Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.54
EAN: 9781559361071
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 1559361077
Label: Theatre Communications Group
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Theatre Communications Group
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Studio: Theatre Communications Group

The national and international success of this contemporary, Tony Award winner has been unprecedented. This elegant hardcover and slipcased edition presents Kuschner's epic play in its entirety for the first time in one volume, and features a revised, never-before-published version of Perestroika. 16 pages of production photos.
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is that rare entity: a work for the stage that is profoundly moving yet very funny, highly theatrical yet steeped in traditional literary values, and most of all deeply American in its attitudes and political concerns. In two full-length plays--Millennium Approaches and Perestroika--Kushner tells the story of a handful of people trying to make sense of the world. Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some sort of personal salvation in his beliefs.

But such a summary does not do justice to Kushner's grand plan, which mixes magical realism with political speeches, high comedy with painful tragedy, and stitches it all together with a daring sense of irony and a moral vision that demands respect and attention. On one level, the play is an indictment of the government led by Ronald Reagan, from the blatant disregard for the AIDS crisis to the flagrant political corruption. But beneath the acute sense of political and moral outrage lies a meditation on what it means to live and die--of AIDS, or anything else--in a society that cares less and less about human life and basic decency. The play's breadth and internal drive is matched by its beautiful writing and unbridled compassion. Winner of two Tony Awards and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Angels in America is one of the most outstanding plays of the American theater. --Michael Bronski

Customer Rating:
Summary: What a Kick
Comment: It always amazes me that people can zero in so narrowly and find something to fight about. It is a testament to the vitality of ideas and the triumph of morality over aesthetics, which might be a good thing. For myself, I don't care whether this play treats Reagan fairly or whether the playwright gets his facts straight on Ethel Rosenberg or anything else for that matter. What I enjoy is the writing. The play as a whole doesn't really add up to much for me (this volume works, while the second is virtually a total loss), but individual scenes are powerful and memorable. Some of the writing seems to me to be unrivaled in American writing. Roy Cohn is well-conceived, whether he resembles the historical figure or not. What a thoroughly imagined monster. As played by Pacino in the TV adaptation, he is poetically reptilian. This is Kushner's doing. But my favorite scene is between Cohn and his doctor. Cohn insists he has liver cancer and not AIDS and is prepared to play rough to force the doctor to change his diagnosis. What a magnificent and "true" moment. Here we see the depiction of power as perceptively conceived as an episode from the Watergate hearings. I can't remember a playwright ever going right to the heart of evil and yet finding such a richly sentimental way of showing it. The trans-gender double-casting works, as does the magical realism technique. It is a wonderful play.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Too farcical to be serious
Comment: The film was great because it was a rococo delirious ranting and raving half nightmare half dream with maybe a third half of delirium not tremens but definitely AIDS. But the play in print sounds wordy and quite often vague, vain and even void. It has probably aged though it might only have been easy and politically correctly incorrect at the time. A little bit of anti-Reagan anti-republican anti-establishment oration and a lot of banal very trite and at times humdrum conformist discourse. The trick is in bringing together blacks, Jews, Mormons, progressive snobs and popular effetes and make it all react in a high shocking half pleasing, pleasing because shocking and shocking because pleasing, situational comedy. You add homosexuality on that and it becomes provocative, with a queen and a few other characteristic personages. And the morality is all contained in one sentence page 204: "You have to reconcile yourself to the world's imperfectability by being thoroughly IN the world but not OF it." You can't imagine anything more demagogical and opportunistic than that. And it comes to a second decision or piece of advice: "The rhythm of history is conservative." And there we are with another fashionable idea of the 1990s: the death of history. There is no history any more when a certain level of development is reached. History does not move any more. History is conservative, conservational. Yet in spite of all that the play is funny. In fact it is a farce, a melodramatic farce and it may survive because of this dimension. It is a farce coming from the Reagan and Bush sr years and announcing the ridiculous end of the hope that was born with Clinton and buried by him long before due. When a period that could and should have been of change ends up in the savory and stinking rigmarole procedure of the impeachment of the President because of some sexual caprice of his in the Oval Office and the subsequent discussion whether sex requires penetration and whether buccal penetration is sexual. This kind of farce died with the Bush jr backlash, the war on Iraq and the birth of maybe a new hope of change after eight years of punishing castigation. You have the right to wonder if history is not a farce, but I am afraid that farcical dimension comes from the on-looking eye that does not believe life can be horrible to the point of justifying death.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Comment: The book on amazon was cheaper than at my college bookstore and local bookstores. Brand new, came in time, and all together fantastic service.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Read
Comment: After watching the Angels in America DVD, I wanted to see how it was originally as a play, and it does not disappoint. In many ways, I think it's a better experience reading this play than it was to see it on my tiny television. Angels in America is essentially a theatrical work, and the miniseries came off just as that, a filmed stage play, espcially in Part 1: Millenium Approaches, so that it seemed really static, even with, if not because of, Mike Nichols' direction. It was, on the other hand, tremendously faithful to the play script. As far as I could tell, not a word was changed.

Part 2: Perestroika, however, had a few changes from the script to screen, and those changes worked well, making the filmed version far more dynamic than Part 1. There's some additional backstory that got dropped in the translation, but the spirit is very much the same.

Ultimately, I recommend that you watch the DVD to get an idea of the characters' mannerisms and the staging, then read the script to fully appreciate the poetry of Tony Kushner's language. Buy it and love it!

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Comment: Angels in America is probably one of the most important pieces of American theatre of the last twenty years. Outside of musicals, probably one of the few contemporary plays of the period that has had a significant mainstream impact outside of an adapted form (and probably significantly more important then a large number of the adapted ones even before it became an excellent miniseries). And for that reason alone, it is worth reading.

But there is more then that.

The play actually is one of the most influential plays for a reason. It speaks to a number of socially relevent themes about the American experience. It deals heavily with the roles of gays in society giving a fascinating dialectic about the potential roles that gays can play in society. One of the most interesting social arguments in the play has to be the complete failure of the traditional nuclear family on every level, a statement that can echo the larger social issue where the image of the nuclear family has failed. As a tangent to that, the play deals heavily with the Mormon church, being both one of the only major religions founded in America and one of the religions with the heaviest focus on the family (and one of the ones with the harshest line towards homosexuality).

This probably isn't a great play to read if you like to read things out of a larger social context. Honestly, though, I really can't imagine how any American could read this play without connecting it to the larger social issues (and I think that would be true for people of a lot of other nationalities as well, though to what degree I'm not sure).

In terms of the actual play, its quite good. But I found (and just about everyone I've asked) has said that they found Part I to be much stronger then Part II.

---