For all of his talent, Abraham seemed to be typecast in Machiavellian roles or as the spokesman of "culture". Salieri, the all-too-human composer in the age of Mozart, ostensibly set the pattern for the actor's TV appearances, which have echoed that role's high-toned, sometimes operatic cadence. He has hosted numerous televised Metropolitan Opera presentations, narrated several science specials and played Pope Julius II in the 1991 TNT miniseries "A Season of Giants". A professor of theater at Brooklyn College, Abraham has also portrayed academics in a fine TV adaptation of Vaclav Havel's play "Largo Desolato" (PBS, 1990) and in a version of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (NBC, 1993). In 1994, he joined the cast of "Angels in America", Tony Kushner's adulated Broadway play, appointed with the difficult task of replacing Ron Leibman, playing one of history's most famous witch hunters, Roy Cohn, undergoing a sort of manic decay. The role was a plum for Abraham: Cohn opened the instant classic with a tour-de-force monologue. Abraham reportedly played the character with insidious intelligence rather than his predecessor's whirling vitriol.
Abraham returned to the big screen portraying Russian dictator Josef Stalin in the Australian black comedy "Children of the Revolution" (1996; released in the USA in 1997) and was alongside Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam in the thriller "Mimic" (1997).