This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is not, on its surface, a play about Mormonism. Its two parts, Millennium Approaches, which premiered in San Francisco in May 1991, and Perestroika, which premiered in Los Angeles in November 1992, are set in New York City in the mid-1980s and follow characters navigating the AIDS crisis, closeted sexuality and the political culture of the Reagan era. But one of its most important characters is Hannah Pitt, a devout Latter-day Saint from Salt Lake City whose son Joe is a closeted gay Mormon clerk.
When Hannah relocates to New York, she becomes the play's central spiritual guide for Prior Walter, a gay man dying of AIDS who has begun receiving visitations from an angel, delivering him a buried book and what the play frames as a prophetic calling. Rather than telling Prior to submit to the angel or dismiss the vision outright, Hannah counsels him to wrestle with it, language that reaches back to the biblical story of Jacob wrestling an angel at the river Jabbok and, scholars have argued, to Joseph Smith's own accounts of angelic visitation. The play's model of divine communication, in which a human being can meet the divine directly and even resist it, sits closer to the Latter-day Saint belief in ongoing, personal revelation than to the cessationist assumptions common in most other American Christian traditions it touches.