Angels in America

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Angels in America swept American theatre's major honors: the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Millennium Approaches, the Tony Award for Best Play in both 1993 and 1994 for its two parts, and, decades later, the Tony for Best Revival of a Play in 2018 along with acting awards for Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane. It is now routinely named among the most important American plays of the twentieth century.

Its handling of Mormon belief has drawn its own scholarly attention, most directly in a 1997 essay by Michael Austin in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Austin argues that Kushner's angel plot is not a generic Christian device borrowed for effect but draws on real Latter-day Saint theological structure, particularly the idea of continuing revelation through direct encounter with the divine. He is equally direct about where the play falls short: Kushner's Hannah treats any departure from Utah as a near total break from Mormon community and belief, a picture Austin says misrepresents how most Latter-day Saints living outside Utah actually experience their faith, where community and belief travel with a person rather than staying behind. Read together, the praise and the correction describe a play that engaged Mormon theology seriously enough to get its structure right and its sociology wrong.