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

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Book Editor Jonathan Evans

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.

"I first encountered Angels in America during the fall semester of my senior year at Ithaca College, when it was suggested by my Drama Lit professor that I read the play ahead of the class assignment; she thought it would make a good project for me to direct as a workshop production (which was our glorified way of saying “staged reading with props”). I went home and consumed the entire seven-hour, three-hundred-page leviathan in one sitting. For as long as I live I will never forget that afternoon: laughing with Belize and Louis, weeping for Prior and Harper, gasping at Roy and Joe, and marveling and the jaw-dropping audacity of the thing: to write a socialist-American history of the age of AIDS and Reagan through the eyes of the marginalized and the dying, and to do so in a way that is both utterly harrowing and wildly entertaining, that is both high- and low-brow, that is both empathetic and empowering, is one of the most fabulous declarations of “I am” I have ever encountered. And yet when I think back to that afternoon/evening, it is with a fair amount of sorrow. The first reason for this was that I remember feeling, not even ten minutes after finishing the play, that I would never be again feel the exhilaration of reading it for the first time. I sat on my sofa for several minutes almost in a state of paralysis (full disclosure: I may have had a few drinks while reading the play), then dragged myself to bed, eager to find my professor the next day and tell her how much I was looking forward to staging a reading. I climbed into bed and checked the alarm on my cell phone, the screen of which revealed what I would only know twenty-four hours later to be the second reason for looking back in sorrow:

“11:35 PM MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2001”

It wasn’t until much later that I was able to think back with even a sliver of clarity on the days and weeks that followed. I was in shock. We all were. It was like we were asleep to the world around us and were only awoken by the pain of our own hearts breaking. I wasn’t naïve to the negative consequences of America’s role as lone global superpower, and I believe to describe the pre-9/11 world as “more innocent” would require one to cover himself in a thick shroud of ignorance. However, to this day I find myself thinking over and over, “If I knew then what I know now.” But there was no way of knowing. You could have read the entire works of Noam Chomsky (which I pretty much had) and still not had any idea of what direction the world would head in. When those planes hit their targets, they blew a giant hole in history itself, out of which spewed pure uncertainty. (People make a habit of looking back to the days after 9/11 and wistfully noting that Bush had the world’s sympathy and affection, and squandered it. I guess this testifies to the ubiquity of uncertainty, the idea that reasonably intelligent people thought Bush would actually do the right thing.) The old paradigms would no longer hold. A membrane had broken. All around us was the rubble of the past, and as the world kept spinning uncontrollably into the future, I was straining to understand the present.

To make matters worse, 9/11 was the day I lost my faith in images. The myriad ways in which images were being manipulated to whip us into some kind of jingoistic nationalist froth convinced me that images were not to be trusted, as they were almost inherently prone to lie (this is quite a devastating revelation for a film student). As a result of this, while my friends and classmates were reaching for their cameras to make sense of it all, I had no textuality with which to, if not comprehend, than at least recognize what Aeschylus called “the awful grace of God.” I had no vocabulary with which to interpret the tensions that seemed to be ripping apart the fabric of Western civilization. I had no language with which to express (in a way that didn’t make me sound like a militant) that the thing I feared most was my own nation and the torrent of hatred it was likely to unleash on the world. It felt like this was the moment when the xenophobic, apocalyptic undertones of the American right-wing would come raging to the surface and usher in the end of days. Everything swirling around us at that point was patently, maliciously Manichean, and while such absolutes comforted some, they terrified me: reducing the geopolitical rabbit hole to a two-sided prism of good-versus-evil was utter insanity. Like everyone, I felt terribly afraid and utterly alone; nothing I knew well enough to draw upon for strength could address the overwhelming feeling of abandonment that hung over me, the anger I felt toward those asked that ridiculous question, “Why do they hate us?”, or the guilt I felt at so selfishly wanting some kind of resolution visited upon me for having undertaken the debilitating task of simply living through the day. Emotional crutches felt hollow and simplistic; intellectual confrontation with history left me feeling like an idiot for being an innate optimist. I looked up at the brilliant blue sky that day and felt that gone was the time when angels fell to wreak havoc on the world; now it was only airplanes and ballistic missiles. I saw an empty heaven, and I had no way of confronting that.

