In Tony Kushner heaven with 'Angels in America'

For scarily close to two decades, "Angels in America" has been on my short list of theater I've been wanting - no, needing - to see again.

Tony Kushner's two-part, seven-hour extravaganza, which won a Pulitzer Prize for the first half and a Tony Award for each section in 1993 and 1994, is a life-marker for the American theater - and, I firmly believe, for America itself.

Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the epic managed to be both important and wonderful, both vast and intimate - an apocalyptic vision of the sexual, political and spiritual unraveling of America at the end of the 20th century that, not incidentally, zipped along with the delightful lusciousness of a popcorn movie.

And now it is back, revived in a new production as part of the all-Kushner year at Off-Broadway's invaluable Signature Theatre Company. And, except for the rest of the Kushner season, it is the event I'm most excited to see despite New York's unusually enticing theater schedule.

"We have been working on planning this season with Tony for four years," says James Houghton, artistic director of the Signature, "and bringing 'Angels' back to New York has always been a part of the conversation." He says that as the theater moves into production, "the play consistently reaffirms and renews its monumental achievements within the context of the present moment."

Kushner has been very much a part of the process, Houghton says. "Tony is everything you would hope him to be - fiercely intelligent, passionate, funny, empathetic."

In addition to "Angels," currently in previews for an Oct. 28 opening (and already extended to Feb. 20), the series includes the New York premiere of Kushner's first play since his spookily prescient "Homebody / Kabul," his stunning 2001 journey to the heart of Afghanistan.

The new work is "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures" and opens March 22 at the Public Theater. Kushner, whose rhapsodic love of language spills endearingly into his titles, calls this one "iHo." Co-produced by the Signature, the Public and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where it had its workshop premiere last year, the play involves a reunion between a retired Brooklyn longshoreman and his children.

Both "Angels" and "iHo" will be staged by Michael Greif, whom most theatergoers know as the musical director of "Rent," "Grey Gardens" and "Next to Normal." For early Kushner watchers, however, Greif was the kid who directed the unknown playwright's first drama, a time-traveling visit to the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic called "A Bright Room Called Day," at the Public in 1991.

I remember it as unwieldy and pretty obvious. But it was also ambitious, full of ghosts and passionate political forebodings, a big, dense play of ideas to be welcomed, whatever its flaws, in an era of apolitical American isolationist theater. "Look to the cracks where the seams don't meet," a character warns, alluding to the smooth surfaces of the Reagan era. "Listen to your nightmares."

Looking back, I wonder if there was a way to anticipate "Angels," the masterwork on the horizon. I do know that it's hard to explain the shock of its vast canvas, hallucinatory style and political fury on a theater stuck in domestic stories and individual pathologies.

I first read the monster of a script before the premiere of both parts in 1991 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It may be hard to imagine, but President Reagan and Vice President George Bush had never mentioned the word AIDS, even though the culture wars were raging and the mysterious plague had been scorching the earth of the gay community through the late '80s.

I remember being blown away by the playwright's brilliance. But I was at least as overwhelmed by the subversive courage of this guy, a late-blooming, exquisitely well-educated playwright with a little apartment in Brooklyn, who, at 36, had been working since 1988 on a play that simply would not end.

The roots of "Angels" are as twisted and untidy as its form is massive. It began life as a commission from Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone at the tiny Eureka Theatre in San Francisco. (They directed the excellent Taper production, but were replaced by George C. Wolfe on Broadway.) As Kushner recalled to me in an interview before the Taper opening in 1992, Eustis (now head of the Public) and Taccone (who runs the Berkeley Rep) wanted "two hours with songs or something. By the time I finished writing, I realized it was not, uh, finished, that it was only the first half."

During rehearsals for an early production of the first half (subtitled "Millennium Approaches"), Kushner was finishing a 5 1/2-hour version of the second half ("Perestroika") which ran 293 pages. Meanwhile, as he understates the surreal scene, "a kind of excitement built up around" the first half, culminating in a celebrated production in London and national praise from Ian McKellen on the Tony Awards. This was two years before the first part of the Broadway production even opened.

"Millennium" started on Broadway while Kushner was still rewriting the second half, which the cast - eight actors playing 30 characters - had to learn and rehearse on the fly. "Perestroika" didn't open for six months, making it the longest cliffhanger in Broadway history. Not counting ghosts and angels, at least three stories run through both parts: a gay Jewish man and his lover, dying miserably from AIDS; a gay Republican Mormon in denial, his agoraphobic Valium-addled wife and his Mormon mother; and Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer and political carnivore, who simply can't have AIDS because homosexuals are men who "have zero clout." There's a Mormon diorama, a scene in which Ethel Rosenberg channels the Kaddish and, of course, a fluffy angel who bursts through a ceiling to announce "the great work begins."

Soon after the "Angels" phenomenon, Kushner kept us busy with smaller work - including the irresistible "Slavs," a Russian tragicomedy based on spinoffs from "Perestroika," and his taut adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's "The Good Person of Setzuan" (directed by Greif) and his adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 1636 "The Illusion" (which will be directed by Michael Mayer at the Signature in the spring). Except for "Homebody / Kabul" and Mike Nichols' enormously satisfying star-encrusted "Angels" staging for HBO in 2003, our only word from Kushner was "Caroline, or Change," the honorable but bland musical collaboration with Wolfe and composer Jeanine Tesori.

But now we have prime Kushner back, along with the promise of new work. I keep thinking about a scene in "Slavs," when the "world's oldest living Bolshevik" warns the new Soviets against proceeding without first knowing where to go. The old man promptly keels over, after which another apparatchik observes, "That was his best bit." As the Angel might put it, Kushner's best bits continue.

WHEN | WHERE Signature Theatre, 555 W. 42nd St. "Angels in America" will be presented separately and in all-day marathons, each section $20 until Dec. 19 (sold out), $85 after Dec. 21; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org.