The name of the thing is Angels in America: Millennium Approaches: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes and that ain’t the half of it. What is now at the Walter Kerr Theatre is only the first three and a half hours; a further three and a half hours, called Perestroika, will arrive in the fall. It is the brainchild of Tony Kushner, whose earlier play, A Bright Room Called Day, was an explicit and loud attempt to equate Reagan’s America with Hitler’s Germany. So one kind of knows what to expect from this cumbrously titled opus. It has been hailed with a rapture unheard in decades. It got the Pulitzer. “The finest drama of our time,” said The New York Observer, “It asks: Where is God? And yearns for an answer, a prophet, a messiah, or salvation. It is, in its searing essentials, about love.” Golly. This language might be thought excessive for the Oresteia. Cleverer in expression but no less smitten was Frank Rich of the Times, who spoke of “the most thrilling American play in years.”

As will perhaps become clear, the huzzas occasioned by Angels are not really about this slender, derivative, and vulgar play; they are rather victory chants in celebration of the takeover of a culture. But first, the play. It is directed by George C. Wolfe, new head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, where Angelswas scheduled to open until Mr. Kushner thought better of that