When Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" landed on Broadway in 1993 it forever changed how gay lives were depicted in popular culture. On its 25th anniversary, authors Dan Kois and Isaac Butler join Salon's Amanda Marotte on "Salon Talks" to share the oral history of the breakout show that won a Tony Award, a Pulitzer Prize and sparked a hit HBO adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino.

Kois and Butler's new book "The World Only Spins Forward" pieces together nearly 250 interviews, including Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker, Nathan Lane, and playwright Tony Kushner. For both Kois and Butler, who are huge fans of the show, they took great care to ensure that the oral history matched the aesthetic and overall themes of the original production. Kois told Salon, "The play is so much about the interchange of voices and a dialectic of people arguing points… points of love and faith and politics and idealism. And so the idea of having all these people talk to each other on our pages seemed like a great way to sort of pay tribute to that."