Why "Angels in America" endures: "Without gay people, you can’t tell the story of America"

When Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," landed on Broadway in 1993 it forever changed how gay lives were depicted in popular culture. It won a Tony Award, a Pulitzer Prize and sparked a hit HBO adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino.

The revival of Kushner's groundbreaking two-part epic, timed for its 25th anniversary,  broke the record for most number of Tony Award nominations in Broadway history, picking up eleven nods, including Best Revival of a Play, Best Director for Marianne Elliott, and acting nominations for Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, Denise Gough and Susan Brown. The production runs through July 15 at New York's Neil Simon Theatre.

Isaac Butler and Dan Kois are the authors of "The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America," an oral history of the play and the movie. The book pieces together nearly 250 interviews, including Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker, Nathan Lane, and Kushner. For both Kois and Butler, who are huge fans of the show, they took great care to ensure that the oral history matched the aesthetic and overall themes of the original production.

As Kois told Salon, “The play is so much about the interchange of voices and a dialectic of people arguing points . . . points of love and faith and politics and idealism. And so the idea of having all these people talk to each other on our pages seemed like a great way to sort of pay tribute to that.”

Kois and Butler sat down in Salon's studio earlier this year to talk about their book, Kushner's play and how "Angels in America" changed everything.

It’s kind of unusual to do a oral history of a Broadway play. So how did this book come to be?

Dan Kois: I pitched it as a piece at Slate, the magazine where I work, and when that piece got approved, I asked Isaac to come in on it with me because it was a big project and a big story to tell. The play had meant a lot to me growing up. Seeing on Broadway and reading it while I was in college was a really formative, artistic and aesthetic experience for me, and I thought it would be a great story to tell, and it turned out… It was a great story.

The reason it’s in oral history, and that was something that Isaac and I sort of came to almost immediately without a lot of hemming and hime.

Isaac Butler: Yeah. I actually don’t remember when we decided or how we decided to sort of… the epiphany was that it was going to be in oral history.

Kois: “Oh yeah, it’s in oral history, right?” “Yes,” that was the discussion. Because the play is so much about the interchange of voices and the dialect of people arguing points, points of love and faith and politics and idealism. The idea of having all these people talk to each other on our pages seemed like a great way to pay tribute to that.

The title, "The World Only Spins Forward," comes from the play, it’s a quote from the play. Why did you pick that particular quote?

Butler: Pretty early on we knew every section of the play was going to have a title that was a line from the play. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

Kois: Maximalist, in the play’s spirit.

Butler: Yeah. As someone who struggles with titles for things, it was really helpful to have an eight hour long play with rich, beautiful language you can just pick and choose. I think that this is a book that covers decades of US history and Tony Kushner’s life. It covers a wide variety of different issues beyond the play and within the play itself, and this idea that we are always turning forward the changes always happening, that it is inevitable, whether it’s change for good or for ill, is very important to both the play and the story of the play at the same time.

Kois: Right. The play makes a real argument that in the speech that the title comes from, Pryor’s final speech at the end, it makes a real argument that change is not only inevitable, but they are sort of the foundational human state. In writing this book we were making, we thought a real argument about the play’s importance in the last 25 years of American history, and the way that it sort of dovetailed with that history. We wanted a title that helped us make that argument.

I think it’s interestingly pressing because the tension between progress and change and those who want time to stand still…

Butler: Or move backwards if possible.

It feels pretty pressing these days. How did the things that have been happening politically inform your process of writing this book, because I know that you all started it before Trump’s election and all that?

Butler: Oh yeah. Well I mean when we started the article, I don’t think we had any idea that these will be the circumstances under which we were reporting the story. When we started working on the book, Trump was a joke and then about halfway through our work on the book, he was elected president of the United States. Actually, the production that’s about to come over to Broadway, their first rehearsal in the UK, was his inauguration day.

I do think that it became… it sort of changed everything about our conversations on some level because it suddenly became, “Oh, this play,” and the story I’m telling you about this play, the subjects that we talked to, it is actually about what’s happening now. It’s not just about these grand themes that come again and again. It’s like this is the ship we are going through at this very moment. It gave it a certain presence that was different.

Kois:  It became so much more urgent for us just by the fact that the president learned that [0:04:37 inaudible], that character in Angles of America, and suddenly this historical figure who I think for many, especially younger people who are potential readers of this book, was sort of a figure out of the myths of history who have maybe had something to do with McCarthyism and who remembers what that is, all over sudden became the evil wizard to our current president who I taught him everything he knew. That just in and of itself gave us a sort of kick in the ass in what it was we wanted to do with this book.

