Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor. The bold-faced lies, guilt-free immorality, blistering aggression, blithe refusal of introspection, and astonishing vulgarity that we now associate with our 45th president are key elements of a style created and refined by Roy Marcus Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and Donald Trump’s red-baiting lawyer. Cohn is at the center of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, which is receiving a glittering 25th-anniversary revival at the National Theatre in London this spring. Marianne Elliott directs an astonishing cast, with the irreplaceable (and irrepressible) Nathan Lane playing Roy.

Thirty years ago I commissioned Tony to write Angels in America for my tiny theater in San Francisco, the Eureka. After Tony and I worked on the play together for a year, he proposed that it should be two evenings long: “I can’t get these people to change fast enough,” he explained. By the time that year ended, Tony had changed his formal problem—getting his characters to change—into the core content of the play. Angels in America is about how excruciatingly difficult, but absolutely necessary, it is to change.

When Angels first opened, in 1992, its power was tied to the surging activism of the gay community. Tony used the crucible of the AIDS crisis to stake out a claim that gay men and women could not only be the heroes of their own lives but also speak for all Americans. Prior (the luminescent Andrew Garfield in the National’s production) was Everyman, and his struggles with disease and loss and despair stood in for all of our struggles.

A generation later, it is the portrait Tony has drawn of the American right that seems so shockingly prescient. Cohn appeared as a larger-than-life demon when Angels opened; now his pupil sits in the Oval Office.