The play’s settings range from Central Park cruising grounds to Antarctica and the afterlife. Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour epic, which was commissioned in the late 1980s and opened in its entirety on Broadway in 1993, mixes fictional characters with real-life figures such as Roy Cohn, the ruthless lawyer who died of Aids, and Ethel Rosenberg, the woman he sent to the electric chair for spying. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianĪngels in America adopts a more expansive, fantastical approach. He was played by Brad Davis, the star of Midnight Express and Querelle, who died of Aids six years later.įantastical … Nancy Crane and Stephen Dillane in Angels In America at the NT in 1993. In front of a set on which the rising fatalities and the names of the dead were scrawled and updated with each performance, Kramer’s crusading onstage alter-ego Ned Weeks ranted, raged and fell desperately in love. In The Normal Heart, which opened off-Broadway in April 1985, playwright and activist Larry Kramer dramatised his own struggle to force politicians, doctors and the gay community to confront a disease many were treating with scepticism or indifference. But even now, after all those works, the conversation about Aids is still dominated by two American plays that arrived in the early days of that pandemic. It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s Channel 4 series, is only the most recent entry on a very long list. O n 3 July 1981, a single-column item appeared on page 20 of the New York Times under the headline: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” In the four decades since, the cultural response to Aids has spanned every art form.

Angels in america part one