A Bridegroom Called Death

Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jonathan Hadary in A Bright Room Called Day (2019). Photo: Joan Marcus.

Upon hearing I was seeing the new production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, a friend asked if I thought the playwright would be in attendance. I pictured him back in the sound booth scribbling notes, some kind of light playing on those perfectly round glasses. I pictured him there, not basking—for Christ’s sake, he’s a writer—but questioning. Kushner, after all, is an indefatigable rewriter, and the temptation of tinkering with a major revival at the Public Theater could have proved impossible to resist. Kushner wasn’t in the wings that night, though. He did his rewrite from the stage.

In this divisive revision of his first play, Kushner has inserted a version of himself, played by the actor is, according to the program materials, what first caught the eye of Kushner’s artistic director and longtime collaborator Oskar Eustis. It’s clear why: the play is near catastrophic in its precocity. But it is also a young man’s play. It is didactic and referential, polemical and pedantic; the reviews over the years have said as much.