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Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (both Tony-winning parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) alighted Oct. 28 on Signature Theatre's Peter Norton Space — a postage stamp compared to previous Broadway accommodations — but this spunky, young, ambitious theatre proved not to be too small for the gesture, happily.

Kushner's cavalcade of sex, politics and alienation in the early AIDS days of the Reagan Administration made itself right at home on the small stage, its spectacle spilling over the sides at times, and settled in for a nice winter's stay until Feb. 20, 2011.

"The great work begins," as The Angel proclaims in such moments — again.

The job of scaling this zeitgeist juggernaut down to do-able Off-Broadway size fell heavily on Michael Greif's able shoulders, which, at the Pio Pio after-party, seemed slumped and listing a bit toward Disney World for some immediate R&R.

"I'm happy that we're here," the director declared with an uncamouflaged weariness. "I'm very happy to get to the next phase: Now, they get to run the play."

Not that it hasn't been "fun," he qualified. "There was something rather liberating about just having to chip away at the plays the way we did, adding layer and layer of detail to the plays. One play informed the other play in remarkable ways. The fact that the characters developed through the two plays made them feel like one play and not two plays. The tones of the plays are different, the demands of the plays are as well — but the characters, their hearts and minds and souls, transcend the plays."

The real headache was logistics, shoehorning the saga into the space allotted. "It was certainly challenging to me," Greif admitted, "the demands of all the times, places and themes of the play so a lot of care and thought went into how to transform the space from scene to scene minimally, efficiently, (I hope) theatrically, magically."

Four degrees of separation lie between the plays' two prime-movers. On the right (the side of The Angel) is the aforementioned Prior Walter (Christian Borle), a young man dying of AIDS, abandoned by his lover, Louis Ironson (Zachary Quinto), who takes up with a married Republican Mormon, Joe Pitt (Bill Heck) working in the law offices of Roy Cohn (Frank Wood). Cohn is the other focal point, as opposite from Prior Walter has one can get. Cohn is also dying of AIDS, although he denies it because that would imply he's a homosexual (and not, as he vehemently contends, a heterosexual who has sex with men — capisce?).

Disbarment is not the final insult for Kushner's Cohn. He is attended by a gay-if-not-downright-festive African-American nurse, Belize (Billy Porter), and visited on his death bed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Robin Bartlett), lips pursed and playing with a smile for the man who had helped place her in the electric chair as a Soviet spy. All his sins have come home to roost and wait for the end.

As you may have deduced already from the angels and ghosts on hand, the linear narrative gets a little loopy at times. Harper Pitt (Zoe Kazan) skitters down to Antarctica on Valium at one point. Then, toward the end, a fever dream allows the whole cast to assemble in Heaven — a scene wittily staged that lumbers solemnly along like something straight out of "The Robe." ("Well, they're in heaven, after all. A little biblical-epic reference was quite deliberate," Greif pointed out.) And, when no logical way can be found to connect characters like Harper and Prior, Kushner just lets them fall into each other's hallucinations and commiserate over their lost loves.

The angel that visited Joseph Smith Jr., prophet of the Latter Day Saints and author of "The Book of Mormon," was Kushner's route into his angelic fantasy riffs, but in the latter-day light of Mormon-masterminded Proposition 8, was the playwright something of a prophet himself? He smiled at the notion and said, "Mormons have always been conservative, but they were a different kind of conservative back when conservatives were different from what they are now, and they've changed in the conservative movement. When I first started working on the play, the conservatives have never been good about gay people. They have had many grim episodes in their life, as is true of all religions, but I always thought of them as being sorta more Republican in the Eisenhower Republican mode, and, as the Republican Party has gotten more and more fanaticized, so too have the Mormons, and the aggressiveness that they showed in the Prop 8 campaign — which I think is still disgraceful — reflected that. There seems to be a newfound right-wing radicalism."

Earlier in the day, Kushner was pleased to report, "I talked to a radio station in Salt Lake where the Salt Lake Acting Company is doing a revival of Angels right now."

As for the New York revival, he couldn't be happier with the results. "It's been a while since I've been directly involved with a stage production, and I love working with these people. They're sublime actors — the best of the New York stage acting community — and it's a great joy. Every single one of them is a fantastic actor."

There are a few firsts racked up by the cast on this production. For Borle, a lively comic and song-and-dance man, it's his first drama. Why did it make this leap? "Well, who wouldn't want to do Angels in America? I felt incredibly lucky to even be considered — and to get it, I couldn't believe my luck. I feel, in this business, you go where the work is. I have been lucky enough to be in musicals — some great musicals — and to me it's all just kinda acting. I just don't break into song in this one."

Yes, he loves his angel-visitation moment. "Every time it happens, I can't believe that I'm doing it. Everyone knows that image. To be in that image is surreal."