Refuse to allow the fear to become too great

Yesterday I saw the play A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner. It was put on by The Theatre Company in the intimate theater inside the downtown YMCA. The Theatre Company is run by the theatre department of University of Detroit Mercy. Their way of working is to cast a show with a combination of students and area professional actors, so the students get a feel for working in a professional atmosphere.

I got a delightful surprise when I went to the box office and said I wanted one ticket for the evening performance. The guy behind the counter said a patron just returned a ticket, which I could have for free!

Tony Kushner is the guy who wrote Angels in America, which I saw in the mid 1990s – yes, all seven hours. It looks at gay life during the AIDS epidemic. It was fascinating, strange, and bloated.

This play was not bloated, though on occasion still strange. The story takes place in Berlin during 1932-33. Yes, this is when the Nazis came to power. The story revolved around Agnes, her lover Husz who is Hungarian, lesbian Annabella, movie actress Paulinka, and gay Baz. Most of them are part of the German Communist Party or other labor movements. They try to make sense of the Nazi rise to power. Can it be stopped? Surely the workers will rise up! They then struggle over how to respond: Join the Nazis to be able to keep working? Resist? Flee? Muddle through? Surely this will last only a few months (it lasted 13 years and destroyed Germany).

Every so often there is a scene set in 1990, when Germany reunified. Zillah, an American, travels Germany for some excitement in her life – the Reagan era was way too boring. She hooks up with Emil, who doesn’t speak a word of English (the actor speaks German and I could understand bits of it) and she doesn’t speak German. Both in 1933 and in 1990 there is a discussion of evil. Zillah says that Hitler has defined the top end of the scale of evil, but he is so far out there the scale has become meaningless. How many deaths do you need to be responsible for before you can be placed on the scale? Millions? One?

Both the playwright and the director draw parallels to today. In a note in the program Kushner wrote:

I think democracy is always in peril. It is always dependent on the various groups that comprise the progressive community making common cause with one another. … People need to focus on what leads up to the Holocaust, what brings us to the point of genocide, to monstrous crimes against humanity.

Director Jamie Warrow wrote:

Thus, for me, A Bright Room Called Day is clearly a warning against political complacency within everyday existence – a mandate to act – to refuse to allow the fear to become too great.

The play will be presented two more weekends.