Sarah on theater

There’s this verbose term, “men who have sex with men,” used in clinical settings to encompass a particular group with careful precision. It’s a useful turn of phrase for research purposes because, as it turns out, many men will admit to the act of having sex with other men even as they reject identification with the word “gay.” At a glance, this might seem to reveal a slightly confused set of priorities.

Then again, maybe you understand where they’re coming from. Labels, after all, have a way of percolating into the most unrelated corners of our lives; for instance, I’ve recently had it explained to me how lesbians buy a particular brand of beer and how trans folks enjoy a certain video game franchise. We all seem to agree that your demographics say something about your lived experience, even if we can’t agree about what that something might be. These correlations help us get a handle on a world that is otherwise too complex to grasp: shortcuts born from observation, circulated as stereotypes, and solidified into biases. It’s a fundamental way we make sense of others and, just as often, how we understand ourselves.

LOUIS: “Well, sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds, that—I mean you sound like a—“
JOE: “No I don’t. Like what?”
LOUIS: “Like a ‘Republican.’”

The gravitational center of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is Roy Cohn, a prominent real-life attorney who was best known for 1.) his ruthless, ultimately lethal prosecution of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg in 1951, 2.) serving as longtime counsel to Sen. Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, among other notables, and, 3.) after a career of working to undermine homosexual causes, being outed to the world when he died from AIDS-related complications in 1986.

ROY: “Like all labels, they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? (…) Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?”

“Men who have sex with men” was coined at the height of the AIDS epidemic as linguistic antidote to the problem of self-identification: to account for men like Cohn, an active participant in the gay community who disavowed its label for fear of being misunderstood, ostracized, or altogether disempowered. This is the historical backdrop of Angels in America, and Invictus Theatre Company’s production sets the stage in a metaphorical one, too: a dilapidated courtroom. The combined effect is an unmistakable atmosphere of judgment—under the law, public opinion, and, in Perestroika, the eyes of the divine. Michael D. Graham realizes Roy with domineering machismo, a Nixonian quiver of the jowls, and a New York snarl. He embodies the profound hypocrisy of a man who couldn’t bear to be reduced to a single word, yet refused to extend that same courtesy to people like him. This coward, who hoarded his clout for personal gain, is probably the most compelling stage villain I’ve ever seen.

Long threatened by powerful figures like Cohn and beset by sheer numerical disadvantage, the queer community is famously close-knit, leaving it especially vulnerable to the devastation of AIDS in the 1980s. The virus fueled a vicious spiral of stigmatization, isolation, and death. Kushner dramatizes this insularity with a sexually networked principal cast: an interlocking chain of characters facing the brutal prospect of dying or watching their loved ones do the same. In the foreground of Millennium Approaches are two couples in the chain—Prior & Louis, a gay one, and Joe & Harper, a straight, married one.

At the start of the play, both pairings are on the verge of major disruptions. Prior has just been diagnosed with AIDS; Joe is gay and about to emerge from the closet. The progressions of these discoveries—and the ripple effects on everyone’s psyches—are paralleled in the text, first implicitly, and then more explicitly in split scenes with frantically interspersed conversations. For Louis, living in the shadow of Prior’s illness—seeing him in agony, risking infection, and dealing with the stigma—proves unbearable. Harper is similarly broken when she uncovers Joe’s double life, and she feels compelled to leave him behind even as she’s carrying his child.

LOUIS: “I’m going to move out.”
PRIOR: “The fuck you are.”
JOE: “Harper. Please listen. I still love you very much. You’re still my best buddy; I’m not going to leave you.”
HARPER: “No, I don’t like the sound of this. I’m leaving.”

HARPER: “You were going to save me, but the whole time you were spinning a lie. I just don’t understand that.”

PRIOR: “I’m dying! You stupid fuck! Do you know what that is! Love! Do you know what love means? We lived together four and a half years, you animal, you idiot.”
LOUIS: “I have to find some way to save myself.”

Director Charles Askenaizer doubles down on these twinned narratives by staging the two couples closer and closer together over the course of the play, eventually arranging them as if they were in the same room and participating in a single dispute. Linking these conflicts together so tightly conflates their causes—it suggests that AIDS is not only a literal threat to the body, but also, audaciously, a symbol of homosexuality itself. As Ryan Hake’s Prior writhes and screams on the floor, we’re forced to ask if, indeed, being gay is the ailment, and AIDS a punishment from the divine.

Characters grapple with this question in a series of harrowing visions. Prior has fever dreams in which he encounters his male ancestors, who are revulsed by his biological dead end. A fearful Harper, the play’s “token straight,” retreats into drug-fueled escapism, spending much of the play in metaphysical encounters with gay men—direct confrontations with her own biases. These sequences are vivid invitations to the audience to engage with difficult questions and their own biases. ”Are gay men broken? Were they simply not made for this world?” Being able to provoke these questions, familiar to many a person in the process of self-discovery, is what makes Millennium Approaches a great piece of queer fiction.

