While it is tempting, and not completely misleading, to locate the play’s genesis in the activism that arose from the AIDS catastrophe that was sweeping America in the Reagan era, there was a far more personal tragedy – the car accident that left Kushner’s best friend and intellectual muse, Kimberly Flynn, severely incapacitated – motivating the work. This relationship not only underpins the characters of Louis and Prior, but provokes the central question of the play: how do we care for and give hope to our dying loved ones in a society that has outgrown the transcendent? Kushner’s first part, Millennium Approaches, was written in the white-hot heat of Reagan’s rule, and seethes with a righteous anger. The second part, Perestroika, was written during the Clinton ascendancy, and is a shaggier, more optimistic piece. That either of them were ever brought to fruition feels now like a blessing from the theatrical gods, and Butler and Kois’s interviews detail just how thorny was that path to success.

David Tredinnick and Colin Batrouney in Angels in America, Tony Kushner's two-part 'Gay Fantasia on National Themes', directed by Neil Armfield for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1994 (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Not that Angels was a sleeper hit. The producers of the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, who were the first to develop the script, knew early on that something profound had been set in motion. Lorri Holt, for whom Kushner wrote the part of Harper, remembers that, ‘the very first time we read a draft of Millennium at the theatre, afterwards it was, like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing’. Once Kushner had decided the play needed to be in two parts, the Eureka reluctantly let go of it and it moved to the Taper Too, in the Hollywood Hills. In a lesson for local producers, it received rigorous support in the form of time and money. Jeff King, who was playing Joe, rather ruefully – and presumably also hyperbolically – sums it up when he says that, ‘There were eleven thousand workshops. It was well developed.’

One of the great advantages of the oral history is its polyphony, that patchwork of opinions and sensations that builds up when testimonies are collated; one of its disadvantages is that certain facts become obscured or contested. The original production’s genesis is complex and frankly confusing. What does emerge is that there was a legal stoush between the Taper and the Eureka, with the latter eventually winning the right to stage the first full production of Millennium Approaches in 1991. Some of the actors who became synonymous with their roles appeared in this production, namely Ellen McLaughlin as the angel, and Stephen Spinella, who would go on to win two Tony Awards for his performance as Prior. These initial performances come alive in the reliving, their honesty and adherence to what Peter Brook in his seminal book The Empty Space (1968) calls Rough Theatre – boisterous and cobbled, ‘the torn sheet pinned up across the hall’ –  but also the greater impact this play about AIDS had on the city that was most ravaged by it.

That crisis and its political, social, and sexual dimensions are of course critical to any understanding of the play, but anyone who has seen Angels will recognise the centrality of humour – bitchy, self-preserving, often withering – that is a hallmark of Kushner’s work and echoes throughout this book. It ranges from the gossipy (actors whispering the whereabouts of Madonna in the audience during their curtain call) to the sublime (an onstage argument McLaughlin has with an audience member during an initial, and seemingly endless, run of Perestroika – ‘Act FIVE?! Oh my GOD! DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?!’).

Catherine McClements and David Tredinnick in Angels in America, Tony Kushner's two-part 'Gay Fantasia on National Themes', directed by Neil Armfield for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1994 (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The sheer reach and depth of the insight is invigorating: on the experience of initiating a role; on the changing landscape of theatre criticism; on the life-altering impact theatre can have on the young. Many of the contributors worked on the play twenty-five years ago, and almost as many were currently performing when the interviews were held, so we get an acute sense of the endurance and the sweep of the play; current productions tease out the Trumpian resonances, but future ones will resonate in entirely unforeseen ways.

The only thing missing is an Australian perspective. Robyn Nevin and Marcus Graham appear briefly to talk about the 2013 Belvoir production, but this is almost perverse, given that the MTC premièred the work in this country in 1993. I was at that performance; I brought my mother, who had only recently discovered that I was gay. I suspect she went home that night and wept for my future. For me, it was awkward and uncomfortable and revelatory, one of those life-altering impacts theatre can have on the young. The most recent production this country has seen was the Gary Abrahams-directed triumph at fortyfivedownstairs. That was a Rough Theatre production, with a sublime cast and the most intimate torn sheet of settings. My mother was with me then, too, and this time she wept for joy. Angels in America is one of those works – the inverse of those ‘I remember where I was when (insert tragedy) happened’ – that binds people, that makes communities where none existed. The World Only Spins Forward is a superb advocate for its continued relevance, and a vital addition to any theatre lover’s library.