SOURCE: "The Great Work Falters," in The New Republic, Vol. 209, No. 26, 27 December 1993, pp. 25-8.

Here, Brustein states that Perestroika "features the wittiest writing, and brightest sensibility, of any play in memory. But it not only has little in the way of structure, it also lacks the important dramatic component of a central action, or animating event, to push it forward. Most serious, it fails to prove its thematic premise, that an insistently homosexual perspective can be the basis for a universal worldview."

At the conclusion of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, an angel crashes through the ceiling of Prior Walter's bedroom and announces: "The Great Work Begins." At the start of Part II, tided Perestroika, a doddering Bolshevik complains that humankind cannot function without me equivalent of Marxist theory. Perestroika makes a heroic, if partly ironic, effort to furnish mat alternative theory...