Work, Motherhood, and Capitalism Onstage
You never quite know what you’re going to get with a revival of a lesser-seen work, one that had the mixed blessing to be considered ahead of its time. Have the moths got to it over the years? Does it now fit the way it was supposed to? When Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” premièred on Broadway, in 2004, it received an uneven critical response, ran for less than four months, and hasn’t been staged here since. Now “Caroline” is back (in a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at Studio 54), with the English star Sharon D Clarke making her soul-shattering Broadway début in the title role. The musical hasn’t just stood the test of time; it has grown into the present—or maybe the present has grown to meet it. Either way, this production, directed by Michael Longhurst, should confirm it as a contemporary classic.
The show opens in November, 1963. We’re in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, home of the Gellmans, a Jewish family of sufficient, if stretched, means. Caroline Thibodeaux, the Gellmans’ Black maid (“Negro” is the term of the era, and the one Caroline herself prefers), toils in the basement, doing the laundry. For company, she has the washing machine (Arica Jackson) and the radio (Harper Miles, Nya, and Nasia Thomas), both of which are personified as fellow Black women, the former crowned in a halo of bubbles, the latter imagined as a Motown girl group with antennas sprouting from their heads. (Fly Davis did the superb costume design and set.) The appliances’ job is to make Caroline’s life easier, and they do their best, serenading her with ecstatic song. But they’re not above passing pointed judgment. “Thirty-nine and divorcée,” the radio sings. “How on earth she gonna thrive / when her life bury her alive?”
Caroline is angry: at life, which has trapped her in other people’s basements for twenty-two years while she struggles to keep a roof over the heads of her own four kids, and at herself, for failing to rise above her regrets. And she’s ashamed—of her illiteracy, of having lost a husband she loved in spite of his violence and drunkenness. Her bitterness explains her terse, forbidding manner, but lonely eight-year-old Noah Gellman (performed, on the night that I saw the show, by Jaden Myles Waldman) isn’t deterred. Caroline is the center of his universe, the woman “who runs everything” and seems, to him, even “stronger than my dad.” It’s a special treat for him to light her daily cigarette. Noah’s mother used to smoke, too. Then cancer killed her, and his father (John Cariani), an emotionally distant clarinettist, got remarried, to Rose Stopnik (Caissie Levy), a New Yorker who feels painfully out of place in this sad family and this strange Southern town. Rose can’t seem to get anyone to warm to her. Caroline doesn’t want her leftover stuffed cabbage, and Noah won’t let her tuck him in at night. But Rose is a woman of action, and if she can’t inspire love she’ll settle for wielding authority. When Noah keeps leaving coins in his pockets like some careless rich kid, she devises a policy: Caroline can supplement her paltry salary with any change she finds in the laundry.
This is one form of change that the musical deals with, and it sets off a crisis. Caroline is humiliated by Rose’s good intentions, but she can’t afford to refuse, even if it means taking “pennies from a baby.” The other kind of change is no less fraught. The world is shifting beneath Caroline’s tired feet. Her friend Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), also a maid, has begun to attend night school in the hope of making a better life for herself; her fun-loving teen-age daughter, Emmie (the radiant Samantha Williams), is developing a political consciousness that Caroline fears will lead to disappointment, or worse. In Dallas, the President has just been shot dead. Then, there’s the statue of a Confederate soldier that stands downtown, and onstage, at the start of Act I. By the time the second act begins, only its legs are left. The rest has been dismantled under the cover of night and tossed into the bayou.
Kushner grew up the son of a clarinettist in nineteen-sixties Lake Charles; he dedicated “Caroline” to his family’s own maid, Maudie Lee Davis. So Noah is an avatar of sorts for Kushner’s boyhood self, but, in this work rooted in autobiography, Kushner does something rare: he invites his curiosity about others to dislodge his own point of view. Carried along by Tesori’s music, which mashes klezmer, spirituals, sixties pop, and half a dozen other genres to create one irrepressible American sound, we see the story simultaneously through a child’s hopeful eyes and through a grown woman’s jaded ones. Are their perspectives so different? Both kids and adults, in this play that grapples with the burdens of reality, are granted gorgeous flights of fantasy; both yearn for life to go back to the way it once was. Still, there’s an asymmetry: Caroline is a mainstay in Noah’s world, while Noah can only dream of making a place for himself in Caroline’s. He longs to stake the same claim to her imagination that she has to his. Isn’t that what we all want—to figure in one another’s stories?
That question is political, too. Kushner comically nails the sincere yet complacent side of so much American Jewish liberalism in his depiction of Noah’s grandparents (Joy Hermalyn and Stuart Zagnit), who eulogize J.F.K. as being as much of a “friend to the colored” as he was a “friend to the Jew.” Nice thought, but not quite the truth. At the Gellmans’ Hanukkah party, Emmie, whom Caroline has brought with her to help serve the latkes, sparks a debate about the burgeoning civil-rights movement with Rose’s old-school socialist father (Chip Zien). Caroline is furious with her insubordinate daughter, and Emmie is incensed by Caroline’s meekness. When will her mother dare to stand up for herself—and for her people?
When Caroline finally does speak her mind, she sings it, in an explosive aria addressed to no one but God; Clarke, as powerful a performer as you’re likely to see, unleashes her character’s dissatisfaction and heartache, and brings down the house. Caroline isn’t who her daughter wishes her to be. She isn’t who she wanted to become. But she is singularly herself, and, as Clarke shows us, that’s enough.
Another musical about politics and motherhood under the strain of capitalism is in revival at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage: Bertolt Brecht’s “The Mother” (directed by Elizabeth LeCompte). Brecht, who based this 1932 work on a Maxim Gorky novel, intended it to be a Lehrstück, or learning play. “About 15,000 Berlin working-class women saw the play, which was a demonstration of methods of illegal revolutionary struggle,” he later wrote. The Performing Garage holds about seventy-five people, who appeared, on the evening that I attended the show, to be members of New York’s literati. The Marxist revolution may yet be fomented on TikTok, but it seems safe to say that the downtown New York stage is not the insurrectionary platform for the masses that Brecht might have hoped for.
The mother in “The Mother” is Pelegea Vlasov (Kate Valk), an illiterate factory worker in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Once she is introduced to Communist politics by her son, Pavel (Gareth Hobbs), she devotes herself to the cause, wrapping pickles in radical leaflets to distribute to workers and smuggling a printing press into her apartment. It is not hard to grasp Brecht’s lessons: workers are exploited, factory owners are greedy, union reps will screw everyone, and common men and women must band together. And there’s another, more curious message: that a parent can be converted to her child’s beliefs through mere exposure. Inspired by a diverse array of sources, including Slavoj Žižek’s YouTube videos, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and Radiolab, the Wooster Group takes an explainer approach to Brecht’s text, breaking up the action with amiable lectures on his theatrical methods; this cerebral production pleasurably tickles the intellect while leaving the emotions untouched. Brecht may have thought that one could function without the other, but no revolution has yet managed to sever the mind from the heart. ♦
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November 01, 2021 at 05:01PM
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Work, Motherhood, and Capitalism Onstage - The New Yorker
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