Angels In America

“The Great Work Begins.” The year is 1985: Ronald Reagan has just been reelected to a second term, and the deadly AIDS epidemic is at its height in New York City. Tony Kushner’s two-part epic historical drama captures the lives of the HIV-positive Prior; Louis, his lover who abandons him; Joe, a closeted gay Mormon; his Valium-addicted wife Harper; Roy Cohn, a notorious lawyer from the McCarthy hearings, dying of AIDS; Belize, his African-American nurse; Hannah, Joe’s mother from Utah; and the Angel, a terrifyingly beautiful herald of the apocalypse. As these characters discover, confront, and seduce each other during a time of death, hypocrisy, and tumultuous change, Kushner summons a restless pastiche of the historical and the supernatural, the theological and the political—all told with surging theatricality by a company of eight actors. Having directed Kushner’s Caroline, or Change and The Illusion, Court’s Artistic Director Charles Newell will direct Millennium Approaches and a newly-revised Perestroika in repertory performance, giving Court audiences the unique opportunity to experience Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus in its magnificent entirety.

Court Theater, 55th and Ellis, Until June 3rd.