A quarter-century after stunning the theater world, one of the greatest theatrical journeys of our time returns to Broadway in an acclaimed new production from the National Theatre. As politically incendiary as any play in the American canon, Angels in America also manages to be, at turns, hilariously irreverent and heartbreakingly humane. It is also astonishingly relevant, speaking every bit as urgently to our anxious times as it did when it first premiered. Tackling Reaganism, McCarthyism, immigration, religion, climate change, and AIDS against the backdrop of New York City in the mid-1980's, no contemporary drama has succeeded so indisputably with so ambitious a scope.
Kushner's two-part play is massive: To see it in a single day, with multiple intermissions and a long dinner break, takes 10 hours. Yet every moment is so rich, so rewarding, so engrossing that it flies by in a rush. It is hard to do justice to the multitudes that Angels in America contains: its synthesis of the intellectual and the lyrical, the comic and the tragic, the intimate and the epic, the engaged and the transcendent. This is a play that breaks and fills your heart; it inspires you as it takes your breath away.
The Angel's introduction is as grand as the come, and that's fitting for such a grand revival of Angels in America. Twenty-five years ago, the play was important and relevant-and in the age of Trump, it might be moreso, on both counts, today. But the reason it persists, the reason companies will stage this work for decades to come, is that it's first and foremost great, riveting drama. And its time has come-again.
Videos