KUSHNER, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992 (Millennium Approaches) and 1993 (Perestroika).

Tony Kushner (b. 1956) was born in New York and grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where his family had moved for reasons he later described as having given him the particular advantage of being an outsider in exactly the circumstances that would matter most to his work. He studied at Columbia and at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Angels in America, written in two parts and premiered separately between 1991 and 1992, is the work on which his reputation rests — and it is a work of such ambition and such achievement that "rests" is perhaps the wrong word; it continues to generate productions, revivals, academic study, and cultural argument across the thirty years since its premiere.

The play is set in New York City in 1985 and 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and follows several interlocking sets of characters: Prior Walter, a gay man who has just been diagnosed with AIDS and is being left by his partner Louis; Joe Pitt, a closeted Republican lawyer and his pill-addicted wife Harper; and Roy Cohn, the real historical figure — lawyer, power broker, architect of McCarthyism — who is dying of AIDS while publicly denying it and privately demanding experimental treatments as his due. The supernatural apparatus of the play — angels, ghosts, visions, the dead speaking to the living — is not ornamental: Kushner is asking, through these visitations, what it means to live through a historical catastrophe, and what obligations the past and the future impose on the present.

Part I, Millennium Approaches, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Part II, Perestroika, won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Play. Harold Bloom called it the finest American play since Death of a Salesman. The HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols in 2003 — with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jeffrey Wright — won eleven Emmy Awards and brought the play to a global audience of millions. A 2018 Broadway revival directed by Marianne Elliott won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Kushner has also written the screenplays for Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005) and Lincoln (2012), the latter earning him an Academy Award nomination.

Near fine. Marking to upper edge gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000520