Angels in
America

A Note from the Director

There is a moment, near the end of this long and beautiful play, when a man who has been told he is dying climbs into Heaven, faces a council of angels, and asks for one thing: more life. He does not ask for a cure or a promise that the pain will stop. He asks for more of it, the whole aching, ordinary, astonishing business of being alive. I have carried that request with me every day of this process.

Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America in the middle of a catastrophe. When it opened, people in the audience were burying their friends, and some of them were watching their own stories onstage. The play could have been only a lament. Instead it is a fantasia, full of jokes and ghosts and arguments and Valium dreams and an Angel crashing through the ceiling. It refuses to let grief have the last word.

So why this play, and why now?

Because the young people on this stage are inheriting a world that, like the world of 1985, often feels as if it is coming apart. Because they deserve to know that people before them faced a plague, an indifferent government and the cruelty of their neighbors, and answered with fury, tenderness and casseroles, with protest signs and hospital vigils and quilts the size of football fields. Because history does not happen to other people. It happens to us, and then it is handed to whoever is young enough to carry it.

And because this play believes something I believe as a teacher: people can change. Not easily or cleanly, and not without loss, but they can. Every character in this story is broken open, and every one of them, even the worst, is offered some measure of grace.

I have watched these actors wrestle with a script that asks almost too much of them. I have watched them learn the names of real people who died too soon, and say those names with care. I have watched them become a company, the kind of chosen family this play celebrates. They have been my angels throughout this process.

Thank you for spending these hours with us. When the lights come up at the end, you will hear the play’s final words: the Great Work begins. We hope you leave a little more ready to take part in it.

With love,

— Steward Savage, Director

A Note from the Dramaturg

Angels in America takes place between October 1985 and February 1986, with an epilogue in February 1990. In those few months the AIDS epidemic was in its fifth year. There was no approved treatment yet, the President had barely mentioned the disease in public, and the real Roy Cohn was dying while telling the world he had liver cancer. Kushner wrote the play in the years right after, while ACT UP was occupying federal buildings and stock exchanges. The first audiences watched it in the middle of the catastrophe it describes.

Everything on this site is here to help you hear the play the way those audiences did: the history it carries, the arguments it stages, and the hope it insists on. Read it before the show, or come back to it after.

— Steward Savage, Dramaturg