Moral exuberance" declares Zillah Katz, our story's narrator-guide, is the key to escaping creeping despotism. No playwright was more morally exuberant in 1985 than Tony Kushner, his outrage so great that it would require the two-part, seven-hour Angels in America to contain it. In the meantime, he contented himself with drawing parallels between the Reagan administration and the rise of the Third Reich, speaking through the device of an insomniac conspiracy junkie haunted by flashbacks of her Weimar Republic-era predecessors.
These ancestral ghosts in A Bright Room Called Day are typical vie-de-boheme types: two film actresses—glamorous Paulinka Erdnuss and utility player Agnes Eggling—along with the latter's cameraman boyfriend Vealtninc Husz, cross-dressing commercial artist Annabella Gotchling and sex-studies research scientist Gregor "Baz" Bazwald. All are Marxists to varying degrees (Hungarian Husz is missing an eye, lost to the Russian revolution of 1919) but continue to indulge their youthful appetites—Paulinka takes opium and consults a psychoanalyst, gay Baz cruises Berlin's public parks, and everybody swills vodka as they pass the time in Chekhovian discussions of current events.
Their likewise varied responses to ominous harbingers of civil unrest are also the stuff of oft-told tales, but this is no docudrama. Paulinka's account of a diabolically inspired hallucination while performing Schiller's Faust ushers in a visit from the Devil himself, followed by frequent sightings of a scavenging wraith (done up in Caligari-expressionist drag) reciting nursery-rhyme oracles. Locating us are Brechtian title-cards, vintage photographs and a carefully selected score of bridging music for the many breaks in the action mandated by Kushner's snapshot scenes.
The Spartan Theater Company lives up to its name, whittling down to a crisp two hours-plus a text deliberately conceived as a sprawling, howling call to arms. Under Laura Elleseg's direction, the bare black-box studio space and low-tech scenic design facilitate character-driven performances (in particular, David Guiden's as the conflicted Baz, who confronts death—his own, and another's—three times in a single afternoon). Though the outcome is never in doubt, the individual paths leading to each person's decision engage our attention and sympathy throughout.
The final scene brings together three generations of survivors in a portrait of unity spanning the ages. That includes us, by the way. Playgoers in 2014 might prophesy doom after the recent election, but they cannot deny that we survived the dire prognostications of 30 years ago to emerge wiser for having faced down our fears.
