Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is an ordeal. A play to be wrestled with. It is funny, disturbing, thrilling, intellectual, guttural, erotic, angry, despairing, hopeful. It is overwhelming. It is eight hours long. Now, it’s back on Broadway for the first time since it debuted in 1993, arriving for a limited run at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre almost fully intact from London’s National Theatre, where it was mounted last summer. As I continue to paw and puzzle over director Marianne Elliott and co.’s dazzling production of Kushner’s work, which I had the odd luck of seeing in one long stretch, a “two-play day,” in the midst of a late-March snowstorm, I kept coming back to the inconceivability that something should be so spectacular, entertaining and mainstream, while also so incisively highbrow, lofty, and academic. Ironically, considering the team of Brits that brought this Angel to life, it is also distinctly American: a great cobbling of the political and historical, with some camp thrown in for fun, peppered with references to Tennessee Williams and Tallulah Bankhead, Shakespeare and the Bible. D …Read more