When Tony Kushner’s Angels in America debuted on Broadway in 1993, likely no one anticipated that the sleaze bag protégé of Roy Cohn, Kushner’s unforgettable villain, would wind up in the Oval Office. Yet here we are, almost three decades later, as Cohn’s heir apparent governs the fractured nation by mob rule from behind the Resolute Desk. Seen through the lens of Angels in America, Donald Trump’s political ascendence seems almost inevitable—a consequence of the moral rot of American conservatism, evoked so vividly in this play, whose longtime sins have come home to roost. As Kushner’s seminal masterpiece re-enters the spotlight on the eve of a historically consequential election, with a murderer’s row of Broadway luminaries live-streaming an abridged evening of selected scenes to benefit amFAR’s COVID-19 relief fund, its keen illumination of our political divisions—and our national identity—is more prescient than ever. Set in the latter years of the Reagan administration and subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” Angels in America is a juggernaut of American drama, arguably the definitive work about the age of AIDS. At the ferocious heart… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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