What takes it from there to a singular work in the literary canon is its ability to construct and rebut these questions from intellectual and moral high ground. Kushner’s characters are never caricatures; instead, they’re dignified, intelligent people navigating impossible situations in ways that feel thoughtful and deeply human. They’re gay, as a neutral descriptor, but not necessarily “gay” as a labeled collection of arbitrary biases. They resist being pigeonholed through the diversity of their reactions: Roy’s cowardice, Louis’s anxiety, Belize’s sensitivity, Joe’s denial, and Prior’s anger. The parallel straight and gay relationships demonstrate that, even if the exact nature of their challenges might be different, the humanity at the center is the same—a lens through which the audience can empathize with what it was like to live through the AIDS crisis. Altogether, it’s a thorough exploration of what it means to be gay in America, and, by extension, what it means to be human.

All that, and then the Angel crashes into the scene.

The Angel alights atop the broken pediment of this production’s symbolic courtroom, pulling our gaze upward in harmony with Tony Kushner’s focus. “Greetings, Prophet; the Great Work begins: the Messenger has arrived”—Angels in America: Perestroika is here, ready to pivot hard into the spiritual, metaphorical, and political.

It does a disservice to Perestroika to consider it as a standalone “part two.” In practice, I’m not sure if anyone really thinks of it that way; the overwhelming majority of revivals present both halves in repertory, symbolizing that, yes, even angels need a dinner break. (I ate at Eden, which was an easy walk and has a fabulous piece of seared barramundi.) If Millennium Approaches is a foundation of self-acceptance—an axiom that homosexuality is a fundamentally human experience—Perestroika is its derived manifesto. “Why am I this way?” “How do I explain this to people who aren’t like me?” “How do I advocate for myself in a hostile world?”

That makes a ton of sense to me as a complementary piece, but the logical waterfall from part one to part two leaves the latter with a much harder job—Perestroika risks audience alienation with slower pacing and overintellectualization. Kushner’s staging notes compound the demand with a preference for sparing Brechtian self-awareness, even as scenes incorporate more elaborate metaphors, dream sequences, supernatural elements, and, yes, a fair bit of raunchiness. This play is challenging and proud of it.

ANGEL: “Open me, Prophet. I I I I am the Book. Read.”
PRIOR: “Wait. Wait. How come… how come I have this, um, erection?”

BELIZE: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Excuse me, please. You fucked this angel?”
PRIOR: “She fucked me. She has… well, she has eight vaginas.”
ANGEL: “REGINA VAGINA! Hermaphroditically equipped as well with a bouquet of phallī.”

ANGEL: “Forsake the open road: neither mix nor intermarry. Let deep roots grow: if you do not mingle, you will cease to progress. Seek not to fathom the world with its delicate particle logic: you cannot understand, you can only destroy; you cannot ‘advance,’ you can only trample.”

Prior, whose AIDS diagnosis kicked off much of the action in Millennium Approaches, is impelled by the Angel to go forth and tell humanity to “stop moving,” because its progress is coming at the expense of Heaven. The exact meaning of this is acknowledged as fuzzy (maybe to a mildly uncharming degree), but it’s evocative, no doubt, and there’s a whole raft of viable interpretations: the Angel as a physical representation of the virus that will literally make Prior “stop moving,” the decline of religious participation and puritanical pearl-clutching after the Industrial Revolution, or even, perhaps, an environmental angle about the destruction of God’s creation.

One thing’s for sure, though: Kushner is drawing a connection between sex and divine creation. The first-degree answer to “Why am I here?” is always “because my parents had sex,” and the last word on the matter is “whence cometh anything at all?” The liminal connection between the two—the messy morass of “why”s and “how”s and “what do I do with this burden of knowledge?”—is the basic outline of what we call “life.” The Angel, a representative of sexuality itself, descends from on high, piques Prior’s “reliable barometer,” and fucks him with her hermaphroditic bouquet. Prior is a prophet because he has the sickness to prove that he’s experienced a touch of genesis.

Ryan Hake demonstrates impressive range as Prior; he’s the beating heart of this production, giving us a relatable throughline of sass, indignation, anger, agony, grief, and defiance. In Perestroika, he’s well-complemented by Nicki Rossi, in gloriously feathery costume, who brings a tongue-twisting vocal dexterity and fiery emotionality to the Angel. Much of their dialogue is staged with the Angel standing in the audience, which is not only visually striking but also has the effect of elevating Prior’s side of the conversation alongside his later monologue as urgent pleas to the audience.

PRIOR: “I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much, much worse, but… you see them living anyway.”

PRIOR: “…please don’t be offended, but… all you can see is fear. I’m leaving Heaven to you now. I’ll take my illness with me, and… and I’ll take my death with me, too. The earth’s my home, and I want to go home.”

If I’m spending a little too much time talking about the supernatural elements of Perestroika, it’s because it felt to me like this was the story that Kushner really wanted to tell. Some of the other participants in the carefully constructed human drama of Millennium Approaches—Louis, Harper, and especially Joe—feel like their earthly narratives are wrapped up abruptly or even obligatorily. Louis spends mostly all of Perestroika feeling guilty about his decision to leave Prior. Harper appears only sporadically and mostly only to move the plot along for the men before she abruptly decides to fly away. Joe is rejected by everyone else and then disappears entirely. After 3½ hours of getting invested in these characters, it’s a little bit of a bummer to see them shuffled into the periphery or otherwise reduced to pawns to advance a message.

