Caroline, or Change is a departure for playwright Tony Kushner, and he pulls it off very well. Instead of writing about cosmic catastrophes like the AIDS epidemic and war in Afghanistan, he narrows his focus to one household in Louisiana in 1963. Even more importantly, he restrains his dialogue and focuses on writing lyrics that reveal their essence within 32 bars.
Luckily, he has a wonderful partner in Jeanine Tesori, who supplies melody, mood and drama with a rich-sounding score. Theatergoers who know her only for Thoroughly Modern Millie, in which she used the style of the flapper era, may be surprised, but this new work is a logical maturation of talent she revealed in Violet off-Broadway in 1997. There she adapted the music of Memphis and Nashville for a story about a woman traveling across the South in 1964. Now she takes Louisiana blues, adds a dash of 60s girl-group rock 'n' roll and spices the brew with Christmas and Hanukkah motifs. She provides a rich tapestry that approaches the classical, but this is an accessible musical play, not an opera as it was mistakenly labeled by the New York Times.
Kushner's story involves a middle-class Jewish family, much like his own, which is isolated in a Christian community, and the Negro maid they employ for only $30 a week. The 8-year-old boy is lonely -- his mother died of cancer, he has no siblings, his father is self-absorbed and he views his stepmother as an enemy. Naturally, he is drawn to the maid, a divorced mother. The boy begs for warmth while the woman pulls back into a shell of anger. Caroline eventually realizes that she needs to change, while the Jewish family comes to recognize the changing political and social scene.
To cure her stepson's habit of leaving loose change in his pants pockets, the lady of the house tells Caroline to keep all the money that she finds. This tokenism, in lieu of giving her a decent wage, infuriates the maid and leads to the play's dramatic climax.
Kushner touches on the assassination of Kennedy, which also brought tumultuous change to America. Kushner's script and lyrics, and even his notes in the program, call attention to the multiple meanings of the word "change." (For the record, William Finn used the same analogy in his musical, A New Brain, in which Mary Testa sang a song asking for change. Finn and Kushner even use the same rhyme of "change" and "re-arrange." But this coincidence doesn't detract from the impact of Caroline..)
Angels in America had its angels, while Caroline has a singing washing machine, dryer, radio and moon and there are some Angelic flights of imaginative prose, but on the whole, this is a realistic drama. The cast is exemplary, especially Tonya Pinkins as Caroline, Harrison Chad as the boy, Veanne Cox as his mother, Anika Noni Rose as Caroline's rebellious daughter and Larry Keith as the boy's politically-left grandfather. The character of the father, however, is shallow and not given any redeeming qualities. There is unexplored drama in the position of Southern Jews, placed in the middle between distrustful adversaries and viewed with suspicion or hatred by many white Christians. Kushner shows surprising discipline in not writing all he could about this; though I miss the Kushnerian digressions, I'm impressed with the compactness of the story. George C. Wolfe's direction is clear and does not call attention to itself.
