Angels in America was an unlikely candidate to become a hit play in the early 1990s: a 7-hour epic focusing mostly on the lives of five gay men (two of them closeted Republicans) and the Valium-addled Mormon woman married to one of the closeted men; “a Gay Fantasia on National Themes” including democracy, socialism, the immigrant nature of American identity, Jewish mysticism, and what Leo Tolstoy called “the American religion,” Mormonism. The critic David Savran described it shortly after its Broadway success:
Angels in America was an unlikely candidate to become a hit play in the early 1990s: a 7-hour epic focusing mostly on the lives of five gay men (two of them closeted Republicans) and the Valium-addled Mormon woman married to one of the closeted men; “a Gay Fantasia on National Themes” including democracy, socialism, the immigrant nature of American identity, Jewish mysticism, and what Leo Tolstoy called “the American religion,” Mormonism. The critic David Savran described it shortly after its Broadway success: