ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Actress Zoe Kazan

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

Photo by Joan Marcus

"It is a great honor to be part of the revival of Angels in America. I can't describe the energy in the room the first day of rehearsal, but it was remarkable to feel that every person there was equally excited about the undertaking and equally eager to get in and start rooting around--as the Angel says, "The Great Work begins." I was also struck by how personal the plays felt for almost everyone I talked to about them. So many of us have some story, some personal attachment, which cuts through the size of what the plays have become. The personal is in the universal, and visa versa: as much as Angels deals with huge themes, it is also (I think) fundamentally concerned with and rooted in the body in all its mess and sex and mutability and mortality--and what could be more personal than that? I think this is what keeps Angels completely rooted in the here and now, even as the "virus of time" has moved the events of the play away from the present tense. I was two years old in 1985, when Millennium Approaches begins, and was only seven when Angels was first produced in New York. I remember my parents coming home from the theater, telling me about it the next morning. I didn't know what AIDS was; I didn't even know the meaning of the word "gay." Three years later, one of my elementary school teachers had died from AIDS; a second one would pass a few years after. I don't remember the first time I read Angels, but I know the impact it had on me--my dog eared copy will attest to the many times I have returned to it. I always find something new. It is a blessing--more life--to have the opportunity to return to it again, in this new way, with these people, in this theater."

–Zoe Kazan

Zoe Kazan plays Harper Pitt in Signature Theatre Company's production of Angels in America

Angels is a hit! See what the critics had to say!

See what the critics had to say about the Signature Theatre Company production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America!


“Five Stars! Perfect Revival! The Signature Theatre Company has done it again. Although it seemed unlikely that they could match last year's Horton Foote trilogy The Orphans' Home Cycle, they've accomplished that with a dazzling revival of Angels in America. It's great to see Angels fly so high and so potently again. "The great work begins" is said by a couple of characters. It's happening now at the Signature.”
Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News

“In seven hours, Angels can change your world!”
Scott Brown, New York Magazine

“The Angel has landed again, at long last, and all's right with the world. Amend that. All's deliriously right in a theater world where Tony Kushner's monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork, "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," can be seen - in all its gargantuan seven-hour, two-part, big-brain glory - at the tiny Signature Theatre Company.”
Linda Winer, Newsday

“Glowingly acted! Bill Heck is superb as Joe. Robin Bartlett’s tough-minded, laconic Hannah is good enough to eclipse memories of Kathleen Chalfant and Meryl Streep in the same role. In Zoe Kazan’s sharply graded, passionately felt performance, [Harper] becomes the production’s nerve center. The received wisdom about Mr. Kushner is that he is a great playwright. This production reminds us that he is also a good one, which as far as satisfying nights at the theater are concerned, may be more important.”
Ben Brantley, New York Times

“The awe inspiring Angels stands the test of time! Kushner’s great work still has the power to shock, enlighten and delight.”
David Cote, Time Out New York

“Shimmers with newfound intimacy and unspeakable beauty!”
Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly

“Christian Borle is instantly believable and never less than heartbreaking. Billy Porter is wonderful in every way.”
Marilyn Stasio, Variety

“Michael Greif's staging is fierce and exact. Mark Wendland's compact double-turntable set is a miraculously efficient piece of design, and Wendall K. Harrington's digital projections add immeasurably to the set's spatial richness.”
Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

“Frank Wood is a revelation as Roy Cohn, exhibiting a fierce intensity."
Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

“Will absorb you utterly and make you think! The superb Zachary Quinto imbues Louis, the lover who abandons Prior in his illness, with a ferocious intelligence and a vivid sensuality. Robin Weigert underscores, with tenderness and wit, the sobering questions posed by Prior's condition, from the nature of mortality to the existence of God.”
Elysa Gardner, USA Today

“Signature Theatre Company offered the theatrical event of last season with its extraordinary production of Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle. The company may have pulled off that feat again, thanks to director Michael Greif's equally extraordinary production of Angels in America. This production makes it clear that Kushner's seven-hour, two-part epic belongs in the first rank of great American dramas, alongside such masterworks as "Our Town," "Death of a Salesman," "A Streetcar Named Desire," and "Long Day's Journey Into Night." What's more, it's proof that…the only way to experience the work's full impact is in its original home: the theater.”
Erik Haagensen, Backstage

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Actor Zachary Quinto

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

Photo by Joan Marcus

"...Angels in America.

brazen.
brave.
unapologetic.
vital.
fierce.
intelligent.
compassionate.
graceful.

