Angels in America in New York Again

The first New York revival of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning two-part epic work, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, will be staged by Signature Theatre Company as part of their 20th anniversary season in 2010-2011. Signature, which devotes an entire season to a single playwright's work, announced that part one, Millennium Approaches and part two, Perestroika, will run in repertory; the theater also plans to have performance days where the plays (each three and a half hours) are presented back to back. As usual with Signature, all tickets for the initial run will be sold for $20, thanks to a grant from Time Warner.

Set in late 1985 and early 1986 during the first big wave of the AIDS epidemic in America, "Angels" weaves together several melodramatic, haunting, and darkly humorous narratives, including that of a young gay man with AIDS and his unfaithful lover; a closeted Mormon lawyer and his valium-addicted wife; infamous New York lawyer Roy Cohn; and a steel-winged, prophecy-bearing angel. The Off Broadway revival will be directed by Michael Greif (Grey Gardens, RENT), but no casting has been announced yet.

Asked how the theater would meet production challenges like [SPOILER ALERT] the angel crashing through the ceiling at the end of part one, artistic director James Houghton tells the Times, "We don’t know yet how we’re solving that particular challenge... but the great thing about theater is that limitations often yield truly creative and original results." Signature is currently embarking on its season devoted to recently-deceased playwright Horton Foote; tickets for the first production go on sale September 11th.