A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner (review)

One lesson of the Public Theater’s recent revival of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day is that self-conscious fretting and hectoring are not theatre’s most effective tools for moving people to action. The production, however, gave glimpses of how a Kushner show usually works the magic of inciting an active response from its audience: mixing the realistic and the fantastic in a baroque swirl of gorgeous language, pulling audiences into characters’ specific terrors and hopes, then zooming out to view the historical conditions that shaped those hopes and fears. From this dialectical process emerges the impetus for choice and action.

A piece written early in Kushner’s career, the original Bright Room of 1985 imperfectly effected this process, but was so full of promise that one wonders how early reviewers missed its flashes of genius. The main action, largely unchanged in the current version, involved a friendship network of artists and political workers living in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. The question facing all of them was how could each, encumbered or emboldened by a specific temperament and set of prior experiences, act in a way adequate to the historical moment? Lest audiences go too far down the rabbit hole of individual psyches, however, the details of Hitler’s rise and the failures of a center-left group to coalesce in opposition were meant to be flashed in blocks of texts above the set, sometimes voiced by an unseen actor. Individual actions thus unwound in view of larger historical events. So far, so Brechtian. The weakness of the original play, though, lay in the second, interwoven but less prominent story-line involving Zillah, an Upper West Side woman living in Reagan’s America who raged against this master of the mindless mumble as he ignored the escalating AIDS crisis. This device fairly screamed: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. THE NAZIS ARE AMONG US STILL, AND THEY ARE REAGAN AND HIS MINIONS.

Estelle Parsons in the Public Theater’s production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

In revising the play for its 2019 revival, Kushner moved Zillah to Trump’s America and compounded the awkwardness of this heavy-handed device by introducing a second character, Xillah, a thinly veiled stand-in for the playwright himself, who worried aloud about the original imperfections of the show, chronicled the difficulties of the rewriting process, and argued with Zillah (played at the Public by the fabulous Crystal Lucas-Perry) about political action and how both they and the play’s other characters should behave. In the most generous reading, Kushner was indulging in a bit of comic self-deflation, numbering himself among those who talk and do not act and underselling the powers of the medium to which he has devoted much of his career. But the fact remains: much of this was tedious, and worse, it interfered with the more urgent energies of the main story—energies that might indeed propel a theatregoer to action, if only the action of critical thought.

At its best, the production’s representation of the main story of 1930s Berlin revealed how Kushner’s deeply-engaging dramaturgy can affect an audience in ways that anticipate later work such as Angels in America, Caroline or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. While the Public’s production made the circumstances in Bright Room’s Berlin feel very grim, touches of whimsy offset the grimness. For example, when at one point the characters summoned the devil to Hitler’s Germany, he suddenly appeared, dapper and polite, and accompanied by a mock-ferocious artificial dog with glowing red eyes. There was a buoyancy of spirit in such gestures that intimated, rather than insisted, that the best response to terror is an unbowed creative spirit, one capable of drawing on reserves of imagination...