Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, first produced in 1993, is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award–winning play written by Tony Kushner and mentioned in The Laramie Project. Described as profoundly moving, yet also funny, it deals with the lives of people who must confront their own homosexuality or that of someone close to them. The work mixes tragedy with comedy and magic realism with stark reality. Both political and private, it is a criticism of the Reagan years and its denial of the AIDS epidemic, as well as a meditation of what it means to know that one is dying.

The Obie Award–winning play I Am My Own Wife was written by Doug Wright, directed by Moisés Kaufman, and produced in 2003. It is a one-man show about the German transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an antique collector living in Nazi Germany. The play’s major theme is that of survivor living in a very oppressive society.

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) is Kaufman’s other outstanding play. It recounts the trials of Oscar Wilde, a playwright who was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for having made love to another man. In this play, Kaufman explores how Victorian homophobia in politics, culture, and law severely punished the brilliant and witty author.

The works of Oscar Wilde, one of the most famous playwrights and authors of the nineteenth century, have been collected in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, and Essays (1989). Some of his most important pieces include The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Salome (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1899). His writing is often compared to that of Shakespeare for its cleverness and wit.