In this review of a production encompassing both parts ofKushner'splay, critic Gelb praises the playwright's ability to fuse entertainment with important social issues while maintaining an epic scope.

In Angels in America (most recently at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles), a two-part, seven-hour workup, Tony Kushner has written an enormously entertaining play while at the same time treating important matters seriously. Kushner de-ghettoizes the AIDS play, placing the disease, like the destruction of the ozone layer or Americans' flight from mutual responsibility in the Reagan era, at the heart of a national and planetary collapse. Mixing realism, fevered hallucination and otherworldly theatrical effects, he pulls back from the tight close-up of so much American drama to underscore a connection between public destiny and love and responsibility in personal relationships. Angels in America stands as a kind of lighthouse on the coast of a new era...