Characters
The play is written for eight actors, each of whom plays two or more roles. Kushner's doubling, as indicated in the published script, requires several of the actors to play the opposite sex.
There are nine main characters:
Prior Walter – A gay man with AIDS. Throughout the play, he experiences various heavenly visions. When the play begins, he is dating Louis Ironson. His best friend is a nurse named Belize.
Louis Ironson – Prior's boyfriend. Unable to deal with Prior's disease, he ultimately abandons him. He meets Joe Pitt and later begins a relationship with him.
Harper Pitt – A neurotic Mormon housewife with incessant Valium-induced hallucinations. After a revelation from Prior (whom she meets when his heavenly vision and her hallucination cross paths), she discovers that her husband is gay and struggles with it, considering it a betrayal of her marriage.
Joe Pitt – Harper's husband and a deeply closeted gay Mormon, clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, and friend of Roy Cohn. Joe eventually abandons his wife for a relationship with Louis. Throughout the play, he struggles with his sexual identity.
Roy Cohn – A closeted gay lawyer, based on real life Roy Cohn. Just as in history, it is eventually revealed that he has contracted AIDS, which he insists is liver cancer in order to preserve his reputation.
Ethel Rosenberg – The ghost of a woman executed for being a Communist spy, based on the real life Ethel Rosenberg. She visits Roy, whom she blames for her conviction and execution.
Hannah Pitt – Joe's mother. She moves to New York after her son drunkenly comes out to her on the phone. She arrives to find that Joe has abandoned his wife.
Belize – A former drag queen, he is Prior's ex-boyfriend and best friend. He later becomes Roy Cohn's nurse.
The Voice/Angel – A messenger from Heaven who visits Prior and tells him he's a prophet.
Read more about this topic: Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“There are as many characters in men
As there are shapes in nature.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)