Tony Kushner gave voice to a movement. a movement of human beings who were unwilling to let themselves - or each other - off the hook. who - in the face of tremendous adversity and horrific decimation - asked questions of courage and took action that elevated them - and all of us who came after them - to another experience of life. a deeper level of acceptance and understanding.

humanity is honored by these plays. he has both captured and created a momentum in these works that is unmistakable and timelessly provocative. he manages to weave the quiet grace of an intimate moment into the terrific power of celestial movement. technically and creatively the plays demand profound momentum and stamina. it is nothing short of an epic journey.

and now here we are - twenty years after the creation of these plays - bringing them back to the city where it all began. in a world more advanced - but no less fractured - we once again turn to ourselves and to each other with the same questions. maybe now they are framed in a different context. but at their core they ask us to - "look up, look up, prepare the way..." because i believe there are forces much larger than all of us at work in these plays. intangible forces that are occasionally harnessed at times of great need. Tony wrote these plays at such a time. he has taken that need and given it inspired and graceful language. and i am deeply humbled to be a part of this ensemble - bringing his language to life at this specific moment.

surrender..."

–Zachary Quinto

Zachary Quinto plays Louis Ironson in Signature Theatre Company's production of Angels in America

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Director Michael Greif

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

Angels in America at 20 Years: Michael Greif from Signature Theatre Company on Vimeo.

Michael Greif is the director of the Signature Theatre Company production of Angels in America

Video: Zachary Quinto Tells Gay Youth "It Gets Better"

Zachary Quinto, who plays Louis Ironson in the Signature production of Angels in America, reaches out to struggling gay youth with an "It Gets Better" video.

For futher information and more "It Gets Better" videos please visit http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject.

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Professor Claire Gleitman

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

"My first encounter with Angels in America occurred when I happened to come across it in 1992 in American Theatre magazine—to which I subscribed at the time (still do!), but which I didn't read religiously. I can't remember now what it was about Kushner's script that caught my eye, but I read it from cover to cover the day it appeared in my mailbox. Back then, I was a young assistant professor, teaching dramatic literature in the English department at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York. Once I read Kushner's beautiful, searing, ferociously angry and deeply compassionate play, I determined that I had to share this piece of theatre with my students. So I contacted the magazine (the play at that point was unpublished anywhere else) and ordered copies for my two classes--utterly unaware, at that moment, of the groundswell of excitement that was starting to gather around Kushner and rather proud of what I thought was my unique and very impressive discovery of an unknown playwright.

In the weeks and months that followed, I came to realize that I was not the only person to have discovered Tony Kushner. Indeed, I learned about the intense buzz that was swirling around Kushner and his play’s impending opening—to the point where an article in the New York Times Magazine described Angels' fortunes as "as a bellwether for the future of innovative drama on Broadway." (How’s that for heavy expectations to place upon a young, unknown author’s shoulders?) As Angels made its way toward Broadway surrounded by palpitating anticipation and (in some corners) ugly homophobia, my students and I did our quiet work in the classroom—reading the play with care and attentiveness and finding ourselves overcome by its richness, its beauty, and the complexity of its conversation with a tradition of American literature stretching from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Tennessee Williams. Kushner, it seemed clear to us, was hurling himself into a dialogue about what "America" means that began with the Puritans and that continues to the present day—and, quite strikingly, he was putting marginalized Americans (gay, female, Jewish, Jack Mormon, ill) at the center of that conversation.

It didn't take us long to decide that we simply had to see the play performed, and so I arranged to get us tickets to what should have been the first week of performances in the original Broadway run, but which turned out to be the end of previews, because the opening was postponed. (My memory is hazy here, but I think they had some technical difficulties involving the advent of the Angel...) My students and I spent an entire semester anticipating the day when we would board a rented college bus together and travel down to New York City to see the play that had turned out to define and shape our entire semester. We all got up very early that morning and boarded our bus in Ithaca, full of irrepressible excitement: we knew that our creaky little van was going to take us on a trip that would culminate with the greatest theatrical experience of our lives. We got as far as Owego, New York--where our bus broke down.

I'll never forget sitting on a curb in front of the Dunkin Donuts in Owego, New York, with 40 disconsolate and absolutely silent undergraduates, thinking: "The event which we all have anticipated for four months is not going to happen. We are going to return to Ithaca with nothing but stale donuts." Miraculously, really--or so it seemed at the time--our van got fixed, by a dashingly good-looking auto mechanic whose name I never learned but who remains my hero to this day. We dashed down the turnpike at breakneck speed; our driver (my self-sacrificing husband, another hero in this story) deposited us in front of the theatre at 2 minutes before curtain time, and we raced to our seats, arriving just at the very instant that the house lights went down.

The anticipation, needless to say, was nothing compared to the play itself. For me and for my students, seeing Angels in America was indeed and unquestionably the theatrical experience of our lives. What is remarkable about Kushner's play, however, is that reading it, too, is the theatrical experience of one's life—and that isn’t true of very many contemporary plays. Angels in America is a play that reads almost as beautifully on the page as it does on the stage. I have taught Angels virtually every year since I first discovered it in American Theatre magazine--and I hear back regularly from my former students, via email or Facebook, who report that reading Angels changed their lives, awakening them to sides of themselves that hadn’t been evident before. Angels is without doubt a play that changes people: it moves them, it politicizes them, it wakes them up, and (if they happen to be American, as most of my students are) it deepens and complicates their understanding of the nation in which they live. This is as true today as it was in those long-ago, pre-9/11 days; the play, amazingly enough, hasn’t dated, despite its keen connection to the historical moment that it dramatizes.

I am excited beyond words to see the revival of Angels in America. More than that, I’m excited to continue to teach this play, with which I first fell in love in 1992. I expect to go on teaching it—with pleasure, admiration and wonder—for the rest of my professional life as a teacher of dramatic literature."

–Claire Gleitman

Claire Gleitman is a professor and the English Department Chair at Ithaca College

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Actor Christian Borle

We continue our series of posts featuring people's thoughts on the power and impact of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Click here and continue checking back for more words from Broadway cast members, our current cast and creative team, Signature’s past Playwrights-in-Residence, and others in the theatre community. We also want to hear from YOU -- click here to find out how you can contribute.

Photo by Joan Marcus

"When asked to share my thoughts on Angels in America, one of the most iconic, acclaimed and… dare I say it… heralded pieces of writing of the last 50 years, I found courage in the words of Tony Kushner himself. Though, I think, not in the way you’d expect.

In one of an ongoing parade of 'pinch me' moments, I was given Tony’s email address after hearing the news that I had been cast as Prior. I wanted to say thanks, how excited I was. He replied, and in his sign-off he wrote… Tony Kushner wrote… 'back atcha.'

'Atcha.'

Something clicked for me when I read that. He’s a human being. Who wrote a play (or two). It’s easy to imagine that the series of words he strung together over a decade ago came to him in some sort of fever dream, channeled or bestowed. How momentous, how inspiring to discover that it’s so much more… accessible than that.

We get to have Tony in the room sometimes. He ARRIVES with new pages (Pinch Me Moments #34-52), hot off the inkjet. These are mostly tweaks to Part Two, him refining, still finding, clarifying. We sit at a table and watch him watch us as we speak this new assemblage of words, stutters, italics, dashes and ellipses. When it’s his turn to speak… to illuminate… he’s profound, intellectually intimidating, learned, funny, basically everything you’d hope for. But still, he’s just a person.

We’re five weeks into rehearsal now, and the room is full of people, just trying to figure it all out. It’s acting, writing, directing, designing, scheduling, maneuvering, lunching, caffeinating, crunching lines, going home at the end of the day. Human stuff.

What seemed, before the whole thing started, insurmountable and daunting is now what the most pretentious among us (read: me) call “the work.” And I hope that you all, uni-genitalled, male, female, or somewhere in between… you who come to see the play that will be barreling atcha… Well, I hope you like it. I hope you don’t notice the work that went into it. I hope you see something timeless in this story of humanity, by humans, for humans.

Because we are not going away."

–Christian Borle

Christian Borle plays Prior Walter in the Signature Theatre Company production of Angels in America