In 1992 and 1993, inside theaters on both coasts of the United States and across the Atlantic in London, an unearthly being “spreading great opalescent gray-silver wings” came crashing through a bedroom ceiling. This was the first major sighting of an epic angel since the archangel Michael vanished near the very end of Paradise Lost. The heavens had been remarkably silent for more than 300 years before Tony Kushner tapped into their faded, half-ruined splendors in his two-part extravaganza, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on American Themes. In the climax to Part 1, Millennium Approaches, the young man into whose room the silver gray angel makes such an over-the-top entrance, with blasts of music and a rainbow of colored lights amid a shower of plaster from the cracked ceiling, is at first speechless with fright. But then awed by the spectacle in which he finds himself, he at last manages a stage whisper: “God almighty … Very Stephen Spielberg.”

There had been hints in several earlier scenes of Kushner's play of preternatural forces at work—a large feather falling to the floor, a mysterious voice proclaiming itself a messenger, ethereal music emanating from no visible source, a steel book that rises up through the stage trap-door and bursts into flames. But the audience—and the young man, Prior Walter, growing more and more delirious with AIDS—must wait until the final moments of Millennium Approaches for the angel herself to materialize. Like Elizabeth Taylor's wink in Cleopatra, Prior Walter's response to the angel's appearance is a burst of camp that makes us distance ourselves from the spectacle we have just witnessed. Here, however, there is more than just Cleopatra's visual joke. As a play situated within the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Angels in America persistently blends horror and hilarity while always taking seriously both individual suffering and the large social and political forces in which the crisis plays out. Gay culture at a particular moment is placed within the context of the long cultural history of the United States and that juxtaposition invites both comedy and sober analysis. The play could not be true to gay experience and gay habits of coping without camp, drag, self-conscious exaggeration in speech and mannerism, and gallows humor.