Intermittently but frequently, as if to repudiate the complaint that our surrounding culture is bland and decaffeinated and McNuggetized, we seem to generate or demand the cultural blockbuster. At the Edinburgh Festival, I remember the lines around the block for Abel Gance’s epic-length film hagiography, Napoleon, as reconstituted and extended by Kevin Brownlow. I spent the whole of a fine afternoon and evening in the dark that same year, emerging in exalted spirits with the realization that I had been in the first audience to view David Edgar’s adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. King Tutankhamen’s baubles I skipped, affecting loftily to have viewed them in the Cairene original. Then there was Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, divinely long (though there will always be those who say that length doesn’t matter) and exquisitely timed for those who had maintained that there was no Aeschylus or Shakespeare outside the “Western civ” tradition. A grueling 10-hour, 4-play production of Greek tragedy, Les Atrides, has lately been preoccupying the Parisians, while in New York the Matisse exhibition brought the 24-hour round-trip flight from L.A ., the bribe, and the stolen day off work into the placid world of the museumgoer. No pain, no gain. Art for art’s sake, but see it for Chrissake.

An authentic cultural blockbuster, however, should be measured not in the hours expended but in catharsis: pity and terror. And very occasionally the stage can do what it’s supposed to do and, as well as entertain or instruct, synthesize some tragic element in the life of humanity. Who does not know someone who has been felled in the clear-cutting path slashed through society by H.I. V.? At the intimate intersection of sex and death, drama begins.

It must be this that accounts, at least in part, for the colossal effect on critics and audiences of a seven-hour exposure to Angels in America. There used to be, if you remember, “Theaters of” this and that genre in criticspeak. “The Theater of Cruelty,” “the Theater of the Absurd,” “the Theater of Illusion,” “the Theater of Pity,” “the Theater of the Kitchen Sink,” and, of course, “Political Theater.” Angels, as well as being two self-contained plays in form, is all of these and more in point of content. The register of contrasts between sacred and profane, supernatural and secular, mystical and political, is inscribed in the titles. The first play is called “Millennium Approaches,” and the second, “Perestroika.”

But even so, angels? I rack the brain. Thomas Wolfe enjoined an angel to look homeward. Harold Brodkey’s Wiley Silenowicz glimpsed an angel in Harvard Yard, with unfathomable consequences. Allen Ginsberg? Perhaps here we are closer:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

And it was post-Howl that Thom Gunn, later and sadly to become San Francisco’s poet of AIDS, wrote “On the Move” and hinted at the fierce joys of Angels from Hell.

“Actually, no,” says Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America and on whom I try some of the above latent connections. “I think I was most influenced by Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, where the humble domestic servant has a baroque cloud of vision on her sickbed, and sees a transfigured version of a bird that was once given her by her son. When the angel crashes onstage at the end of ‘Millennium,’ people ask if it is the Angel of Death, but it’s more traditional in the sense of angelic healing processes for the ill—and in the sense of a promise of deliverance that is both sublime and camp and pathetic.”