kush by kush by kushner

Robert and I have had the extreme pleasure of seeing not just one, but two, Tony Kushner plays, about a week apart. The plays were in a new Boston theater complex, where on the way in, I always feel like I'm going to the movies, but surprise, I get to see live theater instead.

The first was Caroline, or Change, set in the early 60s in the south. Caroline is a black maid to a Jewish family, consisting of a little boy, his recently-widowed father, and his newish "liberal" (in this case, spelled clueless) step-mother from the north. Caroline is a single mother, raising four kids on $30 a week, living close to the edge. The step-mother means well but is always putting her foot in her mouth. The father is still grieving; the little boy is trying to find his way.

The staging is astonishing -- the stage is split in two, with the "black" side lower than the "white" side by a few feet. Also, characters play the washer, the dryer, the moon, the bus that carries Caroline back and forth, and the radio. And it's a musical, or really, a modern opera, with references to all sorts of familiar tunes from the last couple of centuries.

The racial tensions roil as JFK is assassinated, as one of Caroline's daughters engages in radical activities, and as the young white boy provokes tensions with Caroline. And of course, this being a Kushner play, there are some good fantasy scenes, mostly involving the young boy, and including a touching reconciliation with Caroline.

The second play is the opera version of Angels in America, cut from six hours in the original play to two and a half in this piece. The music is fairly "new" sounding -- the most hummable parts sound like Sondheim gone mad. The shortened show manages to be nearly as complicated as the original, with added hope helped along by the perspective we now have on the AIDS disaster.

The set was fascinating -- antiseptically white plastic tile everywhere, with two giant wings toward the back of the set. The curtains around the set looked like giant hospital curtains, and most of the orchestra wore white scrubs and white booties. Much of the color in the costumes was white or black, with a little red and a little lavender.

In the play, the angel comes crashing through the ceiling, but in this production, she is dressed as a doctor or nurse -- one of the real-life angels who's played such an important role in the plague. (To be fair, in the play and in the movie, the actor who plays the angel also plays a nurse.)

Of course, there were fun moments and devastating moments, and some of my favorite lines were cut. (They did keep "I see you are very sick" but cut "but deep down, I see someone entirely free of illness".) One of the characters softened long before the script called for it; I assume that the actor playing that role is just too nice to be cold and hard for that long.

But on the whole, I was enchanted. I mean, I'm not fond of opera, and I usually can't sit through atonal music, but the whole thing worked well. I think we're now officially Kushner fans, and we'll try to see whatever other plays he creates.