Angels in America

The Heights Players opens 2005 with the sobering production of Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, by Tony Kushner and directed by Robert J. Weinstein. The rarely produced show will be presented in its entirety with both parts.

Millennium Approaches will be performed January 7,8,9,13,and 14. Perestroika follows on January 15,16,21,22, and 23.

Tony Kushner’s Broadway production of Angels in America is a masterful epic–it has received a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, two Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Drama. In 1998, London’s National Theatre selected Angels in America as one of the ten best plays of the 20th century. About Angels in America, Newsweek magazine wrote, “The entire work is the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time.” The recent HBO blockbuster mini-series version walked away with a record 11 Emmy Awards.

The unconventional play is set primarily in Brooklyn during the Reagan-Bush years when the AIDS epidemic was being uncovered. The story line follows a gay couple, one of whom is dying of AIDS; a Mormon man who is just waking to his homosexuality and his agoraphobic wife, and Roy Cohn, the power-mongering reactionary lawyer who died of AIDS in 1986. The show’s dialogue reflects the uncertainty and fear of our nation’s conscience at the height of the AIDS epidemic.