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A Bright Room Called Day

by Tony Kushner
review by Robert Avila in SF Bay Guardian October 8, 2003

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Witching hour

In Tony Kushner counsels that we sleep with one eye open

 

"WELCOME TO GERMANY" Agnes (Libby O'Connell), ever the gracious hostess, finds her tongue at last and welcomes Mr. Swetts (John Craven), the Devil, to her home. It's the final moment of a particularly memorable scene in La Luna Theatre Collective's strong, if uneven, production of Tony Kushner's first play, an exuberant piece of theater whose uncanny mix of politics, ebullient dialogue, lively intellectualism, dramatic playfulness, and moral seriousness presages his monumental Angels in America. And though inspired, like Angels, by the excesses of the Reagan era, A Bright Room Called Day seems crazily, depressingly, eerily to have grown more precisely contemporary in its audacious look back at the final months of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

In a series of two dozen or so short scenes spanning six months in the Nazis' consolidation of power (whose milestones appear in pithy phrases projected on the back wall), Agnes and her friends one by one decide what exactly they will do, moving from the comfortable abstractions of Communist Party slogans toward the concrete details of daily survival. In fact, Agnes's graciousness is about to wane. Fear wrestles with her natural kindness and loyalty now. She increasingly clings to the material over the social, like the desperate old woman (Ann Woodhead) who's taken to stalking Agnes's apartment at night in search of food. The close circle of artists, radicals, bon vivants – the life of Weimar Germany – who habitually gather at Agnes's home, including her lover, Husz (Kevin Karrick), find themselves less welcome just as shelter and safety everywhere disappear.

The future repeatedly interrupts this disintegrating scene in the form of Zillah (Floriana Alessandria), an alienated New Yorker in temporary exile from Reagan's America. Channeling the vibes in Agnes's empty flat after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Zillah confronts us with what some may see as a reckless comparison. But from where we sit in today's world, the hyperbole can't be laughed off. The USA PATRIOT Act's subversion of the constitution, the official disappearing of American citizens, executive-mandated detention camps immune to congressional or judicial oversight, the declaration of a world-historical mission premised on perpetual war, the whipping up of fear over internal "enemies," the consolidation of a police state (whose technological capacities would have made the Nazis drool) – if anything, present circumstances only underscore the point Kushner wants to make. Under a legacy one could describe as politico-genetic, we are still reaping the fruit of the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) years.

And Kushner's point has less to do with a one-to-one correlation between Hitler and Reagan – or Hitler and Bush, for that matter – than with the way modern society attenuates moral responsibility to a degree that, in periods of reaction, can have catastrophic consequences. Nevertheless, it's hard to have missed the fact that comparisons between Bush's post-9/11 America and Nazi Germany have been sprouting up all over the place, and not just on the fringes of society – under mossy rocks marked "artists" or "conspiracy theorists" or "nonconformists" – but in high places, including the halls of the German government!

Against the criminally minded propositions of the ruling class and the complacency of a routinized private life, Zillah recalls one of American dissident writer Randolph Bourne's "malcontents," the youthful breed of irreverent, antiauthoritarian agnostics conjured by Bourne to meet the crackpot idealism fronting for militarism in 1917. Rather than having a self-deceiving faith in corrupt institutions, Zillah echoes Bourne's sense that a "more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the sign of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting in America today. It may be a sign of hope."

Alessandria plays Zillah with affecting humor and charm, if perhaps with slightly less than the requisite jitters (a more manic undertone wouldn't be out of place). And generally, despite solid, even exceptional, acting, director Thomas Cooke's astute ensemble can lack focus at times, and consequently the urgency of the play comes across imperfectly. Still, Zillah sounds an appealing note of resistance, one vital to a story of political commitment and moral choice that, for all its defiant humor, comes laden with despondency and defeat. Her history, at least, remains to be written. In the meantime, the restless malcontent and self-styled "hysterical rationalist" swears by her paranoia, her subconscious mind's urgent proffering of the unimaginable. "That's my common sense," she says. "I pay attention to that."

In staying home to weather the storm outside, Agnes dies of a broken heart. But Zillah is the petrel at home in the storm, a wandering insomniac – one doesn't easily fall back to sleep after waking up to reality – and a survivor. "Don't put too much stock in a good night's sleep," she cautions us. "During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who're giving the rest of us bad dreams."

Sound advice for unsound times: "Eat something indigestible before you go to bed, and listen to your nightmares."

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