Mostly about AIDS, the Reagan years, death, forgiveness, and love, told by various characters including two gay men who are in a relationship with each other, a gay man who is a Mormon (and also married), and flaming right-wing bastard Roy Cohn...but it's about lotsa other stuff too.

Mr. Otter and I saw both of these plays (four hours apiece, onstage) in San Francisco when they were new, ten years ago. I have to admit, I had never paid nearly fifty bucks apiece for theatre tickets up to that time, and was appalled at the price (and that's per play, so we're talking almost two hundred bucks for one day's theatregoing, oh my god!) but it was worth it. Not only were these plays brilliant and funny and overwhelming and heart-rending and pretty doggone amazing, but seeing them both on the same day was great, we got an hour and a half between plays to scrounge up some dinner and then back we came for the second half. Wow.

Anyway. HBO got Kushner to adapt these plays for the small screen, and he really did a good job...he kept some of the stream-of-consciousness oddness that was so intriguing, but made the plots and characters' interactions smoother and more cinematic. Lost some of the immediacy of the original, but in the translation to television, that's going to happen anyway.

The characters were good, and well portrayed; The Beckster was very happy to see her Golden Love Object, Al Pacino, doing such a fine job, and there were some really touching moments. At first I didn't like Emma Thompson as the angel (and she certainly wasn't as overwhelming as the live one, they used harmonics and turned the loudspeakers all the way up and pretty much got all your adrenaline going for that one...) but she really was good...and because they could use computerized special effects, they could do many things that aren't possible in live theatre that were very effective.

Overall: excellent, well worth seeing, good to talk about even if you don't agree with Kushner's version of events, wow.