Seeing Red

She’s right on that second point. Tony Kushner’s epic masterpiece of the early 1990s, about AIDS, sexuality, religion, and politics in 1980s America, is among my top 10 favorite works of 20th-century writing, and Mike Nichols’ six-episode HBO adaptation of it in 2003 is one of the rare shows I have downloaded on my phone—so that I can watch snippets of it as the spirit moves me, which it often does.

An unusually large number of subscribers to this magazine are under 28, which means I should rightfully give you a synopsis of the story here. I can’t. It’s an interconnected weave of multiple threads following a cast of incredibly special characters—including a gay couple dealing with an AIDS diagnosis, a Mormon couple who’s just moved to Brooklyn Heights, Republican power broker Roy Cohn, the...