There are also some scenes in here that, frankly, felt too complex for me to unpack on a first viewing! There’s a relatively lengthy sequence in the Mormon Visitor Center in which some of the characters look at a diorama of a traditional pioneer family on the American frontier, and it feels like it’s vaguely on theme to talk about this slice of American history and traditional family values, but I’d be lying if I said I totally understood what Kushner was going for. Later on, there’s a scene in which Prior encounters a council of angels named for continents, and, honestly—I think this is one of the challenging things about the minimal staging—I didn’t really get what was happening until I read the synopsis afterwards. (And I’m not sure I can fault the production for it. This is tough material.)

I just wonder if this opaqueness serves the larger Angels in America as a piece of drama (or as a message). It’s rightly venerated for its unimpeachable, self-consistent intellectualism, but if I have to write an essay or read more literature to understand what you’re trying to say, are you saying it effectively? (It took me a week to write this, and I’m usually pretty quick!) Millennium Approaches is so resonant because it illuminates the real-world AIDS outbreak—a contemporary historical trauma which, like the Holocaust or the African diaspora, forced a significant reorganization of the affected community and looms large in its collective memory today. Millennium Approaches fosters quite a lot of empathy just through the lens of historical fiction. Do the complex metaphors of Perestroika extend that empathy or muddle it?

The earthly story isn’t neglected, but its focus shifts to Belize—a secondary character in part one—who now serves as nurse to the dying Roy. Belize and Roy trade barbs and highlight the tangible consequences of Roy setting himself apart from his community: he hoards a trove of lifesaving drugs (his “clout”) to preserve himself at their expense. When Roy finally dies—disbarred, disgraced, and hilariously taunted by the spectral Ethel Rosenberg—Belize takes the drugs and distributes them to the very community Roy disavowed. It’s such a complete, fitting defeat.

Contrast that with Belize’s developing friendship with Hannah, Joe’s mother. Hannah also comes from a conservative background, but she opens her mind and heart to the possibility that the agony these men are experiencing is human, which highlights the real moral axis of the play. Roy isn’t evil because he holds a particular abstract ideology; he’s evil because he fundamentally lacks compassion. Kushner develops a politics of queer bodies around the simple idea that intellectual jousting is worse than useless when human lives are on the line, and he’s careful to apply it against representatives of both the contemporaneous left and right.

ROY: “I can get anyone to do anything I want. For instance, let’s be friends. Jews and coloreds, historical liberal coalition, right? … But the thing about the American Negro is, he never went Communist. Loser Jews did. But you people had Jesus so the reds never got to you. I admire that.”

ALEKSII: “How are we to proceed without Theory? What System of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad swirling planetary disorganization… ? … Do they have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct? … Change? Yes, we must change, only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades… Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent.”

Though they might find that they agree on little, these representatives both tacitly argue for the continuation of the status quo—a status quo that Kushner contends is immoral and unacceptable because it devalues real human lives. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like me. It doesn’t matter whether I have some grand intellectual theory to justify my existence. I am human. I am fact. My dignity is inherent. If your way of making sense of the world overlooks me, it is your flaw, not mine. I am going to advocate for me to live and write the theory down later.

LOUIS: “It’s all too much to be encompassed by a single theory now.”
BELIZE: “The world is faster than the mind.”
LOUIS: “That’s what politics is. The world moving ahead. And only in politics does the miraculous occur.”
BELIZE: “But that’s a theory.”
HANNAH: “You can’t live in the world without an idea of the world, but it’s the living that makes the ideas. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.”

The influence here is hard to overstate. In 2025, the left that Kushner frames the play against has declined in favor of the one he advocated for, which makes this play feel like a foundational text for modern progressivism. Many conversations in the text feel unfailingly modern—Roy Cohn “made presidents,” and, of course, he directly mentored the current one, too. Modern politicians like Pete Buttigieg are still having to make the case that “your quarrel is with my creator.” But languishing on the connections to modern politics, except to note the influence, doesn’t actually honor the artistic merit of the work itself, I think.

It feels fairly clear to me that Perestroika is a somewhat weaker half. It suffers from a degree of incohesion, discarding lovingly developed character threads and storytelling devices in service of a moral argument which can feel overly elaborate and too academic. I found it very rewarding to write about this work and process it, but that’s not a reasonable thing to expect the audience to do. It seems to me that the flaw is in the rigorous logical flow from axiom to conclusion, which is likely a consequence of the way the play was written and premiered.

But I don’t want that to be the takeaway, really—it would be a similar structural mistake to divide up my thoughts on parts one and two so neatly. Because the truth is that Angels in America, taken together, is a great work—the Great Work, if you like. It’s vast and ambitious, but deep and consistent even under 35 years of intellectual scrutiny. It’s as bitingly funny as it is spectacular. It was incredibly timely then and it’s startlingly prescient today. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me stop and consider my opinions as a queer person and a political agent. And in that respect, it is an overwhelming success. So grateful to have had a chance to see it.