It’s a measure of how surreally unsettling the past three years in American politics have been that even liberals now reflect on the relative halcyon days of previous Republican administrations. Some of the same media outlets that labeled George W. Bush a war criminal now offer revisionist accounts of his painting skills and friendship with Michelle Obama. Tony Kushner, predictably, is having none of it.
Kushner’s first produced play, A Bright Room Called Day—written when the playwright was in his 20s, and unveiled in 1987, six years before the first installment of Angels In America, Millennium Approaches, earned him the Pulitzer Prize for drama—reacted to Ronald Reagan’s presidency by inviting parallels between our 40th commander-in-chief and another great communicator, one Adolf Hitler. Set in Berlin in 1932 and 1933, during the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi party, Bright Room follows an actress, Agnes, and her progressive friends as they struggle to come to terms with the catastrophe unfolding around them. They are periodically interrupted by a visitor from the 1980s: Zillah, a Jewish woman who, while admitting to paranoia, believes she has genuine reason to fear that history’s still-recent atrocities may go unheeded.
If Trump’s election inspired Kushner to revisit Bright Room, the results—now on display at the Public Theater, in a production helmed by artistic director Oskar Eustis, one of Kushner’s early champions and collaborators—are not necessarily what you’d expect. While Zillah, played here by a dynamic Crystal Lucas-Perry, has still arrived from the Reagan era, she’s accompanied by another visitor, from the present: Xillah, a stand-in for Kushner himself, played by a charmingly kvetchy Jonathan Hadary.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Xillah brings Zillah up to date during their first interruption, though it takes her a while to process news of our current White House occupant. “The, the clown from Queens with the gold-plated airplane shuttle and all those failing casino hotels in New Jersey…?” she begins, obviously not realizing the half of it. Xillah, who also addresses the audience, doesn’t go into many details about Trump’s time in office, soon promising us that “this is the last time his name will be mentioned tonight because it is a name that is hateful to God.”
Kushner isn’t out to convince us how much worse things have gotten over the past three decades—or to draw equivalencies between Trump and Hitler, for that matter. While I didn’t see or read Bright Day in its original iteration, this one made it hard for me to imagine that the younger Kushner’s intention was to predict an American Gestapo under Reagan, who remains a prominent presence through Zillah. The playwright’s true focus, it would seem, is the fragility of democracy under a leader who doesn’t recognize the fundamental rights shared by all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, etc.
Casting black actors as both Zillah and Agnes underscores this point; the anti-Semitism that has resurfaced so ominously in our country and others of late is already prominent in the text. (Zillah’s religion is no longer specified, and Kushner and Eustis left the roles open to actors of all races and ethnicities.) And Nikki M. James, as Agnes, and Lucas-Perry are potent foils; the latter’s Zillah bubbles and bursts with energy, and frustration, yearning to communicate with James’s increasingly despondent but luminous Agnes as her friends start fleeing Berlin. “I can’t move,” Agnes says, twice at one point. Or put just a bit differently, the actress cannot act, which is precisely what Zillah and others would and do beg of her, from Vealtninc, the Russian and Hungarian dissident who is her lover (a vigorous Michael Esper) to Annabella, a Communist artist (Linda Emond, razor-sharp as always).
Paulinka, an opium-addicted film star who is also part of their circle, made both sexy and chilling by Grace Gummer, proves more opportunistic, while Gregor, a gay psychologist imbued with sparkling wit and humanity by Michael Urie—fast emerging as one of his generation’s most facile and appealing actors—admits to feeling frightened and overwhelmed. The commiseration and debate between these characters reminds us of Kushner’s gift for dialogue that, however windy at times, crackles and dazzles us on both a cerebral level and a visceral one.
We’re also reunited with the playwright’s penchant for supernatural touches. A ghost-like figure, Die Älte (Estelle Parsons, terrifying in the best sense), turns up in Agnes’s home, and there is talk of the existence and nature of evil, with the Devil coming up at numerous points. In a scene that nods to Angels, dramatic lighting (by John Torres) enhanced by fire and the booming finale from Mahler’s The Resurrection herald the arrival of a guest from another, this time lower realm, Gottfried Swetts (Mark Margolis, dapper and grotesque), to deliver a monologue strewn with references to excrement.
Xillah—that is, Kushner—tells us, nonetheless, that he has become unsure of the use of magic in theater. “I don’t write ghoulies or ghosties anymore,” quips the “creator-abandoner,” as Zillah will call him. “I’m a narrative realist now!” Xillah has dropped in nonetheless to fix a play that “never worked”—”Some of it worked,” he corrects himself, moments later—but feels compelled to return to, despite a growing suspicion of art’s limited power in dire times. The supertitles that loom over David Rockwell’s set seem to back him up, spelling out Germany’s descent in capital letters.
But as Xillah protests, Zillah goads and refutes his arguments, which we all know are, essentially, poppycock; if Tony Kushner doesn’t believe in the power of art, or magic, no one does. But if the often self-deprecating exchanges he has written for Xillah and Zillah can feel like diversions, or indulgences, they reinforce the central message that politically minded theater serves little purpose offstage if we don’t act in that arena. Or, though Kushner doesn’t point this out, if that theater doesn’t compel us through invigorating entertainment, as A Bright Room Called Day does, consistently.
A Bright Room Called Day opened November 25, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through December 15. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
