Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika » (Part 2)

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.

The second half of Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic steers the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches from the opportunistic 1980s to a new sense of community in the 1990s, as they struggle to overcome catastrophic loss. Scheduled to open on Broadway and at London's Royal National Theatre this fall.

Library Journal

The same masterful writing that won Kushner the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Millenneum Approaches (Part 1 of Angels, Theatre Communications Grp., 1993) is carried forward here. Capable of being understood as a self-contained play, Perestroika continues from the final scene of Millenneum, wherein an angel had crashed through the ceiling of young Prior's apartment. One is shocked, moved, touched, and saddened yet ultimately uplifted by this delightful story involving the angel, Prior, and six other mortal characters. Kushner uses his humor and wit to show the harshness, fear, and sadness that surrounds anyone touched by AIDS. Prior's closing statement, spoken to the audience, speaks for this play as well: "This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one." Essential for contemporary drama collections.-H. Robert Malinowsky, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago