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Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition

Angels in America Officially Opens on November 8, 1992

by Robert C. Evans

Date: November 8, 1992

Locale: Los Angeles, California

Categories: Arts; literature; drama; television; film

Tony Kushner speaks at the University of Maryland in February 2011. (Courtesy of Franchise41 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Key Figures

Tony Kushner (b. 1956), Gay American playwright

Roy Cohn (1927-1986), powerful American lawyer; closeted gay man who refused to admit publicly that he was dying of AIDS

Summary of Event

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a lengthy, innovative, two-part play that marked a significant advance in the visibility of LGBTQ topics on the American stage. The play’s first part (Millenium Approaches) was performed in various venues in the U.S. and abroad before the first official complete performance (including the second part, Perestroika) at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in November, 1992. Millenium Approaches soon had a Broadway production in 1994, opening on May 4, to be joined on November 24 by Perestroika. The Broadway production ended shortly thereafter, on December 4, 1994. The play (especially the second part) has been revised several times since its original production.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney Roy Cohn during Senate Subcommittee hearings on the McCarthy-Army dispute in 1954. (Library of Congress)

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Playwright Anthony Kushner receiving a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013 at the White House. (Courtesy of Chuck Kennedy via Wikimedia Commons)

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Millenium Approaches centers around two couples – two gay men (one of them living with AIDS) and a heterosexual wife who discovers that her Mormon husband is also gay. The relationships of these couples disintegrate during the course of Millenium. Perhaps the most intriguing character, however, is Roy Cohn, a corrupt, powerful, closeted gay man strongly identified with right-wing causes dating back to the 1950’s. (The play’s Roy Cohn is based on the real Roy Cohn, who had died of AIDS in 1986 and who has often appeared as a villain in numerous recent works of art since at least the late 1970s, including as the model for Mr. Burns in the popular television cartoon The Simpsons.) Cohn is often hated on the American left because of his closeted life, his conservative politics, and especially his prominent role in 1950’s McCarthyism. At the very end of Millenium Approaches, an angel appears to Prior, the gay man with AIDS whose partner, Louis, has abandoned him. (Louis subsequently develops a relationship with Joe, the Mormon husband who has come out of the closet and who is first seen in the employ of Roy Cohn.) The angel declares that Prior is a prophet. At that point, Millenium Approaches abruptly ends.

Perestroika, the second part of Angels in America, opens with the angel telling Prior that human progress has led God to abandon a deteriorating heaven. The angel wants Prior to tell humans to stop progressing. Prior refuses, thus angering the angel. Meanwhile, Louis, who has been having an affair with Joe (the Mormon husband who is now out of the closet) breaks off the affair after he learns of Joe’s connections to Roy Cohn. Cohn, too, eventually rebukes and rejects Joe before dying of AIDS. Cohn, once enormously powerful, is now a defeated man, but the play shows some compassion even for him. After jumping five years into the future, the play depicts most of the major characters reconciled to various degrees and in various ways. Prior, directly addressing the audience, ends the work with an optimistic speech about his confidence in progress for gays and all other humans. He pointedly includes gays who will die of AIDS.

Significance

Angels in America – a work inventive in themes, characterization, and structure – helped earn Kushner a reputation as perhaps America’s most important living playwright. The play itself was showered with awards, including at least seven major honors for Millenium. That work also won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and the 1993 Tony award for best play. At least three significant awards were given to Perestroika before it, too, won the Tony Award in 1994 for best play. Eventually Angels in America was turned into a multi-part television series in 2003, directed by the famous director Mike Nichols and featuring such important stars as Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson. This production received nearly fifty nominations and awards, including some of the most important, such as the 2004 Emmy Award for outstanding miniseries. Up until that point, no single miniseries had won more Emmy awards.

Taken together, then, both the staged and televised versions of Angels in America made it one of the most honored and most widely discussed dramas in American history. The fact that the work dealt so frankly with LGBTQ themes – and especially with the difficult issue of AIDS – made it a pathbreaking work in American theater. The play has been performed countless times around the world, making it one of the most significant of recent American cultural exports. Before the mid-1980s, it would have been difficult to imagine that such a work could even be conceived, let alone successfully staged. By the early 1990s, however, AIDS was a much-discussed, much-debated topic, to a degree that people born later in that decade would find hard to believe. Now that AIDS has turned into a chronic illness that can be controlled with drugs, the disease is much less discussed than it was in the period from 1985-1995. Angels in America is a product of that period, but many readers, theater-goers, and television viewers find that it still speaks to them on many different levels and for many different reasons. It has won a permanent place in the American theatrical canon.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Evans, Robert C. "Angels In America Officially Opens On November 8, 1992." Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=LGBTQ2E_0233.

APA 7th

Evans, R. C. (2017). Angels in America Officially Opens on November 8, 1992. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Evans, Robert C. "Angels In America Officially Opens On November 8, 1992." Edited by Robert C. Evans. Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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