Angels in America

About the show

Set in New York City, the play takes place between October 1985 and February 1986. The first part begins at a funeral, where an elderly rabbi eulogizes the deceased woman's entire generation of immigrants who risked their lives to build a community in the United States. Soon after, the deceased's grandson, Louis Ironson, learns that his lover Prior Walter, the last member of an old stock American family, has AIDS. As Prior's illness progresses, Louis becomes unable to cope, and he abandons Prior during a health episode that lands him in the hospital. Prior is given emotional support by their friend Belize, a hospital nurse and ex-drag queen, who separately also deals with Louis's self-castigating guilt and myriad excuses for leaving Prior. Joe Pitt, a Mormon Republican clerk in the same judge's office where Louis holds a word-processing job, is offered a position in Washington, D.C. by his mentor, the McCarthyist lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn. Joe hesitates to accept due to his agoraphobic, Valium-addicted wife Harper, who refuses to relocate. Feeling adrift and undesired by Joe, Harper retreats into drug-fueled escapist fantasies, including a dream where she crosses paths with Prior even though the two of them have never met in the real world. She confronts Joe about his deeply-closeted homosexuality, which he views as a sin. Torn by pressure from Roy and a burgeoning infatuation with Louis, Joe drunkenly comes out to his conservative mother Hannah, who reacts by changing the subject and hanging up the phone. Concerned for her son, she sells her house in Salt Lake City and travels to New York. After Joe confesses his homosexuality to a drug-addled Harper and leaves her, she flees their apartment and wanders the streets of Brooklyn, believing she is in Antarctica. Joe sets out to look for her, but follows Louis to Central Park, where they tentatively begin an affair. Meanwhile, Roy Cohn discovers that he has advanced AIDS and is dying. Defiantly refusing to publicly admit he is gay or has AIDS, Roy instead declares he has liver cancer. Facing disbarment for misappropriating money from a client, Roy is determined to beat the case so he can die a lawyer in good standing, and he attempts to position Joe in the Department of Justice to ensure the case is quashed. When Harper disappears and Joe refuses his offer, Roy flies into a rage and collapses in pain. As he awaits transport to the hospital, he is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he prosecuted in her trial for espionage, and who was executed after Roy illegally lobbied the judge for the death penalty. Prior begins to experience intense dreams and visions as his health worsens. He hears the voice of an angel telling him to prepare for her arrival, a flaming book erupts from the floor during a medical check-up, and he receives visits from the ghosts of two ancestral Prior Walters, informing him that he is a divine prophet. Prior does not know if these visitations are hallucinations caused by an emotional breakdown or if they are real. At the end of Part One, a glorious winged Angel crashes through Prior's bedroom ceiling, addresses him as "Prophet", and proclaims that "the Great Work" has begun. The second part begins with a speech given by the world's oldest living Bolshevik, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, addressing a crowd in Moscow in December 1985. He condemns the reforms proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev, decrying the notion of progress without political theory and declaring that the only way forward is to not move. At the funeral of a friend, a shaken Prior relates his encounter with the Angel to Belize. After revealing the presence of a mystical book underneath the tile in Prior's kitchen, the Angel reveals to him that Heaven is a beautiful city that resembles San Francisco, and God, described as a great flaming Aleph, created the universe through copulation with His angels, who are all-knowing but unable to create or change on their own. God, bored with the angels, made mankind with the power to change and create. The progress of mankind on Earth caused Heaven to suffer earthquake-like tremors and physically deteriorate. Finally, on the day of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, God abandoned Heaven. The Angel brings Prior a message for mankind—"stop moving!"