Even for one of Temple’s most innovative professors — one who infuses his classes with animation, multimedia and real-time surveys — this was unique.

Samuel D. Hodge Jr., director of the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the Fox School of Business, recently hosted actors from the award-winning play “Angels in America,” now showing at the Society Hill Playhouse.

Before an audience of some 400 freshmen in Hodge’s Law in American Society class, actors performed two key scenes from the play, which is serving as background material for students to write legal briefs and argue both sides of a lawsuit.

Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed “Angels in America Parts I and II: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” set amid the 1980s AIDS epidemic, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for drama and was adapted into an award-winning miniseries starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep.

Hodge’s students, who are studying same-sex marriage and researching discrimination in the general-education course, got front-row seats to the play when the actors performed scenes of fraying relationships and political wrangling on Nov. 5.

Hodge, chair of legal studies at the Fox School, said the live performance brought key legal issues to life and linked law to society.

“I think it’s another venue, and I really think it’s important to open their horizons to this issue,” Hodge said of his students. “You’re not making a statement on the issue. You’re just presenting a problem.”

The actors from BCKSEET Productions — the resident theater company at Society Hill Playhouse — performed a scene depicting Roy Cohn, a conservative New York lawyer who worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and died of AIDS, and an associate trying to pressure a third character, Joe Pitt, into interfering in disbarment hearings against Cohn.

The second scene featured a violent confrontation between Pitt, a closeted gay law clerk, and his lover over a controversial decision Pitt wrote on behalf of an appeals judge in a case about a gay man who was discharged from the Army.

Temple law student and Hodge teaching assistant Matthew Morley said Pitt’s decision for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York is important because, along with binding lower courts, it overturned a trial court decision that had held that gays were a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

By deciding against the Army, but on a different theory, the Second Circuit avoided creating precedent that could have protected gays in several different situations, including gay marriage and employment discrimination.

Morley said the students are using the legal issues raised in “Angels in America” and other equal protection cases to write legal briefs in small teams and present oral arguments before teaching assistants acting as appellate judges.

“Not only did we want to introduce the students to the basic equal protection argument, we wanted to introduce them to the plight and the discrimination homosexuals have experienced,” Morley said, because a history of discrimination is a factor weighed by the courts in deciding equal protection cases.

The actors, some of whom are gay, also led a class discussion that touched on current issues and themes in the play.

Junior international business and legal studies major Nick Staich said the performance was “absolutely fantastic.”

“It’s very relevant to what we’re discussing in class,” Staich said, adding later, “It’s a great experience to have the cast come in. I feel very, very blessed.”

“Angels in America Part I and II” in repertory is being performed through Nov. 29. For more information and tickets, visit www.bckseet.com.