A Landmark Play, and What It Got Right and Wrong About Mormonism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Angels in America swept American theatre's major honors: the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Millennium Approaches, the Tony Award for Best Play in both 1993 and 1994 for its two parts, and, decades later, the Tony for Best Revival of a Play in 2018 along with acting awards for Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane. It is now routinely named among the most important American plays of the twentieth century.

Its handling of Mormon belief has drawn its own scholarly attention, most directly in a 1997 essay by Michael Austin in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Austin argues that Kushner's angel plot is not a generic Christian device borrowed for effect but draws on real Latter-day Saint theological structure, particularly the idea of continuing revelation through direct encounter with the divine. He is equally direct about where the play falls short: Kushner's Hannah treats any departure from Utah as a near total break from Mormon community and belief, a picture Austin says misrepresents how most Latter-day Saints living outside Utah actually experience their faith, where community and belief travel with a person rather than staying behind. Read together, the praise and the correction describe a play that engaged Mormon theology seriously enough to get its structure right and its sociology wrong.