The Cost of Change
Of the many haunting crescendos that filled the final Broadway performance of Caroline, or Change, there was a single lyric that echoed long after the curtain had lowered.
This occurred during a pivotal scene in Act One: In Louisiana circa 1963, Caroline Thibodeaux, a black maid played by Tonya Pinkins, learns that President Kennedy has just been assassinated. The Bus — a soulfully anthropomorphic creature brought to life by Chuck Cooper — delivers the news in one succinct, sung declaration: “The President is dead.”
On any other night, the lyric is nothing more than a plot point, necessary to propel the narrative and thus free of insinuation. But on Aug. 29, the Bus bellowed with rage. By letting his voice curdle into violent vibrato, Mr. Cooper shattered the present tense — that fragile space that live performance at once occupies and dismisses — and gave the line an inescapable political context.
It became clear why this was not like any other night at Caroline, or Change. Tonight, eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, a different President had roiled Mr. Cooper’s emotions.
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One could argue, quite feasibly, that George W. Bush and his party are culpable in the closing of Caroline, or Change. When The New York Times reported that the show — a musical about the intricate, tense relationship between a young Jewish boy (Noah Gellman) and his family’s black maid, via Tony Kushner — would be shutting down due to horrendous projections for the last week of August, fingers predictably pointed at the RNC. Producer Rocco Landesman said it “would be absolutely disastrous for us to keep open.... The Republicans are going to be occupied with the convention, and anyone who’s not a Republican is going to be out of town.”
True. That week, Manhattan’s vacancy was unprecedented, most noticeably in Times Square. And Caroline was not the only show forced to close in late August — Bryony Levy’s acclaimed Frozen ended its run on Aug. 22, as did the crowd-pleasing Little Shop of Horrors. Evidently, it was not a good week for business on Broadway, and Caroline was just another unlucky show.
But it’s not that simple. Upon closer examination, the “blame the RNC” defense falls apart. When a critically lauded production from a critically lauded group of collaborators lasts less than a year, questions — many of them messy and troublesome — are bound to be raised. Like a character in one of Mr. Kushner’s plays, the commercial disappointment of Caroline, or Change is complex, conflicted and intrinsically political.
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“There are moments in the history of theatre when stagecraft takes a new turn. I like to think that this happened for the American musical last week….”
This is how John Lahr began his review of Caroline, or Change when it debuted in the Public Theater in November 2003. Lahr, head theater critic for The New Yorker, could find no fault with Caroline. He wrote that it “bushwhacked a path beyond the narrative dead end of the deconstructed, overfreighted musicals of the past thirty years.” Lahr may not have witnessed the same political potency that filled the Aug. 29 performance, but he clearly felt “this musical’s many thrills” offered promise from the beginning.
John Heilpern of the New York Observer was equally unbridled in his own extolment, calling the show a “monumental achievement in American musical theatre. Joyful, wholly successful, immensely moving, told with abundant wit and generosity of heart … The finest musical theatre to come our way in a long, long time.” Heilpern, echoing Lahr, mentioned the show’s impact on “theater,” a world whose state of affairs is constantly lamented; critics of all shapes and sizes write obituaries for American drama on a seasonal basis. But in Caroline, each man saw hope for his discipline: something different, fresh and, as Lahr put it, entertainment that “offers the complexity of psychology and of history.”
It seemed as though positive press for Caroline was coming from all directions, and in a way, it was. But amidst the unanimous praise of the show’s elements — Mr. Kushner’s libretto, Jeanine Tesori’s score, George C. Wolfe’s direction, Tonya Pinkins’ performance — there was a trepidation about that nagging “complexity.”
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Reserved admiration for Caroline, or Change first appeared in a review by Ben Brantley of The New York Times. Brantley referred to the show as a “judiciously arranged social canvas” and warned potential viewers that “you may find that you appreciate the show more in retrospect than while you’re watching it. In ambition and achievement, Caroline handily tops any new musical this fall…. But in truth, it is almost too good to be good.”
Too good to be good? What could possibly make Caroline, which Brantley referred to as a “carefully wrought ... impeccably performed show,” open to such criticism? And is being “too good” an acceptable criticism in the first place? Brantley was not the only critic who felt this way. Adam Feldman of Time Out New York said outright “the daring, beautiful, and profoundly moving” show was “endangered” — after all, he asked, “How deep is a musical allowed to get on Broadway?”
