Perseus Academic: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner

HBO Films will present Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols from Tony Kushner’s own adaptation of his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The remarkable cast features Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson, James Cromwell, Michael Gambon and Simon Callow.

Angels in America is one of the most remarkable and celebrated plays of our time. Over 350,000 copies have been sold in paperback since their original publication in 1993.

Praise for the play:

Angels in America is the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time.—Jack Kroll, Newsweek

A vast, miraculous play … provocative, witty and deeply upsetting … a searching and radical rethinking of Ameri-can political drama.—Frank Rich, The New York Times

Something rare, dangerous and harrowing…a roman candle hurled into a drawing room … —Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard

Playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty, and compassionate, furious and incredibly smart … It’s impossible to imagine anyone captivated by the beginning not wanting—needing—to go back for the end.—Linda Winer, Newsday

An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theatre stretched to its full potential can achieve.—Clifford A. Ridley, Philadelphia Inquirer

Perestroika is a masterpiece.—John Lahr, New Yorker

Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!; as well as adaptations of Corneille's The Illusion, Ansky's The Dybbuk, Brecht's The Good Person of Szecguan and Goethe's Stella. Current projects include: Henry Box Brown or The Mirror of Slavery; and two musical plays: St. Cecilia or The Power of Music and Caroline or Change. His collaboration with Maurice Sendak on an American version of the children's opera, Brundibar, appeared in book form Fall 2003. Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he lives in New York.