Angels in America: Perestroika (National Theater Live)

I saw this Thursday night (and am now in a car dealership waiting room). I pre-read the current text of the play as preparation: this is apparently the second revision, which means that at least one change I remembered from the HBO version may not be its fault--I don't have the intermediate text to compare. (If you read the oral history at Slate, it approaches a literal miracle that this part of the play was ever finished, so I'm not surprised that Kushner keeps tinkering with it.)

Notes first about staging and smaller bits in roughly chronological order, then bigger-picture comments.

( spoilers )

The text I have is copyright 2013, and if you haven't seen or read the play since then, I think the changes are worth checking out. What did you all think?

adulthood

I generally don't feel old or even middle-aged (elementary-school kids are a good antidote to that, for me). But it seems appropriate to note the one time recently when I genuinely felt like an adult:

I finished T. Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus, in which Baba Yaga grants the eponymous Summer her heart's desire, and because I'm a daydreamer I set about deciding what my heart's desire would be. And after not very much thought, I concluded that the genuine wish of my heart . . .

. . . was to live in a post-scarcity society.

And that's when I said to myself, boy, I'm not even remotely a candidate to be the protagonist of an adventure novel any more. (Not that I ever was. But still.)