'It's more important than ever.' The enduring influence of Angels in America

Angels in America has been a formative influence on generations of theatre-makers, some of whom are also bringing shows to this year’s Edinburgh festivals. Here, writers share what Angels in America means to them.

Mason Rosenthal (co-creator of Foriegner, Summerhall, 9pm, until 31 August.)

I often use a quote from Tony Kushner when teaching script analysis to theatre artists: “There is a great power in the inability of theatre to create a complete illusion. You believe and disbelieve at the same time. The doubleness of theatre, its poverty of means, teaches you something: you can’t be a literal reader of life, you have to be an interpreter.”

I'm inspired by Angels in America for the way it slams together belief and disbelief. It contains American history and politics, but it also holds the metaphysical. It’s something I’m always trying to do in my own work, and something I think, as Kushner suggests, is uniquely powerful about theatre. It’s a live event that is very real and very fake at the same time.

The show that brought me to Edinburgh this year, Foriegner, also lives at that intersection of politics and the metaphysical, the fake and the real. The piece is grounded in the very real circumstances of Sohrab Haghverdi, an Iranian asylum seeker in the United States. But the performance itself is absurd and challenges audiences to move beyond literal reading of an immigrant story into something more spiritual.

Emery Schaffer (writer of BearGirl, Assembly Roxy, 4.20pm, until 31 August)

In 2018, as a gift to myself for graduating from university, I took myself on a solo date to see Angels In America parts 1 and 2. It was one of the most profound theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and even after all six hours I found myself wishing for it not to end.

As of late, I have questioned my own ability to make a difference to others with my profession. I think of people who have the ability to literally save lives, and sometimes, in moments of doubt, wonder if somewhere along the way I made a wrong turn. But then I think of Angels, how even still it shocks the world, how we’re still discussing its impact on us and on society. I’m reminded that life is earmarked by the plays written about times that require freezing in perpetuity. For me, Angels is a reminder that reminders themselves are essential to our world, and only require words to shape a generation.

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Gregory Nussen (creator of QFWFQ, Summerhall, 11.40am, until 31 August)

“In the States, millennial theatre students like myself were more or less forced to reckon with Tony Kushner’s opus, both as a primer for the operatic possibility of the art form and as an introduction into the beauty (and the bloodshed) of queer life in President Reagan’s brutalist America. But, more than anything, and especially as someone who remained closeted for most of my youth, Kushner’s work helped me understand that self-actualisation was necessary for total artistic expression. Indeed, that one couldn’t come at the expense of the other. That, in order to become the artist I wanted to be, I had to become the person I was meant to realise. Delving into Angels in America was the hinge point upon which all my future and past selves came together.”

Joy Nesbitt (writer-director of Julius Caesar Variety Show, Summerhall, 4.45pm, until 31 August)

“My first encounter with Angels in America was in my bedroom when I was in high school. I watched a bootleg recording of a recent production at the National Theatre that I had found on Tumblr. I was awestruck. As any American teenage girl I was, of course, delighted to see Andrew Garfield (Spiderman to me at the time) in a play that I had never heard of. What I found in those six or so hours sitting on my teenage bed was more than what I bargained for.

Angels in America was a real lesson to me that two truths can be true at the same time. The world is bleak, but we continue to hope. People do terrible things to each other, but we continue to love. People are always dying, but we continue to laugh. This play embraces these contradictions and suggests that, despite it all, we must tumble on. This play has deeply inspired my work, especially because Angels in America delivers a heartfelt truth through absurdism: our society wants us to fail, but our faith in humanity allows us to persist.

As a playwright, I consistently find myself revisiting that text to give myself license to write characters that are foraging through complicated circumstances in which their intersectionality is constantly at odds with their world. Moreover, the play is constantly relevant, addressing that unpicking of the American Utopia we've all been sold, and giving us an unforgettably human story to demonstrate that to us. I am so grateful for that all nighter I pulled to watch that bootleg, and I promise I bought the play afterwards.

Marnina Schon (one half of Couplet, whose new show Folk Marry Kill is at Assembly George Square Studios 4.35pm, until 30 August)

In middle school I was in my first professional production and it was Tony Kushner’s Brundibar. He wrote a new translation from the original Czech libretto, written by a Jewish composer who brought this opera that was an allegory for fascism to the concentration camp where it was put on by imprisoned kids. I got to meet Tony Kushner myself and saw how as a playwright he chose to lift up voices that history has silenced. So then of course I became an Angels in America kind of teen, and still have the “bless me anyway” monologue memorised. Last year I saw an inventive production of it at the Oakland Theatre Project and was just struck by how much it is about this moment right now, of corruption and overlapping crises and how it impacts the queer community.

Fagner Rodrigues (director of Dribble, Underbelly George Square, 11.15am, until 31 August)

Angels in America had a profound impact on me, both personally and artistically. As an artist born in the 1980s, I encountered the work at a formative moment, and it helped shape my understanding of what theatre can hold: complexity, politics, intimacy, and imagination all at once.

As a gay man, I also saw myself reflected in Kushner’s writing in a way that was both rare and transformative. The play’s emotional and political scope gave me permission to explore identity, history, and desire in my own work with greater courage and honesty. It expanded my sense of narrative possibility and reinforced the idea that theatre can be both deeply personal and unapologetically expansive.

Its influence continues to resonate in how I approach storytelling today, especially in my work with Cênica (creators of Dribble), where we strive to create pieces that engage with contemporary urgencies while remaining rooted in human experience.

READ MORE: 'It's really exposing just now.' Telling queer stories at the Fringe

Arden Fitzroy (writer/performer, CVNTCLAVE, Greenside @ George Street, 8.45pm, until 29 August

A scene in Angels in America that haunts me: Louis saying the Kaddish - a mourning prayer - over Roy Cohn’s body, helped by Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost. Even though he doesn’t know the words, even though he despises everything Cohn stands for, he does it for generations of queer people past and to come, for forgiveness as “the place where love and justice meet.” An angel passes on the Great Work to Prior Walter, whether he likes it or not. He transforms it into a blessing and passes it on to us, as a queer audience, whether we like it or not: more life, to share in his addiction to living - and this, now, is more important than it’s ever been, our Great Work of these difficult times. Live: we have always been here, and we too shall be ancestors for the queer people of the future.

Chris Grace (Assembly George Square, 1.40pm, until 31 August)

I'm not sure why I decided to drive from North Carolina to New York City during my college spring break in 1994. I just knew I needed to get to NYC. I was a junior in drama school, and this was the first time I was ever going to see a Broadway show. A "real" show (whatever that meant; I carried a certain snobbery about Broadway that I admit I still possess today). A show that spoke to the current moment, and to me, a once-closeted gay kid and an aspiring playwright. The miles didn't matter, the gas cost didn't matter, the weird idea I had to park my car at a friend's house in New Jersey (not close-to-Manhattan New Jersey but that's-too-far-why-are-you-parking-there New Jersey). And I had one show, or shows, that I had to see: both parts of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

I remember it being quite difficult to get seats; in the end, I wound up sitting all the way to house right, my neck canted at an impossible angle, almost looking into the wings, but it was an epic, operatic, transformative show, and it didn't matter that I was seeing it almost orthogonally. It didn't matter that because of the scarcity of tickets I had to watch the second part Perestroika first (I wasn't confused, I had read the plays in preparation). It didn't matter that on some level seeing such a beautiful work by yourself can sometimes feel the loneliest experience, you don't know the strangers next to you well enough to turn to them and say, "I have witnessed this, and now I will be an ARTIST!" (Although maybe it's better I didn't have friends or family around to exclaim something like that to.)

There's a Japanese word – yoin – for the afterglow of a moment that has just ended. I lived in the yoin after seeing Angels in America for hours, days, certainly the rest of the week, and the entire gruelling drive home. I returned to North Carolina with sparks of scenes from those plays that live in my mind still today... Jeffrey Wright angling his wrist across the horizon as he said the word "mauve". The comedic stutter of a character admitting they were... Gay? Republican? (Both?) The simultaneous beauty and terror of a righteous angel. I continue to carry those moments, and the grandeur and sweep, and the exhilaration of seeing theatre that felt Important, defiant of conservative thought and control. For me, seeing that show is when the Great Work began.

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