About the Show

A new version Tony Kushner's ("Caroline, Or Change"; "Angels in America") first play, a prescient 1985 drama suggesting the possibility of the Reagan counter-revolution eventually giving rise to American fascism.

From the show:

Agnes, an actress in Weimar Germany, and her cadre of passionate, progressive friends, are torn between protest, escape, and survival as the world they knew crumbles around them. Her story is interrupted by an American woman enraged by the cruelty of the Reagan administration, and a new character, grappling with the anxiety, distraction, hope, and hopelessness of an artist facing the once unthinkable rise of authoritarianism in modern America.

Funny, brilliant, and devastating, this new production of A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY revisits an epic work that takes a piercing look at the vulnerability of American democracy, and demands to know: when the devil takes up residence in your country… will you act?

Critic Reviews (15)

"The Playwright Enters the Play In retooling his first produced work, Tony Kushner himself appears as a character in this lumbering portrait of endangered artists in Nazi Berlin."
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4 Stars. "This will not be welcome to the kind of people who scream 'Godwin’s Law!' at any whiff of comparison to the Third Reich...But it is a privilege to spend three hours in the company of such an invigorating, morally serious intellect.
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"The Wild Invention of 'Fefu and Her Friends,' and the (Latest!) Rewrite of 'A Bright Room Called Day'"
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"Blaming the President: Tony Kushner’s 1985 history play prefigured ‘Angels in America,’ but even a new revival leaves a lot to be desired."
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"This first major NYC revival of the 1985 debut from Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Angels in America' author Tony Kushner is a revised version featuring a stand-in for the playwright commenting on the action."
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"Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day Corrects Its Past Mistakes — and Hopes America Will Too: Kushner updates his Reagan-era critique of dangerous right-wing politics for a new production at the Public Theater."
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"Tony Kushner Inserts Himself Into His Early Effort, 'A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY'"
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"Dead on arrival when first seen at the Public in 1991, thanks to its irritatingly facile and misleading parallels between the Nazi regime and the Reagan Administration, it has been tinkered with by the author, with results that only add to its dramatic inertia."
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