AFTER ANGELS.

On May 2, 2004, the humid Sunday that his musical "Caroline, or Change" was to transfer from the Public Theatre, downtown, to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, on Broadway, Tony Kushner left his apartment on the Upper West Side and ambled east through Central Park. He was seeking out Bethesda Fountain and the statue of an angel that graces it to ask for blessing. For luck, on opening nights, Kushner usually performs two rituals: before the curtain goes up he sings Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine"--a song that, according to his will, must be played, along with Brahms's Fourth and Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, at his funeral ("I envision a lengthy service," he has written. "Bring lunch"); then, while the show is on, he slips away for a Chinese meal. On this occasion, however, Kushner found himself doubly in need of luck. Not only would the opening of "Caroline" mark his return to Broadway after more than a decade but a revised, nearly four-hour version of his play "Homebody/Kabul" was beginning a limited engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Kushner had last been represented on Broadway in 1993, with "Perestroika," the second part of his seven-hour epic, "Angels in America." The first major play to put homosexual life at the center of its moral debate, "Angels" covered territory that ranged from Heaven to earth, from the aids epidemic to conservative politics, encapsulating, in its visionary sweep, the sense of confusion and longing that defined late-twentieth-century American life. "It gave a language to that generation," the director George C. Wolfe, who staged both "Angels in America" and "Caroline, or Change" on Broadway, says. "It gave playwrights permission to think about theatre in a whole new way. A play could be poetic, ridiculous, fragile, overtly political, sentimental, and brave all at the same time." "Angels" won Kushner two Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize. Last December, HBO aired Mike Nichols's sixty-million-dollar film version, for which Kushner adapted the play and which starred Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (The film was nominated for twenty-one Emmys and won a record eleven.)

In Kushner's view, however, "Caroline, or Change"--a semi-autobiographical account of the relationship between a Southern Jewish boy, who has lost his mother, and his family's saturnine maid, Caroline--is his best-told story. Based on the "unexpected hidden life" of the Kushner family's maid, Maudie Lee Davis, the script is a radical departure from the standard forms of Broadway musical distraction. With its focus on race, class, and even economics, "Caroline" celebrates the ambivalent, instead of the upbeat. When it opened last year at the Public, it earned a strong critical response, not all of it positive. For some critics, the show's psychological subtlety was hidden beneath the folkloric, seemingly simplistic style of the production. (" 'Caroline' might be regarded as the brooding person's 'Hairspray,' " Ben Brantley wrote in the Times.) Kushner felt, he says, "hugely disappointed" and only "cautiously, but definitely, endorsed."

Nevertheless, throughout the winter and into the spring, bolstered by the growing demand of the Public's audiences and by the success of the Nichols film, Kushner worked the phones and called in favors until a consortium of twenty Broadway producers put up five million dollars to move the musical to Broadway. No one was going to get rich, their mantra went, but Broadway would be the richer for it. The Broadway opening meant another round of reviews. "It would be lovely if suddenly there was sort of this Pauline conversion and people were coming and saying, 'I was wrong the first time; it's great now,' " Kushner said. "But that isn't going to happen. Tomorrow there'll be some wonderful things and also maybe some not-so-wonderful things. Then we have to take a deep breath and figure out how we're going to give this a respectable run on Broadway." Kushner admits that he is "preternaturally, even prenatally, thin-skinned." He says, "I would like to care less about the things other people say about me, but I can't imagine caring less. I think people pay heavy prices for armor and callousness." Still, he adds, "it's very hard to take criticism when it's inept, when it kills the chances of that show being seen."

For a while, he sat on the low perimeter wall of the Bethesda plaza, enjoying the scene. His gaze finally came to rest on the blousy bronze angel in the center of the fountain, which plays an important role in the finale of "Angels in America." In the Biblical tale of Bethesda, an angel appears on the surface of a pool and gives the water healing powers. The statue, Kushner explained, "commemorates the naval dead of the Civil War. It's the first commissioned sculpture by a woman in New York--Emma Stebbins, the sister of the parks board president and a lesbian." He went on, "The other thing I love about it is that it got terrible reviews when it was unveiled."

Kushner is a purveyor of what he calls "brave art"--"the best sense we can make of our times." Several weeks before "Caroline" opened on Broadway, in a debate sponsored by the Classic Stage Company, one of Kushner's great champions, the critic Harold Bloom, spent the better part of two hours trying in vain to get Kushner to admit that he was a theological writer. "I'm somebody who believes in . . . a kind of relationship of complaint and struggle and pursuit between the human and the divine," Kushner said finally. "And part of that struggle involves politics. For me, drama without politics is inconceivable."

He is fond of quoting Melville's heroic prayer from "Mardi and a Voyage Thither" ("Better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals"), and takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history--among them, aids and the conservative counter-revolution ("Angels in America"), Afghanistan and the West ("Homebody/Kabul"), German Fascism and Reaganism ("A Bright Room Called Day"), the rise of capitalism ("Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown"), and racism and the civil-rights movement in the South ("Caroline, or Change"). But his plays, which are invariably political, are rarely polemical. Instead, Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls "a dialectically shaped truth," which must be "outrageously funny" and "absolutely agonizing," and must "move us forward." He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstance--a drag queen dying of aids, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans--and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized--a humanizing act of imagination.