Roy Cohn obviously in the play is a fictionalized version of the real person who did die of AIDS in the '80s and did lie about it. How do you think audiences felt about this character in the '90s when the play was written versus how it reads to audiences now?

Butler: They had real mixed feeling about him, because on stage he is a great character man.

Kois: He’s delicious.

Butler: He’s so much fun to watch, he’s so repugnant but funny and charming, and he gets off these great one liners. He has this bravura opening scene where he’s handling the phone. Oscar Eusters talks in the book about having this incredible experience when the full production of both parts first opened in Los Angeles in 1992 during Roy Cohn’s death scenes. Spoiler, he dies. Of hearing people in the audience start crying at the scene, which is as very moving and emotionally difficult scene, yet also is like a happy ending. I think that audiences in the 90s struggled with that. A lot of those audiences particularly were people for whom McCarthy was still a particularly fresh memory who’d been touched by it in many ways. Seeing that character and watching what he went through, and watching him grasp just a tiny bit of this humanity was both moving and sort of delicious to watch.

Now I think it’s almost impossible to watch. I mean this was the case when we saw the show in London by summer. It’s almost impossible to watch him and not think very directly of the current administration in the United States and to see the parallels between for example, the way that Roy Cohn in the play, massages lawyers and massages people investigating him, and the way that the Trump administration tries to go after people investigating them, skills that Trump and people he works with learn from Roy Cohn.

When I got the book in the mail, I flipped straight to the back and looked at how many times you all mention Donald Trump. It’s so pressing right now. I think that goes to, with Trump in office, you hear a lot of people, like even liberals, comparing him negatively to Ronald Reagan. I think that’s interesting for this book in this play because this play takes place in the 80s. I just want to invite you all to respond to people who are like, “Trump is degrading the office unlike Ronald Reagan.”

Butler: Yeah. We saw a similar thing with George W. Bush, who sort of had this weird redemptive [narrative] because he’s no longer the worst president.

Kois: Of our lifetime.

Butler: He’s now the second worst. I will say that I was reading a lot about Watergate last year too. The day Sessions accused themselves, I was like, “I’m going to get some books about Watergate.” When you read up on that and you read up on Reagan and you read up on Bush, Trump is an aberration, that he’s an incredibly extreme form of this thing, but there’s absolutely a continuum that runs Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, Trump. They get more extreme in each version, but you have the lawlessness, the inviting corruption, you have the bigotry and widespread discrimination. There are very, very similar things that unite all four of those presidents I think actually. There is a way in which I think the people who lived through the Reagan years who have a chance to talk about it in this book, those quotes will feel very familiar and very present to people who are living through the Trump years now, that emotional current of what it’s like to be a human being with a conscience, living under this administration. It’s not that different from the emotional currents of being a living human being with a conscience under Reagan.

Kois: Right. It’s like a reminder that Reagan and Trump were different in that Reagan had gravitas and respect for the office which Trump does not have. I mean he’s sort of almost… he’s comically anti gravitas. But their policies are not that different from one another, and the sort of shit shows that their administrations can become underneath them, underneath their sort of blind eyes. Reagan’s for one reason and Trump’s for another or maybe not, who knows. What their administrations can and are devolving into are very similar.

This play came out in the '90s and it takes place in the '80s. I think it’s safe to say that the world has spun quite a bit forward since them, particularly when it comes to the social acceptance of homosexuality. I think for a young person now watching this play would be difficult to like even grasp how bad it was in the 80s. how do you think that that affect modern audiences that maybe don’t remember the 1980s or even really maybe the 1990s?

Kois: I think it’s hard. We talked to actually to a lot of professors, teachers in high schools and colleges who teach this show. In theater classes and English classes and street classes. Unanimously they said that the hardest part about teaching this is just truly trying to make it clear to young people, just what life was like for gay people and outcasts in general to society in the '80s and early '90s. Not only sort of the bigotry that they face, not only the structural barriers that stood in front of them, but also the effects of AIDS.

AIDS to many, many young people now is one of a bevy of vaguely menacing manageable chronic diseases that you may or may not get if you have sex with someone, as opposed to being just a straight up death sentence, which is what it was for an entire generation of people. It’s getting that across to get them to understand the stakes of the play for everyone involved is incredibly difficult.

I think that’s interesting because it still has a reputation 25 years later as a play about AIDS, and it’s obviously about that. For somebody’s who’s never seen it before, what would you want to tell them about it?

Butler: Wow. Well I mean I would say that the subtitle of the play, right, it’s Angels in America, a gay fantasia on national themes. To me it is really about AIDS but it’s also about those national themes. It is about who are we as a people, what kind of people do we want to be, what it the left vision of America or rather the multiplicity of left visions in America and of right visions in America, because they both get represented here. The ways that kind of AIDS is in the play, it’s opening this door that all these other stuff can come into. It really is about the meaning of America itself is to me, what I get hit by again and again as I read and reread it.

Kois: Right, the meaning of America, particularly is it making argument about that, meaning being intrinsically and irremovably tied to the lives of gay people.

Without gay people, you can’t tell the story of America. For good and ill in the case of Ray Cohn and many people like him, that they inflect that entire story. The other thing, I wanted to make sure that people know about this play, is that… We saw the production of London last summer that is not coming to Broadway. When I went to London to see this production, I stayed in an Airbnb by Waterloo station with this very nice, maybe 24-year-old guy who is a huge theater fan, and I asked him, “Well, are you going to see Angels in America?” and he was like, “You know, everyone is talking about it but it just seems so depressing.” I wanted to shake him, I didn’t because that would be a violation of the Airbnb service agreement. I wanted to shake him and be like, “It’s the funniest fucking play of the last 30 years.” That is so funny and so entertaining just like wildly, outrageously so, that for anyone to think that it’s a downer makes me like so angry.

Butler: Yeah. There’s a quote that George C. Wolfe in the book repeats that Ron Lehman used to say before they go on stage. It’s something to the effect of everything that happens, happens in this play.

Kois: Everything in the world, it happens in this play.

Butler: Everything in the world happens in this play. It really is like that. It’s the most devastating play and the funniest play. It is the most serious play and the silliest play. It is all of these things all at the same time, and that along with how much actual time you spend with these characters, it’s part of why it has such a massive impact on you when you see it.

Dan saw this play on Broadway in ’94, because you saw both parts. It was utterly life changing to him, and when he reached out to me he learned that I too saw this play in both parts in ’94. It was utterly life changing for me, and when we embarked on this process what we learned is that there’s basically like a generation of people who see theater for whom going to see both parts of this play, changed their lives. It’s not every play that there’s like thousands of people for whom that is true. It’s because everything in the world happens in this play.

You did nearly 250 interviews for this book, of actors, directors, writers, all sorts of people. You are going to kill me for asking this, but who was your favorite interview?

Kois: Great question.

Butler: I’m forcing Dan to go first with my eyes here.

Kois: I mean the easy answer is Kushner because he is a great talker. I don’t actually know that that was my favorite interview because I spent a lot of it like just desperately trying to get it, steer it back to like the actual practical things I needed him to answer like, “What year was this?” It was like a great one man show to which I was lucky enough to bear witness.

I really, really enjoyed our conversation with James McCall who is playing Louis on Broadway right now and who played Louis at the National Theater last year. He’s a Scottish actor, I didn’t know him at all. He’s a very handsome gentleman, he’s a good theater actor, he’s been on a couple of British TV shows, but he’s also just a relentless shit talker of his cascades and the play in general. He clearly has a deep well of affection for this experience. It clearly is an incredibly meaningful moment in his life and artistic career. But also, he’s just very funny and was very candid about the moments of panic he had along the way, and then the moments of panic that he watched all his fellow cast members go through where he just like scoffed at them. That was a delightful interview.

Butler: I second the Kushner as the obvious choice. One of the very first interviews I did that made it clear to me what the scope of this project actually was because I thought it was going to be a 45 minute long interview and it was a two and a half hour long interview or whatever, was with Eleanor McLaughlin who took over the role of the Angel from her best friend who died of cancer, and then played the angel subsequently in every production of the play’s development, through to when it was on Broadway.

Eleanor is herself a writer and deep, deep thinker and really amazing person. I don’t know, we were crying together on the phone, talking about parts of the story and we were laughing together telling the story and she’d sort of mapped out kind of what the spiritual and emotional terrain of the story was, at least through that Broadway production, in a way that was very definitional to this whole project. Writers sort of two thirds the way through, she was like, “I think you are actually working on a book and you might not know this yet, but you are actually working on a book,” and she turned out to be right.

Another actor in those productions, Cathy Soufan, said something similar to Dan. I’m eternally grateful to her for mapping that whole thing out in that way that she did because she’s a very smart reader of text. In the ways that the angels we interviewed tended to be, because all of the people we interviewed who were angels had this sort of celestial insight into the world and the people around them in the play.

Kois: They all seemed like they could be guerillas and in fact one or two of them have in fact dropped acting and are now like life coaches.

Amazing. Like real angels.

Kois:  Yeah. Like, “I’m good at being an angel, I’ll just keep doing this.”