two is named for Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “restructuring” the Soviet Union. Its prologue is spoken by the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik, frozen without a theory to live by. By the 1990 epilogue the Berlin Wall has fallen and the characters argue about what comes next. The real subject is whether people and nations can change without being destroyed by it. The play’s answer, like Benjamin’s angel, looks at the wreckage and still moves forward.
Sources
Read
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America (TCG, revised edition). Read the playwright’s notes and afterwords.
- Isaac Butler & Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward (2018)
- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (1987)
- Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York (2021)
- Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and Reports from the Holocaust
- Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations
Watch & explore
- Angels in America (HBO, 2003). Rated TV-MA, so preview before sharing with students.
- Wrestling with Angels (documentary on Kushner)
- How to Survive a Plague (2012); United in Anger (2012)
- HIV.gov: A Timeline of HIV and AIDS
- National AIDS Memorial: Quilt history (includes a virtual Quilt)
- NLM: Against the Odds and Surviving and Thriving exhibitions
Works consulted
- HIV.gov, “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS.”
- Stonewall National Museum & Archives, “AIDS Timeline: The First Twenty Years.”
- KFF, “Global HIV/AIDS Timeline.”
- POZ, “HIV Treatment: 40 Years of Innovation” and “Milestones in the Era of Effective HIV Treatment.”
- ACT UP New York, “Accomplishments and Partial Chronology.”
- NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, ACT UP Wall Street demonstrations; Emma Stebbins & “Angel of the Waters.”
- National Library of Medicine, Against the Odds: “Action on AIDS.”
- American Archive of Public Broadcasting, “1989–1991: Broadcasting ACT UP Direct Action.”
- The Henry Ford, “Silence = Death: The Early Fight Against the AIDS Epidemic.”
- Smithsonian Institution Archives and History.com on the AIDS Memorial Quilt; National AIDS Memorial, “Quilt History.”
- AP/PBS NewsHour, Advocate, Gay City News and TheaterMania obituaries of Larry Kramer (May 2020).
- Britannica, EBSCO and Encyclopedia.com on Roy Cohn; Biography.com on Cohn’s disbarment and death certificate.
- EBSCO Research Starters and Literary Worlds (WMU) on the Rosenberg case.
- BuzzFeed News, History.com and VOA on Rock Hudson and Reagan’s response to AIDS; PBS Frontline interview with Landon Parvin.
- 64 Parishes, Encyclopedia.com and EBSCO on Tony Kushner’s life.
- American Theatre, “How Angels in America Came Out of the National Theatre”; Out, “The Dream Life of Angels”; StageAgent; IBDB.
- Playbill, Broadway.com and The Hollywood Reporter on the 2018 Broadway revival.
- AP / Spokesman-Review, Playbill and TribLive on the 2004 Emmys for HBO’s Angels in America.
- Charles McNulty, Modern Drama 39.1 (1996); Roger Bechtel, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (2001); Tablet; AlterNet (2003) on Kushner and Benjamin.
- Michael Austin, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 30.1; Patheos, “Angels in America at 20.”
- BroadwayWorld on Rec Room Arts (Houston, 2025), Invictus Theatre (Chicago, 2025) and the 2026 Normal Heart reading.
Dramaturgy prepared for Carnegie Theatre Co. Quotations from the play are brief and used for educational commentary.