Not too deep, apparently. Despite its sold-out run at the Public, Caroline, or Change failed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater: it debuted in early May 2004 and lasted less than four months. Though some, like Feldman, saw this coming, many in the theater world were perplexed. After all, Tony Kushner is one of America’s most successful playwrights. A profile of the writer in The New York Times — which ran the same week Caroline debuted at the Public and Angels in America dominated HBO — pointed out that Mr. Kushner is the rare playwright who can support himself through his theatrical endeavors: A solid run at a regional theater like the Mark Taper Forum brings in $50,000 to $60,000, he said; the HBO Angels script, which he rewrote from scratch, brought in much more.
And the sheer fact that Angels — an epic, self-proclaimed “gay fantasia” that confronts AIDS, embraces black drag queens, bisexual Mormons and drug addicts, and bashes Ronald Reagan — has any sort of mass appeal in the first place is a testament to Mr. Kushner’s ability to translate his fringe sensibilities to a mainstream audience — and succeed.
So what went wrong? However many lukewarm notices there were (and there were more than a few; the New York Post went so far as to suggest that Caroline, or Change was the theatrical equivalent of “castor oil”) alongside the worship of Lahr and Heilpern, mediocre reviews are no more to blame than the RNC. One need only look to the triumph of Movin’ Out or the bombing of Bombay Dreams to know that there is no discernable correlation between Good Review and Good Box Office.
Good Review, however, has a cousin — let’s call him Word of Mouth — who can override the most poisonous press and transform the fortunes of a struggling show. ‘Surely,’ the producers of Caroline must’ve thought, ‘Kushner fans will rally together. Surely the same well-to-do, educated, liberal New Yorkers who first cheered on Angels will see the show, love it and put Word of Mouth into action.’ But they didn’t.
Some came. Some even loved. And some told their friends about Caroline, or Change, in hushed tones at fundraising balls or in the produce aisle at Balducci’s. But the New York elite, it seems, felt the same way Brantley did: Caroline was good, but why so glum? And, Mr. Kushner, why so ... four decades ago?
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Watching Caroline, or Change, I couldn’t keep a rather obtuse question out of my head: “Isn’t this supposed to be a period piece?” The plot certainly doesn’t seem that dated: Caroline, poor but diligent, works long, hard hours for little pay; the family that employs her feels guilty about not giving her more, but do nothing to change the circumstances; Caroline feels a flash of rebellion and leaves the job, only to come back to it in the end when she realizes that she has no other options. Is this really a situation that could only exist in the 1960s?
To be sure, the historical framework of the JFK assassination and the vintage Southern design gave the show a specific time and place. But everything that impassioned the characters in Caroline — their conflicts, their ambiguities, their unspoken frustrations — felt unsettlingly pertinent.
All I had to do was exit the Eugene O’Neill Theater to be surrounded by evidence that little has “changed” since Caroline Thibodeaux’s days.
New York City is a microcosm of the Black Problem in America. In April of this year, the Community Service Society released a report stating that only 51.8 percent of African-American men in the city hold paying jobs. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that these numbers represent a “state of emergency.” Bob Herbert of The New York Times saw “an emerging catastrophe — levels of male joblessness that mock the very idea of stable, viable communities.”
Herbert was right in the severity of his language, but to refer to this problem as “emerging” missed the point. Unemployment — like poor education, poverty or the AIDS crisis — is one of many cards that have been stacked against African Americans since the days of slavery. These issues have always existed, some lying dormant during periods of prosperity. The only thing that changes is our willingness to talk about them. Randall Collins, a noted sociologist, pointed to a recent dramatic shift in liberal ideas about race in his essay “Ethnic Change in Macro-Historical Perspective”:
“In the late twentieth century, the prestige of ethnic autonomy has been high, and discourse in the social sciences has been replete with morally charged concepts such as multiculturalism, the right to one’s culture and cultural genocide. This is a very different mood from that of the early twentieth century and before, when liberals’ ideals were often an inclusive nationalism, overcoming regionalisms and local animosities in the name of one people cooperating toward a shared goal.”
Few would argue that African Americans have achieved the “shared goal.” And that’s why Caroline, or Change struck a nerve with its audience — it reminded them that little has changed, that there is still hard work to be done.
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“There is no upbeat future for Caroline. She has put herself beyond dreams. To the end, she is wary and stolid and clear-eyed.”
John Lahr again, this time illustrating what I liked best about Caroline, or Change. The show may not have been uplifting, but it was inspiring. To see a character like Caroline — hard, stubborn, real — is to be reminded that, yes, change takes time — but change is needed. This is what we need to be reminded of every day. In an era of “compassionate conservatism,” Red states and Blue states and corporate greed, it is clear that the idea of change — the hope of it, always burning somewhere — might be the best thing we have.
