Too late for a cautionary tale?

It’s not a comforting show for closing out the year, but Blank Theatre Company’s revival of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day is an important one as we head into the bleak times ahead. Kushner’s look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through a group of bohemian and leftist friends in Berlin (and the play makes it clear these aren’t synonymous terms), from the first day of January 1932 to mid-November 1933, feels both prescient and immediate in Danny Kapinos’s spare but well-acted production in the Greenhouse Theater studio.

A Bright Room Called Day
Through 1/5: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Mon 12/30 7:30 PM; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, blanktheatrecompany.org and greenhousetheater.org, $35 ($20 students/industry)

Kushner wrote this occasionally didactic early play in 1984 and ’85, during the lead-up to the second Reagan administration, and the parallels he obviously intended between the rise of the Third Reich and the sharp rightward shift of the 1980s are embodied in Zillah (Lilah Weisman), a young Jewish grad student. In the original version of Kushner’s play (itself inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 drama Fear and Misery of the Third Reich), Zillah writes letters to Reagan that she knows no one will read. During the first Trump administration, Kushner revised the play to send Zillah to 1980s Berlin, where she engages in an affair with a young German man, despite their language barrier. 

Kushner noted in a 2019 interview with Alisa Solomon of the Nation that there was a wave of renewed interest in the play after Trump’s first election, while also reflecting on the reviews of the early productions, which tended to pooh-pooh the Reagan/Reich parallels. “The Reagan counterrevolution’s mantra was that government is the problem. And hatred of government leads to hatred of democracy, and if it goes on long enough and isn’t checked by people who believe in democracy and believe in government, it’s going to lead to an attempt to replace it with something else—whether you can call it fascism in the mid-20th-century sense or some other antidemocratic, oligarchic kleptocracy,” Kushner told Solomon.

For those unfamiliar with the history of the collapse of the Weimar era, Kushner’s play (which includes Brechtian timeline projections of events as they unfold with depressing swiftness) is a good primer. It’s perhaps too late to call it a “cautionary tale,” but in Agnes Eggling (Katherine Schwartz), an actor with a middling career and vague desires to be part of the German Communist party, we perhaps see ourselves: a woman desirous of doing good and helping her friends, but fearful to the point of paralysis of the consequences of running afoul of those who can deny us our comforts, if not our very existence.

The internecine battles between Agnes’s Trotsky-loving cinematographer partner, Husz (Raúl Alonso), and Stalinist artist Annabella (Shannon Bachelder) feel depressingly on point as a reminder of the inability of various factions of the left and center-left to unite against fascism. The ghostly presence of Ann James’s mysterious and increasingly malevolent Die Alte (the Old Woman), who shows up in Agnes’s flat from time to time, and Ben Veatch’s sterling one-scene appearance as Gottfried Swetts (but you can call him Old Scratch, if you like) are among the many highlights in this intellectually rich, sometimes confounding, and ultimately wrenching reminder of how easy it is to tear people apart and away from each other—and their values—when we fail to recognize the evil within and around us.