A Bright Room Called Day

Debbie and I went to the theater in San Francisco last Friday night, seeing a production by the La Luna Theater Collective of Tony Kushner's play A Bright Room Called Day.

The play is being performed Friday and Saturday nights through November 8, with an additional performance on Monday, October 27, at the EXIT on Taylor (one of three venues of the EXIT Theater), 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets cost $20; call 415-721-9682 for reservations.

We had read the play some years back in a book- and play-reading group to which we belong, but the details had faded from our memories, and we came to it essentially fresh.

The play concerns the reactions of a small group of artists and intellectuals, connected to each other largely through the German filmmaking industry, to the advent of Hitler and the Nazis, in 1933. By interleaving the short scenes with a "present-day" (1990) pair of characters, Kushner draws parallels between the plight of the characters of the past and our own lives today. These parallels are more apt in America under the rule of the Shrub than they ever were when his father was president.

The production was well-cast, with the performers inhabiting and delivering their roles excellently. My largest criticism is about the writing and structure of the play itself: the many brief scenes seemed fragmented to me, with the fragmentation getting in the way of what ought to be a long, slow, steady buildup of the drama and tension.

Marking the scene breaks are captions, presented by slide projector, giving the date and outlining events of the day. A slide saying something like "February 20, 1933 - Later that night" resonates unfortunately with the film Start the Revolution Without Me with the constant narrated repetition of the date: "Still 1789...."

Kushner is wordy and long-winded – the production is more than two hours long – but his writing is nonetheless powerful and authentic.

One speech particularly moved me, spoken by Husz, an exiled Hungarian cinematographer:

Shut up. Listen.
There is something calling, Paulinka.
If you still retain a shred of decency
you can hear it – it's a dim terrible
voice that's calling – a bass howl, like
a cow in a slaughterhouse, but
far, far off...
It is calling us to action, calling us
to stand against the calamity,
to spare nothing, not our blood,
nor our happiness, nor our lives
in the struggle to stop the dreadful day
that's burning now
in oil flames on the horizon.

What makes the voice pathetic
is that it doesn't know
what kind of people it's reaching.
Us.
No one hears it, except us.
This Age wanted heroes.
It got us instead:
carefully constructed, but
immobile.
Subtle, but
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.
It happens.
A whole generation of washouts.
History says stand up,
and we totter and collapse,
weeping, moved, but not
sufficient.

The best of us, lacking.
The most decent,
not decent enough.
The kindest,
too cruel,
the most loving
too full of hate,
the wisest,
too stupid,
the fittest
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.

The Enemy
has a voice like seven thunders.
What chance did that dim voice ever have?
Marvel that anyone heard it
instead of wondering why nobody did anything,
marvel that we heard it,
we who have no right to hear it–
NO RIGHT!
And it would be a mercy not to.
But mercy ... is a thing ... no one remembers its face anymore.

The best would be
that time would stop
right now,
in this middling moment of awfulness,
before the very worst arrives.
We'd all be spared more than telling.
That would be best.