—in the belief that if man ceases to progress, Heaven will be restored. Since the night of his vision, his health has once again started to decline. Belize believes that Prior is projecting his own fears of abandonment and death into an elaborate hallucination, but Prior suspects that his illness is the prophecy taking physical form and that the only way the Angel can force him to deliver her message is for him to die. Roy lands at the hospital in the care of Belize, where his condition rapidly declines. He manages to use his political clout to acquire a private stash of the experimental drug AZT at the expense of withholding the drug from participants in a drug trial. Alone in the hospital and fighting disbarment, Roy finds himself increasingly isolated, with only Belize, who despises him, and the ghost of Ethel for company. Prior goes to a Mormon visitors center to research angels, where he meets Hannah, who is volunteering there and taking care of Harper, who has slowly returned to reality but is now deeply depressed. Harper and Prior share a spark of recognition from their earlier shared dream, and witness a vision of Joe and Louis together. Louis is aghast to learn that Joe is a practicing Mormon and, regretting his actions and resistant to the intensity of Joe's infatuation, begins to withdraw from Joe. He begs Prior's forgiveness, which Prior angrily refuses, and Prior, who knows about Louis's affair with Joe from his vision, becomes deeply hurt that Louis is attempting to move on. Joe visits Roy, who is near death, and receives a final paternal blessing from his mentor. However, when Joe confesses he has left Harper for a man, Roy rejects him in a violent reaction of fear and rage, ordering him to return to his wife and cover up his indiscretion. Joe returns to Harper, and they have an unsatisfying sexual encounter, which prompts Harper to realize their marriage is over. Prior, accompanied by Belize, jealously confronts a confused Joe at work, but the encounter descends into chaos when Belize recognizes Joe as Roy's protegé. Belize informs Louis about Joe's connection with Roy, whom Louis despises. Louis, as a result, researches Joe's legal history and confronts him over a series of hypocritical and homophobic decisions Joe himself wrote. The confrontation turns violent, and Joe punches Louis in the face, ending their affair. Ethel Rosenberg watches Roy suffer and decline before delivering the final blow as he lies dying: He has been disbarred after all. Delirious, Roy seems to mistake Ethel for his mother, begging her to comfort him, and Ethel sings a Yiddish lullaby as Roy appears to pass away. However, with a sudden burst of energy, he reveals that he has tricked her, viciously declaring that he has "finally [made] Ethel Rosenberg sing". He then suffers a stroke and dies. After Roy's death, Belize forces Louis to visit Roy's hospital room, where they steal his stash of AZT for Prior. Belize asks Louis to recite the Kaddish for Roy. Unseen by the living, Ethel guides Louis through the prayer, symbolically forgiving Roy before she departs for the hereafter. After his confrontation with Joe, Prior begins following him obsessively, neglecting his health. He collapses from pneumonia after following Joe to the Mormon center, and Hannah rushes him back to the hospital. Prior tells her about his vision and is surprised when Hannah accepts this, based on her belief in angelic revelations within Latter-day Saint theology. At the hospital, the Angel reappears, enraged that Prior has rejected her message. Prior, on Hannah's advice, wrestles the Angel, who relents and opens a ladder into Heaven. Prior climbs into Heaven and tells the council of Angels that he refuses to deliver their message, as without progress, humanity will perish, and he begs them for more Life, no matter how horrible the prospect might be. He returns to his hospital bed, where he awakens from his vision with his fever broken and his health beginning to recover. He makes amends with Louis but refuses to take him back. Meanwhile, Harper departs New York for San Francisco, leaving Joe alone. The play concludes in 1990, five years later. Prior and Louis are still separated, but Louis, along with Belize, remains close in order to support and care for Prior, and Hannah has found a new perspective on her rigid beliefs, forging a friendship with the three gay men. Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah gather before the angel statue in Bethesda Fountain, discussing the fall of the Soviet Union and what the future holds. Prior talks of the legend of the Pool of Bethesda, where the sick were healed. Prior delivers the play's final lines directly to the audience, blessing them and affirming his intentions to live on and telling them that "the Great Work" shall continue. The initial print editions of the play include two scenes in Perestroika that were frequently deleted from productions. With the publication of the "Revised and Complete Edition" in 2013, Kushner elected to follow "the verdict of twenty-two years of production history" and placed them in the play's appendix. The former Act Five, Scene 6, where Prior runs into Rabbi Isidor Chemelwetz and Sarah Ironson, Louis' grandmother, as they play cards in the streets of Heaven. A scene taking place between Act Five Scene 7 and 8, where a deceased Roy Cohn in the afterlife offers to represent God in a paternity suit filed by the angels.