1951→2026
Seventy-five years. Five chapters. One great work.
Scroll to move through the history that shaped Angels in America: the Cold War, the epidemic, the activists who fought back, and the play itself. Use the bar at the top to jump to a decade or follow a single thread.
Cold War Men
Roy Cohn, the Rosenbergs, and a boy growing up in Lake Charles. Kushner wrote this history into the play.
The Rosenberg espionage trial opens in New York. Roy Cohn, then in his early twenties, is on the prosecution team and questions Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, the government’s key witness.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing prison. In 2001 David Greenglass admitted that his trial testimony about Ethel’s role was false.
As Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, Cohn is at the center of the televised Army–McCarthy hearings.
Tony Kushner is born in Manhattan to two classical musicians. The family soon moves to Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Cohn becomes a New York power broker and fixer. His clients include Donald Trump.
BA from Columbia University (1978) and MFA in directing from NYU (1984).
The Plague Years
A new disease appears and the government says almost nothing. The play takes place in these years.
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describes a rare pneumonia in five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. It is the first official report of what will be called AIDS.
The New York Times reports a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, in 41 gay men, and “gay cancer” enters common speech.
Larry Kramer, Dr. Larry Mass and others found Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first AIDS service organization.
The CDC uses the term “AIDS” (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) for the first time.
The CDC identifies all major routes of transmission and rules out spread through casual contact, food, water or air.
Ronald Reagan wins re-election in a 49-state landslide. The confident conservatism of his second term is the political air of Millennium Approaches.
Researchers announce that a retrovirus, then called HTLV-III or LAV, causes AIDS. In 1985 the first antibody test is licensed and blood banks begin screening donations.
Kushner’s first major play, A Bright Room Called Day, set in Weimar Germany, premieres in New York. It is the play that brings him to Oskar Eustis’s attention.
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart opens at the Public Theater, one of the first plays about AIDS.
It is announced in Paris that Rock Hudson has AIDS.
Reagan mentions AIDS publicly for the first time, at a press conference, four years into the epidemic.
Rock Hudson dies, the first major U.S. celebrity whose death from AIDS is openly acknowledged. The same day, Congress sets aside nearly $190 million for AIDS research, about $70 million more than the administration asked for.
Millennium Approaches begins with the funeral of Sarah Ironson.
The Angel arrives (end of Part One). Perestroika opens in the Kremlin.
Roy dies, Prior goes to Heaven, Harper flies west. The main action ends.
An international committee names the virus Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
Roy Cohn is disbarred by New York’s Appellate Division for unethical conduct.
Roy Cohn dies of AIDS-related complications at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, still denying he had AIDS.
Surgeon General C. Everett Koop releases a frank report on AIDS that calls for public education, including for adolescents.
Act Up. Fight Back.
Grief becomes anger and anger becomes strategy. Meanwhile Kushner starts writing.
Larry Kramer gives a furious speech at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. Two days later about 300 people return to found ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
The FDA approves AZT, the first drug for HIV. It is expensive and toxic, and the virus soon develops resistance to it.
ACT UP’s first action: about 250 protesters at Wall Street and Broadway demand access to experimental drugs and a national AIDS policy. Seventeen are arrested.
Reagan gives his first major speech on AIDS, at an amfAR dinner. By then more than 20,000 Americans have died of the disease. Kramer is among those who jeer.
At the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is shown for the first time: 1,920 panels covering an area larger than a football field. About half a million people see it that weekend.
“Seize Control of the FDA”: about 1,500 activists shut down FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Within a year the agency speeds up drug approval.
The first World AIDS Day.
Kushner develops Angels in America on a commission from San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, with support from the NEA and the Mark Taper Forum, working with Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone.
The Berlin Wall falls. The epilogue’s characters are still arguing about it three months later.
“Stop the Church”: about 4,500 people protest at and inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral against the Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms and safer-sex education.
The epilogue at Bethesda Fountain.
First public workshop of Millennium Approaches at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
“Storm the NIH”: about 1,000 protesters shut down the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, demanding faster and more inclusive drug trials.
The Great Work
From San Francisco to London to Broadway, and two Tony Awards in a row.
World premiere of Millennium Approaches at the Eureka Theatre, San Francisco. Perestroika is shown as a work in progress.
Royal National Theatre, London: Millennium Approaches, directed by Declan Donnellan.
Perestroika premieres alongside Millennium Approaches at the Mark Taper Forum.
The Ashes Action: ACT UP marches from the Capitol to the White House and scatters the ashes of people who died of AIDS on the White House lawn.
Millennium Approaches opens on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on May 4, directed by George C. Wolfe. It wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Perestroika joins in repertory that November.
Perestroika wins the Tony Award for Best Play, so the two parts take the award in back-to-back years.
More Life
New drugs, new generations, and the revivals that keep the play alive.
The first protease inhibitor is approved in December 1995. At the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, researchers show that triple-combination therapy works. U.S. AIDS deaths fall 47% from 1996 to 1997.
Caroline, or Change, his musical with Jeanine Tesori set in 1963 Lake Charles, premieres. He marries Mark Harris; they are the first gay couple featured in the New York Times “Vows” column.
HBO airs Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America, with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Jeffrey Wright and Mary-Louise Parker. It wins 11 Emmys in 2004, a miniseries record at the time.
Screenplays for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln, both nominated for Academy Awards. He receives the National Medal of Arts in 2013.
The FDA approves Truvada as PrEP, a daily pill that prevents HIV infection.
Marianne Elliott’s National Theatre revival, with Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, becomes the fastest-selling production in the NT’s history and wins the Olivier for Best Revival. On Broadway it earns 11 Tony nominations, a record for a play, and wins Best Revival.
Larry Kramer dies in New York at 84.
A Grammy nomination for the Caroline, or Change cast album makes him one of the few writers ever nominated for an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Rec Room Arts stages both parts in rotating repertory in its 60-seat downtown Houston space.
Kushner directs a benefit reading of The Normal Heart at the Public Theater for the play’s 40th anniversary.
The Great Work Begins.
Carnegie Theatre Co. · Houston, Texas