Maid in America
Tony Kushner sets the struggles of the civil rights movement to the music of home, hearth, and laundry in Caroline, or Change.

By Robert Avila

UNLIKE THE REMARKABLE title character of his new play, Tony Kushner is at home with the inevitability of change. At least it's a theme that has offered up rich possibilities in his work. And in Caroline, or Change – an involving, pulsating new musical developed in collaboration with acclaimed composer Jeanine Tesori – the author of Angels in America and Homebody/Kabul again displays, in a freshly inventive form, his knack for registering the timbre of the times while seeking a basis for spiritual and political regeneration in the cleavages opened up by social crisis.

With Caroline he's at home in another sense too – even with the surprising foray into musical drama – since the story's setting in 1963 Lake Charles, La., recalls Kushner's childhood there as the son of working musicians in a white Jewish household aided by an African American maid. The boy in the story is roughly the age of the playwright in 1963, the time of the burgeoning civil rights movement and the cusp of a more general social upheaval that for many seemed ominously on the horizon.

Those seismic shifts in American society form the meaningful backdrop for a deceptively modest domestic drama centered on Caroline Thibodeaux (portrayed by the excellent Tonya Pinkins), an African American single mother of four who spends her days in the Gellman family's basement laundry room, its location and heat representing the earthly hell she sees as her regret-filled life. Stuart Gellman (David Costabile), meanwhile, has remarried after the death of his first wife from cancer, but his eight-year-old son, Noah (a bright Benjamin Platt, alternating with Sy Adamowsky), remains inconsolable and aloof from his well-meaning stepmother, Rose (Veanne Cox). Noah gravitates instead to the indifferent Caroline, whom he sees as a pillar of strength and permanence and calls "the president of the United States" and "indestructible." Of course, not even the president of the United States is indestructible. By contrast, Caroline's teenage daughter Emmie (a terrific Anika Noni Rose) grows more independent each day in step with what her mother sees as a dangerous interest in the civil rights struggle.

Noah's problem with "change" extends to the coins in his pockets that end up in the laundry, where Caroline places them in a cup on the washer. Kushner's brilliant use of the word in all its subtle shades of meaning serves to crack this little domestic drama wide open when Rose decides to enlist Caroline's help in teaching Noah the value of money. From now on, she can keep whatever change she finds. As a snapshot representing two months in the interconnected lives of two families, Caroline's story line in fact takes in whole vistas of American history through this double entendre, which registers everything from an existential dilemma to the fraught racial and socioeconomic ties that bind the characters in the waning days of Jim Crow.

Director George C. Wolfe's evocative staging throws Kushner's unconventional characters and poetic metaphors into vivid relief. As Caroline sings a bluesy lament for her stagnant solitude, the basement's appliances, a kind of chorus, all sing too: the washing machine (a bubbly optimist played by Capathia Jenkins), the radio (a flashy Supremes-like trio played by Tracy Nicole Chapman, Marva Hicks, and Kenna Ramsey), and the dryer (a devilish soul brother played by Chuck Cooper). For that matter, so do the moon (Aisha De Haas), a traditionally female harbinger of rebirth, and the city bus (Cooper), that icon of the civil rights movement's drive into the public sphere.

Sung straight through like a chamber opera, Kushner's witty lyrics blend seamlessly with Tesori's vivacious score, an ingenious mélange of Motown, blues, klezmer, and other styles that evokes a kind of heated cultural cauldron, churning the energies of a diverse but overlapping set of people and histories.

Also unusual for an American musical is the fact that, aside from a few more nostalgic and fanciful moments, the play focuses largely on lonely moments, as well as the awkward, inappropriate, regrettable encounters between a group of people finding it, individually and collectively, very hard to pull themselves together. Noah's gentle but oblivious father has retreated so far into his music that Noah identifies him with his instrument ("My father is a clarinet," he sings). Rose, uprooted from her beloved Upper West Side and rebuffed in her attempts to bond with Noah and Caroline, is a complete outsider. And even Emmie dreams of her own home where she can live "by myself, all alone." It's just such moments that can convey the play's full complexity – including its considerable humor – with a visceral force. It's also such moments that make Caroline, in particular, so compelling and memorable a character. For despite what she believes about herself, Caroline is the lifeline of her children, a generation that in 1963 has already claimed history for itself (signaled, in the play, by the theft of the local confederate statue). This alone gives her suffering and perseverance the dignity and real social value Emmie pays tribute to in her stirring epilogue. Caroline finally erases the line between a domestic sphere characterized by "secret little tragedies" and "costly, quiet victories" and the larger transformations underway in a restless world. 'Caroline, or Change' runs through Feb. 20. Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, S.F. $45-$90. (415) 512-7770, www.bestofbroadway-sf.com.