Angels in America
by Texas State University

Mar. 24 - Mar. 29, 2015
Tuesday-Sunday

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes play opens with Louis Ironson, a gay Jew, learning that his lover, WASP Prior Walter, has AIDS. Prior is visited by ghosts and an angel who proclaim him to be a prophet.

The play is set in New York City in 1985. Pulitzer Prize-winning play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. The two parts of the play are separately presentable and entitled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, respectively. The play is written for eight actors, each of whom plays two or more roles. Kushner's doubling, as indicated in the published script, requires several of the actors to play the opposite sex.

As the play and Prior's illness progress, Louis becomes unable to cope with the emotional stress and moves out. Meanwhile, closeted homosexual Mormon and Republican Joe Pitt, a law clerk in the same judge's office where Louis holds a clerical job, is offered a major job opportunity by his mentor, the McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn. Joe doesn't immediately take the job because he feels he has to check with his Valium-addicted, agoraphobic wife, Harper, who is unwilling to move. Roy is himself deeply closeted, and soon discovers that he has AIDS.

As the seven-hour play progresses, Prior is visited by ghosts and an angel who proclaim him to be a prophet; Joe finds himself struggling to reconcile his religion with his sexuality; Louis struggles with his guilt about leaving Prior and begins a relationship with Joe; Harper's mental health deteriorates as she realizes that Joe is gay; Joe's mother, Hannah, moves to New York to attempt to look after Harper and meets Prior after a failed attempt by Prior to confront Hannah's son; Harper begins to separate from Joe whom she has depended upon and finds strength she was unaware of; and Roy finds himself in the hospital, reduced to the companionship of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and his nurse, Belize, a former drag queen and Prior's best friend, who meanwhile has to deal with Louis's constant demands for updates on Prior's health. 

-- Wikipedia

 

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Angels in America
by Tony Kushner
Texas State University

University Main Stage, Drama Bldg, 600 Moon Street, San Marcos