When it debuted on Broadway a quarter-century ago, Angels in America (now at the Neil Simon Theatre through July 1) was immediately stamped with Landmark status by the Dramatic Landmarks Commission. A landmark it remains today: no other play has managed to do what it accomplishes, which is to run five hours too long. A tolerable two-and-a-half hour piece, it wears its seven-and-a-half-hour running time the way a fifth grader wears his father’s suit.

Good writing is ordinarily understood to involve being economical, even ruthlessly parsimonious, with words. Yet the playwright Tony Kushner, who won every prize in sight for this two-part aids play set in 1986 New York City, would have us view his Exxon Valdez–style word spillage as genius. Every time he has a point to make, he repeats and reprises and revisits. Because his subject is mammoth—the gay pestilence—he tries to match it with operatic expansiveness, in a three-and-a-half hour first part called Millennium Approaches and a four-hour second part, Perestroika. Yet “epic” does not, as he and many of his admirers seem to think, mean “long work.” Angels in America does not have more to say about its subject than the average play. It simply says it at greater length. Its stem-winding on subjects unrelated to the aids crisis is supposed to broaden Kushner’s scope, but it’s so much padding. The play’s gassy obsession with Mormonism, for instance, is as strange as if Death of a Salesmanused Biff’s favorite sport as