In celebration of the play’s 20th anniversary, the Museum of Performance & Design will mount an extraordinary new exhibition, More Life! Angels in America at Twenty, which opens November 6, 2010 and runs through March 26, 2011.
Angels in America was commissioned and premiered by San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company and produced to mounting acclaim at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum and London’s National Theatre. The play burst on to Broadway in 1993, winning multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. An unlikely blockbuster, this seven-hour epic in two parts (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) took audiences on a dizzying journey from New York to Heaven and everywhere in-between, following a group of unforgettable characters as they grappled with AIDS, identity, community, love, death, and transcendence in Reagan-era America.
Simultaneously hilarious, disturbing, and moving, Angels permanently stretched the boundaries of theatre and elevated Kushner to the ranks of America’s finest playwrights. Angels has since been produced in countless productions around the globe, published in dozens of languages, made into a groundbreaking HBO film that swept the Emmy Awards, and transformed into an opera. This fall, as Signature Theatre Company mounts the first New York revival in almost two decades, San Francisco’s Museum of Performance & Design brings Angels back to the city where it all began.
Organized by Brad Rosenstein, MPD’s Curator of Exhibitions and Programs, More Life! Angels in America at Twenty will immerse visitors in the magical world of the play, tracing it from its earliest development in Kushner’s notebooks to its premiere in San Francisco, from its triumphs in London and on Broadway to the HBO film, the opera, and the brand-new Signature Theatre production in New York (which begins performances in September). The exhibition brings together a thrilling array of original costumes, props, manuscripts, video clips, photos, designs, and other rare memorabilia from key productions of Angels, as well as new audio and video interviews conducted especially for the exhibition with many of the play’s creators and participating artists.
Playwright Tony Kushner and members of the original Broadway cast of Angels will attend the exhibition’s gala opening Friday, November 5th and Mr. Kushner will participate in a public conversation with curator Brad Rosenstein Saturday, November 6.
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