The two-part epic, Angels in America may be Tony Kushner’s best known play, but for the past decade A Bright Room Called Day, which premiered in 1985 before Kushner was hailed as a star of the American theater, has become the one most frequently performed. The revived interest seems to coincide with the entry of Donald Trump into national politics. In 2017, during Trump’s first year in office, I wrote about two productions of A Bright Room Called Day that opened nearly back-to-back for the Boston area’s Arts Fuse. Today, after one Trump presidency, his third time on the ballot, and the imminent possibility that he might become the next president-elect, the play has acquired even a greater subtext.
Aptly timed, D.C.’s latest iteration of A Bright Room Called Day is a co-production from Nu Sass Productions and Pinky Swear Productions. Helmed by director Aria Velz, who manages a cast of 10 and a notoriously challenging script, the assembled team has made that Herculean work seem nearly effortless.
The play opens in 1932, with a New Year’s celebration in the Berlin apartment of film actor Agnes Eggling (Karen Lange) and her lover Vealtninc Husz (Zach Brewster-Geisz), a one-eyed Trotskyite cameraperson who fled Hungary and the Soviet Union once Joseph Stalin took power. Vodka abounds. Their guests range from the ideologically uncommitted opium-smoking actor Paulinka Erdnuss (Amber Gibson) to the strident communist Annabella Gotchling (Aubri O’Connor), who is the first to observe that many of her former comrades are now wearing swastikas; to Gregor “Baz” Baswald (Joshua Poole), a cocaine-snorting gay man. (It’s implied that Baz works at Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, founded and led by pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who believed that fascism arises from suppression of anything that does not conform to heterosexual normativity.)
Over the course of the next two years, Agnes, Husz, and their friends contend with the country’s political instability that inevitably leads to the rise of Nazism. Blinded by their ideologies, these Berliners (except Agnes) miss the simple truth: Nazism is neither the logical conclusion of capitalism nor sexual repression but founded on antisemitism and racism.
Agnes creates a performance piece calling for a workers’ revolution and a united front against anti-fascist parties to defeat the Nazis, but is soon visited by Communist party officials Emil Traum (Zach Walsh) and Rosa Malek (Leah Ly), who demonstrate that the party backs neither revolution nor unity for the time being. Traum and Malek’s subtle bickering reveals a party divided against itself. This fracturing and failure of the political left is a theme Kushner returns to in his 2009 play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.
On the skylight to Agnes and Husz’s apartment, projection designer Hailey LaRoe presents not just a window to the heavens, but 1930s newsreel footage and intertitles detailing the back and forth of German parliamentary politics. This much would make A Bright Room Called Day a smart, well-crafted historical drama. But what makes the play so memorable are its weirder elements.
There’s Die Alte (Nancy Blum), an old woman with a habit of climbing through the couple’s window late at night and rifling through the cabinets for food. Does she represent those dispossessed in the 14 years following Germany’s defeat in World War I or is she a ghost of Germany’s future defeat in World War II? Kushner leaves it ambiguous; regardless, Blum gives a harrowing portrayal of trauma and dementia. Likewise the Devil himself makes an appearance in the form of Herr Gottfried Swetts (John Stange). Made up in whiteface with thick black lipstick and eyeliner and dressed in his best formal wear (Ashlynne Ludwig’s costumes are impressive), he looks like a figure from Cabaret or the German expressionist films of the silent era. But the most controversial element of the play is the recurring appearances of the monologuing 1980s New York conspiracy theorist Zillah Katz (Julia Klavans).
Zillah has long been cited as the reason why A Bright Room Called Day had long been relegated to Kushner’s juvenilia. Klavans gives an intense and engaging performance, but it is hard to escape her use of numerology and the Book of Revelations to prove a link between Adolf Hitler and then-president Ronald Reagan—there’s no analysis of policy or ideology, just esotericism and feels. Structurally, Zillah’s scenes seem like excerpts from a one-act solo piece grafted onto a historical drama. But it’s also the reason so many theaters see the current era as a time to engage with this 39-year-old play: Reagan has become a metaphor for Trump, and Trump a metaphor for Hitler.
In late 2017, Trump’s description of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who participated in the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville as “very fine people” was fresh in mind. In 2024, the parallel between Reagan’s lack of response to the AIDS epidemic and Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic is hard not to notice. But it’s also hard not to notice that Zillah’s conspiracy board is only a few decades, several pushpins, and a skein of yarn away from becoming a Pizzagate or QAnon cultist.
With such a large ensemble, it is difficult to give attention to every player’s contributions, but Poole’s performance is singular. In previous shows, Poole has proved himself a physical comedian; here, he uses these skills as Baz with flamboyantly broad movements that both entertain his friends and physicalize his despair when he realizes the Nazis have won.
Some still consider A Bright Room Called Day as the work of a less mature, less disciplined playwright than the one who authored Angels in America. But they forget Angels was just as weird when it premiered in two parts in 1991 and 1992—it just happened to align with the zeitgeist of that decade. Yet judging by how often A Bright Room Called Day has been staged in the past eight years, it would seem that Trump and whatever cultural forces brought him to prominence have also primed the zeitgeist for Kushner’s earlier work. This is messy, yet important theater, which will undoubtedly take on new meanings no matter the result of today’s election.
Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, directed by Aria Velz and co-presented by Nu Sass Productions and Pinky Swear Productions, runs through Nov. 16 at DC Arts Center. nusass.com. $10—$30 with pay what you will options.