So there we all were, violently jerked into a new world with no time to truly comprehend what had been lost and no real plan for how to deal with our initiation into the murderous reality we had managed to elude for so long. I went home some time later that day, and still sitting on my living room sofa was my copy of Angels. I picked it up and started rereading different parts. The scene that stopped me cold was a conversation between Harper and the Mormon mother. Harper asks, “In your experience of the world, how do people change?” Rereading this scene, I began to understand that, as is necessary when the world changes, we were on our own to do the stitching and then get up and walk around. We were just mangled guts pretending. The idea that a positivist change could only come as the result of unbearable agony resonated; at the time, surviving the horror of 9/11 required enduring unimaginable suffering. In the weeks that followed I poured over the play again and again. It became for me a framing mechanism with which I was able to comprehend that moment of history. And like the most thrilling works of art, it gave color and shape to what had been, for me, abstract notions of tragedy, fidelity, justice, compassion, wisdom, and love. It simultaneously expanded and honed my comprehension of the devastation wrought by the gale-force winds of progress (as Walter Benjamin put it), and helped train my ears to the birth cry (which all too often comes in the form of a dying scream) of new life at its term (hat tip: Seamus Heaney). It cannot possibly be understated how important Kushner’s words became to me:

—“Before the world becomes finally merely uninhabitable, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”

—“It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at least.”

—“I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas and stories and people dying and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.”

—“Maybe I am a prophet. Not just me, all of us who are dying now. Maybe we've caught the virus of prophecy. Be still, toil no more. Maybe the world has driven God from heaven and incurred the angel's wrath. I believe I've seen the end of things, and having seen I'm going blind as prophets do; it makes a certain sense to me. And if I hate heaven, my only resistance is to run.”

—“You are a battered heart bleeding life into the universe of wounds.”

—“In this world there is a kind of painful progress: longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

And, of course:

—"I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children—they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life."

The enduring legacy of Angels in America in my life is the manner in which it instilled in me—through its magnanimity of intelligence and spirit, and abundance of outrage and empathy—the notion that it is a moral and ethical obligation to not abandon the struggle for justice, even though the struggle very often seems impossible; that it is imperative we stare into the deepest black until we find that needlepoint glimmer of light; that it is not impossible or irresponsible to imagine that there is a place where love and justice finally meet; that it is necessary to live past hope. (Had I been given a more Judaic upbringing, I’m sure this would have occurred to me sooner; as it was, I had such a sheltered WASPish upbringing that I got all the way to college before I learned that Hebrew and Yiddish are two different languages; not a proud moment for me.) In the decade since I first read the play, we have come through such terrible times, and it looks like we will have to endure further madness—just turn on the television and let the images tell you all about the decline and fall of the Republic—but I believe that true progress has been made, progress that doesn’t seem to move the needle when cast against the backdrop of the 24-hour American freak show, but is nonetheless real. Six years after homophobic legislation was used as a state-by-state wedge issue to swing an election, I am truly confident that my generation will be the last one to see laws passed banning gay marriage. Two disastrous military campaigns have turned public opinion against neo-conservative warmongering in ways that I thought only reinstating the draft could. The economic meltdown has galvanized opposition to economic inequality in ways that seemed unimaginable at any other time in the last thirty years. And even amid race relations that are still tense and combustible, no one can dispute that the color of the president’s skin is an irrefutable sign of progress. I am certain that, were it not for Angels in America, I would not be able to see this progress as anything other than blips along the way to inexorable decline. It wouldn’t have been too terribly hard to fathom a decade ago. But every once in a while, when we find ourselves at the utter midnight of hopelessness, a voice rises from the darkness and leads us to a place of knowing. A voice that reverberates through you so profoundly that you feel altered on an almost biological level, as if your heart will never beat the same way again. A voice so powerful and overwhelming that I can only think of it as the voice of God. Sometimes this voice comes from a person or group of people. Sometimes it comes from a work of art. Angels in America is one of those voices. It spoke, I listened, and nothing has ever been the same.

Very Steven Spielberg."

–Jonathan Evans

Jonathan Evans is a Senior Production Editor at Simon & Schuster

ANGELS IN AMERICA Thoughts -- Playwright Sarah Ruhl

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.

"I remember vividly the first time I saw Angels in America in a church in Chicago for the first time. The way the angel exploded language on a simple ladder. Thank God Tony Kushner writes for the American theater, making us believe again (in the age of instant gratification) in seriousness, endurance, political engagement, and language."

–Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright whose plays include In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House