Caroline, or Change

Last night I saw Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. It’s a memory play, a sung-through musical created with the composer Jeanine Tesori. Reconstructing his own childhood, Kushner places us in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Caroline is the black maid for a Jewish family in some distress. The mother has recently died, the father has remarried, the young son Noah hates his stepmother and reveres Caroline, who seems to him the all-powerful ruler of her domain: the laundry room in the basement.

The change of the title has two meanings, a bit awkwardly linked. It’s November 1963 and social change is in the air. In addition, the well-meaning but clueless stepmother tries to discipline Noah and help her maid at the same time: she tells Caroline to keep any loose change that Noah leaves behind in his laundry. Caroline is thus trapped between her financial need and her understanding that “a grown woman got no business taking pennies from a baby.”

This all reaches a climax of emotional violence after Noah leaves in his pocket a $20 bill he receives as a Hanukkah present. It’s a slender reed on which to build the conflict needed to power 2½ hours of drama. But it works.

The astonishing Sharon D. Clarke commands the stage throughout: the stillness of her face and body conveys her pain and restrained anger, while the unrestrained power of her voice articulates all the feelings she must otherwise repress. And she’s backed by a formidable array of singers, all people of color, representing the washer and dryer, a mournful bus that movingly announces the Kennedy assassination to Caroline and her friend at the bus stop. And most prominently, a Supremes-like trio forming a kind of Greek chorus whenever Caroline turns on her radio.

The white family is fully in the background, not just in the writing but in the production as well, where their area of the house is placed high and upstage.

I noted, however, that there appeared to be more people of color on stage than in the audience. Kushner wrote the piece 15 years ago. Could he write it today, when people are more troubled by the notion that a white man can tell the story of a black woman? Perhaps, because he’s Tony Kushner. But I couldn’t help but question whether he really can bring to life a woman modeled on his family’s maid.

I was deeply moved by the play. But, like Tony Kushner, I’m a privileged white person. In discussing the play with others this morning, one person objected to this concern by saying that it’s a memory play and that he knew her. But that’s the problem: he didn’t know her, and to his credit he presents Noah, his child self, as oblivious to Caroline’s real life and real relationship to him. Whether he really understood her by the time he wrote the play is for me an open question.