ARTS WATCH : Taper Power

Only two-thirds of the annual Pulitzer prizes are for journalism, but all are awarded in the shadow of journalism. The arts Pulitzers--fiction, poetry, drama, history, biography and music--go, year in and year out, to works that gesture toward public affairs.

Is AIDS a public affair? At the start of the epidemic, journalism, notoriously, did not think so. AIDS was the special affliction of a sexual minority, as Tay-Sachs disease or sickle cell anemia were the special afflictions of ethnic minorities.

The selection of part one of Tony Kushner’s sweeping, 7 1/2-hour play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” for this year’s drama Pulitzer ends that closeting forever. The story of a gay couple and a straight couple, each of whom will split during the two-part epic, “Angels” makes the public private and the private public by, as it were, a complete language transfusion. Elevated, even religious language is used for the obscenities of sickness and death; campy, slangy language is used for the glories of redemption and transfiguration.

“Angels” received its first full production at the Mark Taper Forum, this in the same 25th-anniversary year in which Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” was mounted. Both plays have now won the Pulitzer, both breaking the previously unviolated if unwritten rule that no play not produced on Broadway could win the prize. “Angels,” now Broadway-bound, confirms, if any confirmation be needed, that “Kentucky Cycle” was no fluke, and that the Taper is now the premier stage in the nation.