Stage

...Zillah as a character and Reno as a performer have so much force--compared to the beautifully realized inconclusiveness of Frances Conroy's Agnes--that Zillah may be able to reject both exile and inaction at home...

...Perhaps that could be an epigraph for both A Normal Life and A Bright Room Called Day...

...Yet it's obvious that most human beings are going to be failures," says Jacob in "The World Is a Wedding," "...practically everyone is unhappy...

...the most recent has just closed at the Public Theater...

...It is into Agnes's apartment that Zillah Katz (impressively played by Reno, the aggressive stand-up comedian) comes in 1990, an exile from Reagan-Bush America, which she equates with Agnes's Germany...

...It's a kind of reverse exile," Kushner says, "a decision to re-engage...

...Still, the power of dramatic analogy is great, and one wonders if the political outspokenness of Zillah is likely to be any more effective than the gestures--the posters, the meetings-that Agnes and her friends used...

...He responds to the man's question with, "No, I have no light...

...Still, his fiction is no place to go for a happy----or even a hopeful--ending...

...In a Schwartz-free environment, the play can be seen as a sentimental comedy about Jewish life in New York during the 1930s, peopled by stereotypes and punctuated by conventional bits--invented by Brogger--like the fourteen-year-old Jasper's having sex with an older woman and the rescue of the bad son, Seymour, from a threatening gambler by Baumann and the dentist...

...All but Agnes, that is, a follower who is unwilling to run away but who can only succumb to passivity...

...There is a problem with the ending, however, for the German story is about the defeat of the Left, whether it stays like Agnes or goes like her friends, and it is unclear whether Agnes is a lesson or a promise...

...That's what the play is about, that's what a 'bright room called day' is...

...The first version of Bright Room was produced in 1985...

...STAGE WITHOUT A LIGHT 'NORMAL LIFE' & 'BRIGHT ROOM' n Delmore Schwartz's most famous story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the protagonist/narrator watches his parents courting as though they were on the screen and leaps from his seat, crying out, "Don't do it...

...Although there were some effective performances--notably, Jeanne Paulsen's Rebecca--there is a synthetic quality to play and production alike...

...She is in search of revelation from the past, and it presumably comes when the ghostly presence of Agnes appears in the room, sensed--perhaps seen--by Zillah...

...A Bright Room Called Day came across to me as a more despairing play than it probably intended to be...

...She dismisses her German lover and prepares to return to America, leaving the apartment to the ghost of Agnes...

...Kushner, not completely convincingly, says the equation is Zillah's, not his...

...Well-made or not, these scenes concern a group of five friends ineffectively fighting the rise of Hitler, who, one by one, escape into exile...

...Schwartz's stories are saved from being as depressing as the world they depict by his affection for his losers and a wryness, an irony that lets him see the comedy in the tsuris--even then the character is a version of the author...

...Rebecca, who is given some of the desperation of Laura from "The World Is a Wedding," marries her dentist, a comic but substantial figure who has become a major character in the play as he never does in the story...

...And not marriage only...

...Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous...

...GERALD WEALES 132: Commonweal...

...Brogger keeps some of the overriding unhappiness of his source, but his play is designed to end on a note of possibility...

...There are two spaces here--Berlin in 1932-33, America in 1990...

...Kushner calls his 1930s scenes a "well-made, little four-wall drama," but a play that conjures the devil and lets Marion Seldes, as a symbolic figure in a nightie, crawl in and out the window, is not well-made in the usual sense of the phrase...

...By limiting his play to a few months in 1932, Brogger can use the Depression as an exacerbating influence on the Hart dislocation, but he can also focus on an immediate event instead of following the Harts through two decades as "Child" does...

...Perhaps it would be better to come to A Normal Life without the original stories...

...At the end of "The Child Is the Meaning of This Life," the grown-up Jasper, having promised his dying grandmother that he will marry and give her a great-grandchild, is stopped outside the hospital by a man with an unlit cigar...

...Bits and pieces of many Schwartz stories can be seen in A Normal Life--the screen scene, if not the shout, from "Dreams"--but it is primarily about the Hart family from "The Child Is the Meaning of This Life," with the addition of Jacob Baumann, the insurance man from America/America/, and a bookseller who gets his ideas if not his name from Jacob, including his interpretation of a Breughel painting as an illustration of the idea that "the world is a wedding...

...Eric Brogger's A Normal Life, which I saw at the Philadelphia Drama Guild, grew out of his fascination with Schwartz and his characters...

...The play ends with a wedding and revelation...

...Jasper, Rebecca's nephew, has an epiphany of some kind in his dead father's Pierce Arrow--the ghost of the much maligned man at his side--and is presumably ready to face the future for himself and his family...

...So it is with marriage in Schwartz's stories--a desired state that is always a disappointment...

...he ghosts who wander through A Normal Life are dramaturgical tools of doubtful value, but the one in A Bright Room Called Day is central to Tony Kushner's more ambitious play...

...In an interview in TheaterWeek (January 14-20, 1991), Ktlshner explained that "there's a space, a revolutionary space" in which the status quo disintegrates and a struggle for control takes place, one that often politicizes ordinary people...