A Vision of Empathy: On Watching ‘Angels in America’

I had the chance to see it, “the greatest American play of the waning years of the 20th century.” Angels in America was being produced at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 1994, and I held tickets. The play had won the Pulitzer, the Tony, and heaps of praise by then, and I wanted in on the cultural moment. But when curtain time drew near for Part One: Millennium Approaches, on a weeknight after a full day at the office and with my kids waiting at home, I collapsed.  I didn’t have the stamina to sit through a two-intermission, 3.5 hour play that would run until almost midnight. My husband accompanied me home, gallantly never once mentioning our forfeit of the orchestra seats we’d splurged on.

Regret welled up as soon as I walked in the door. I saw that the kids would’ve been perfectly fine without me—there were three of them; they were a self-entertaining lot, and the babysitter was a dream. We didn’t call it FOMO then but my Fear of Missing Out was every bit as gnawing. I compensated in the years that followed by seeing other Tony Kushner works—; ; ; ; and the Spielberg movies he wrote, and . I went to hear Kushner speak and was amazed at his ravening curiosity, the breadth of his knowledge. Listening to him give a five-part answer to a one-part question was like watching Robin Williams scoop up a stray phrase and run with it, pausing after a couple of miles to let the rest of us catchmini-series more than once. But none of those offerings, dazzling as they were, matched in my imagination the sublime experience of seeing performed live onstage.