"Prepare the way…" -- a supernatural admonition given to a young man in 1985, new to his first lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, a devastating indication of the AIDS virus. Meanwhile, a valium-addicted housewife calls on "Mr. Lies", her hallucinogen-induced travel agent, ready to take her wherever she needs to go, for an escape from her phobias and suspicions about her husband, Joe. Across town, Ethel Rosenberg, a woman executed for being a Communist spy in 1953, appears as a ghost to Roy Cohn, a right-wing closeted lawyer, chiefly responsible for putting the Rosenbergs in the chair. He counts this among his major accomplishments. He's also infected with AIDS.
The scope Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award winning two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes", is broad. Incorporating the topics of AIDS, religion, death, politics, corruption, and then some, with a few supernatural visits thrown in, could seem over-whelming, if not for Kushner's ability to bring all of these subjects down to a common denominator. A responsive chord that brings Reagan-Era philosophies and the hopeless devastation of the AIDS virus together under the ageless umbrella of an undeniable humanity.
The scope Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award winning two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes", is broad. Incorporating the topics of AIDS, religion, death, politics, corruption, and then some, with a few supernatural visits thrown in, could seem over-whelming, if not for Kushner's ability to bring all of these subjects down to a common denominator. A responsive chord that brings Reagan-Era philosophies and the hopeless devastation of the AIDS virus together under the ageless umbrella of an undeniable humanity.
