It’s rare to hear a playwright admit that his own play—the one you’re watching at that very moment, in this case the wildly ambitious, slightly cluttered, and frequently inspiring A Bright Room Called Day at the Public Theater—has never really worked. But few playwrights are as critical of their own work, and spend as much time rewriting/reworking/overhauling it, as Tony Kushner.
“Some of it works,” Xillah (Jonathan Hadary), a Kushner stand-in and a new character for this production, tells the audience. “Some” might be a bit of an understatement.
To be fair, A Bright Room Called Day is Kushner’s first play. He wrote it while he was still at NYU. It received its first professional production in 1987 at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre; the director was Oskar Eustis, who then smartly commissioned Kushner’s Angels in America. So it’s fitting that both Kushner and Eustis have returned to the piece in the latter’s current artistic home, the Public Theater. (The Public has also produced a number of Kushner’s works over the years: Bright Room; The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures; his adaptation of A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds; his translation of Mother Courage; and Caroline, or Change, his musical with Jeanine Tesori, which is receiving a Broadway revival this spring.)
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
But as the interrupter/Reagan-era critic Zillah (Crystal Lucas-Perry), one of Bright Room’s original and most controversial characters, now asks: “Why this belated return to the scene of your original dramaturgical boondoggle?”
To put it bluntly: Suddenly Kushner’s parallel between the rise of the Weimar Republic and the evildoings of the Reagan administration—a correlation that caused offense or sounded far-fetched back when the actor-turned-president was still in office—seems pretty prescient…especially when you consider the fascist leanings of a current commander in chief, whose actions (and even gestures!) have been likened on more than one occasion to Hitler.
“Things are so bad people want to do this play! Like, like fixing the play is going to help,” Xillah muses. Of course, he’s correct—fixing this play, or any other play, probably won’t help. But there is a certain gleeful satisfaction in hearing Kushner’s characters tear into Trump, railing on his “dirty dental-floss toupee” and “the face like an orangutan’s butt with a sphincter of a mouth and the puffy piggy little cadaver eyes.” Thankfully, Kushner mentions the words Donald Trump only a few times, because, as Xillah explains, “it is a name that is hateful to God.”
But such contemporary commentary composes only a small fraction of Kushner’s drama, albeit an immensely enjoyable one. The bulk of Bright Room is set in 1932–33 Berlin, centered on a group of friends—artists, intellectuals, and activists—who gather for regular drinks and lively discussions in the cozy apartment of actress Agnes Eggling (Nikki M. James). As the Nazis gain more and more power in Germany, everyone around Agnes begins to see the light—or, rather, the darkness: the homosexual Baz (Michael Urie) is arrested after his Institute for Human Sexuality is raided and boarded up; he considers killing himself in Munich, but decides instead to flee to Paris. Actress Paulinka (Grace Gummer) is taking herself and her fur—and presumably her opium pipe, the only thing that provides her comfort—to Moscow. “The Americans found my name on an old list of Communist Party memberships,” she pouts. “I joined for two seconds, but…Long enough to get on the list. So…No Hollywood for me.” (She had joined not for political reasons, but because “the communists make the best films, so I thought I’d sign up and then after the revolution I’d get all the good parts.”) Agnes’ Hungarian exile boyfriend, a one-eyed Trotskyite cameraman named Husz (Michael Esper), is off to Chicago thanks to a counterfeit visa. Communist artist Annabella (Linda Emond) is helping transport fellow KPD, or Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, members across the border.
But Agnes won’t—or can’t—budge. “Really. I can’t move. I can’t move. I’m sorry,” she tells Husz. Not even a visit from the devil himself—who knew Kushner was dancing with the devil before he was wrestling with angels?—can convince her that her homeland is being overrun by evil. “I sense great possibilities in the Modern World. The depths…have not been plumbed,” says Gottfried Swetts (Mark Margolis). Xillah pops in to explain Swetts’ presence: “It’s a German play, the Devil always appears in German plays, novels, ever since Goethe wrote Faust, the Devil’s practically been the German National Mascot!”
And what to make of Die Älte (played by Estelle Parsons)—the white-haired, almost translucent-skinned elderly woman who appears to be haunting Agnes’ apartment? Ghost? Delusion? A vision of Agnes’ future? “She’s a night bat, she’s unaccountable, an unaccountable presence,” says Xillah. (Thank goodness he’s here!) “And she’s a chance to cast, you know, fantastic actresses of a certain age.”
The addition of Xillah; the arguments between the playwright’s alter ego and the alter ego’s alter ego, Zillah; the function—or lack thereof—of the Zillah character: Much has changed about A Bright Room Called Day over the years. And Kushner believes that it should. In the production notes prefacing his script, he writes this: “Ideally there should be a continual updating of the specifics of Zillah’s politics of paranoia, in the form of references to whatever evildoing is prevalent at the time of the production”; in fact, he explains, “Zillah’s materials have gone through drastic revisions (originally she had a brother—and in the London production she was an anti-Thatcherite Brit).”
But here are a few lines that didn’t change from that version to the current one on stage at the Public, which I somehow can’t imagine ever changing. After Baz and Anabella attend a Nazi rally (“You must have an intimate knowledge of the enemy,” he explains), Baz offers this analysis of the Führer’s appeal: “Hitler simply offers a lot of very confused and terrified and constipated people precisely what they want, an exhalation, a purgation, catharsis.… They’re in love with the shine on his boots, they want a fatherly boot-heel to lick, they want him to say ‘Daddy loves his children, now go and kill for me.’” And we don’t need Xillah, Zillah, or anyone else to make the connection from Hitler to you-know-who.
A Bright Room Called Day opened Nov. 25, 2019, and runs through Dec. 15. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
