I saw Angels in America, Part 1 last week and Part 2 on Friday. Couldn’t get tickets—when they went on sale in July, Signature Theatre’s ticketing system crashed under the weight of the demand—but I could secure ushering slots. Get to the theater an hour and forty-five minutes early, wear black, stuff some programs, direct folks to their seats, slide into a free seat moments before curtain. Lots of nonprofit theaters use volunteers, and I’ve done it a fair amount. Sitting on the floor and folding inserts on Friday night, I was reminded of my first time: twelve years ago, still in high school, on a day-long bus trip furlough from my real life, an early evening performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Jane Street Theater (a haunted and now obsolete place). I stuffed Playbills, botched seat numbers, and at the end was rewarded not with a seat but a place by the bar where I could sit on the ground. It was wonderful and I loved every second, even the bit at the end when I started to cry and suddenly the house manager was pulling me to my feet so I wouldn’t get hit by Hedwig, who was about to go running out into the audience. I thought it was the most fantastic thing that had ever happened to me.

The Signature space is new, with strong seat cushions and a wide, wide stage. It seats, I think, 160, or thereabouts, and it is a nice place to spent six hours of your life. The audiences were balanced both nights between older folks and younger folks, couples, singles, a few mother-son teams, and once, a group of four college-aged folks who had all stood on the standby line, one of whom had a “Defy Gravity” scarf on. Hedwig ushers, like me. Kids who will stand outside on the coldest day of the year in the hopes that they might possibly get sold last minute tickets, kids who place equal weight on doing the lottery for Wicked and doing the standby line for A Gay Fantasia.

Angels in America has been holding out on me for years. I was too young and too far away to see it done the first time. Saw the HBO movie but who even knows about those things. Was college-taught all about it. Read it. Knew it as the thing that begat the things we see all the time, now: dangerously long & poetically spun monologues, split scenes with overlapping dialogue/meanings, magical realism drawn with shaky rules. (All of which I have imitated myself, at one or another time.) It also has plenty of elements that have not always been satisfactorily carried onward and upward. It has, for instance, a great deal of sublimely ridiculous ambition. I am not even sorry to say that when Prior confronted the Angels in Part 2, I thought for a second this would sooner be seen in an episode of Doctor Who (The Doctor confronts the Time Lords about the malleability of time and the goodness of humanity!) than it would be in a modern off-Broadway production. And I will not bash, I will not bash bash bash my playwright fellows. It is super-hard to be ambitious, and even harder to accomplish what Tony Kushner accomplished. Not just that he wrote it, but that he was supported in writing it, and that it was done, and beloved, and brought to Broadway and brought around the world. We write for the small-cast-no-intermission-black-box because we feel we can reach that, we feel it’s produceable. Except here’s something tricky, and I’m just learning it myself: the substantial cast, the substantial length, the substantial scene changes in Angels are not what makes it ambitious. It’s what Kushner wrote about that makes it gorgeous and, at times, completely unbeatable. So what did he write about, and how can I sign up, well:

Just after seeing Part 1, one of the patrons approached me and said, “It doesn’t have the immediacy it once had.” I was still a little teary-eyed from seeing Calamity Jane crash through the ceiling. “Is that right?” I said to her. “Back then,” said the woman. “All my friends were dying of AIDS.” And I just looked at her. I was crying and she was saying this to me and still she made me think twice. Is it less immediate because my friends aren’t all dying of AIDS? Except no. Yes: Tony Kushner wrote a play about the AIDS crisis, about the Reagan years, about being gay in America. But he did himself legendary by also writing about love, change, forgiveness, and the end of the world. These things are immediate. These things are super, super immediate. And you can write about them anywhere. In a small-cast-black-box, in a huge-cast-opera-house, in the Jane Street theater while dressed in drag. Anywhere.

This production of Angels in America is the first in New York City since the original Broadway run in 1993. And it’s in a 160 seat space, featuring a cast with but one genuine movie star (Zachary Quinto, who is totally good). Mostly it is theater veterans (FRANK WOOOOOOOD). When we’re at Bethesda Fountain, it’s just a projection. When the angel appears, we see the wires. But we were always supposed to see the wires, because it’s not the wires that hold the ambition. It’s the nature of the writing. So, so what if the scenery shakes a little, if you can tell which costumes were bought from H&M, if it’s a little soapy, if Joe doesn’t get a fair shake, if Harper is sometimes inexplicable, if it goes on. Did it or did it not, for six hours, keep me in my seat thinking about the biggest ideas my brain can think about. ANSWER ME.

Yeah it did.