Signature Sets Start Date for Off-Broadway Revival of Angels in America

Signature Theatre Company’s previously announced off-Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes will begin performances on September 14 and open in late October. The epic two-part work, which consists of Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, will be presented in repertory from the beginning of the run, kicking off a season that will include two more Kushner works yet to be announced. Michael Greif will direct.

According to a January 14 release, “the initial announced run” of Angels in America will feature $20 tickets. Casting is currently underway.

Angels in America is set in late 1985 and early 1986 as the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in America is escalating and Ronald Reagan has been elected to a second term. The play’s two parts bring together a young gay man with AIDS and his frightened, unfaithful lover; a closeted Mormon lawyer and his Valium-addicted wife; the infamous New York lawyer Roy Cohn; an African-American male nurse; a Mormon housewife from Utah; and a steel-winged, prophecy-bearing angel, as well as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, an ancient rabbi, the world’s oldest living Bolshevik and a Reagan administration functionary, all played by a company of eight actors. The lives of these disparate characters intersect, intertwine, collide and are blown apart during a time of heartbreak and transformation.

Millennium Approaches, opened on May 4, 1993, and Perestroika, opened on November 23, 1993, with the two parts eventually playing in repertory. The two plays won Best Play Tony Awards in 1993 and 1994 and Millennium Approaches won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Kushner adapted the plays for an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries, which premiered in 2003.

Signature is currently presenting the world premiere of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, a trilogy of plays by Horton Foote.