SOURCE: "Earth Angels," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXIX, No. 42, 13 December 1993, pp. 129-33.

In this assessment, Lahr declares Perestroika "a master-piece."

Tony Kushner wrote Perestroika, the second part of Angels in America, in what he describes as "an incredible eight days I spent at the Russian River, in Northern California, in April of 1991, ten months after my mother died." The play was a tape-measure job—three hundred pages, five acts—that would take six hours to perform. After finishing the epilogue, Kushner threw his belongings in his car and set off down through the Napa Valley toward San Francisco. Almost immediately, life began to imitate the play's marvels and resonances. "When I got in the car, this magical thing happened," Kushner told me the day before he jetted off to watch the London production of his superbly expanded and polished final product (it had been reworked in collaboration...