How do we live in the Here and Now?
A Tony Kushner play offers some thoughts for getting through right now.
Over the weekend, I saw a production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, an early play that looks at a group of artists and activists in 1930s Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. It’s punctuated by monologues from a character named Zillah, an 1980s conspiracy theorist watching the rise of an evil she calls Ronald Reagan. These two timelines eventually touch each other — as the play says, “The border is full of holes.”(more on that later) — and the play is ultimately a meditation on how community forms, how it fractures, and how it dissolves in the face of what we might call evil.
We originally booked tickets a few weeks ago, because I am a Kushner fanatic. I have been since college. I first encountered A Bright Room Called Day in my rush to buy everything Kushner after reading Angels in America, which is the play that jumpstarted my passion for playwriting. I liked the play a lot, and even though at 20 I didn’t fully understand all of its politics and history, it’s long been a play I admired and hoped to see at some point.
The play took on a very different function over the weekend, however, a different urgency in light of the election, a moment in which many of us are seeing history painfully repeating. I realized a few scenes in, I wasn’t watching as a Kushner fanboy. I was watching as an anxious queer adult living in the United States on the verge of a fascist administration coming into power with stated goals of wiping the present and history clean of people like me.
There’s a moment in Act Two, in a scene between Agnes, an actor finding her political footing and the play’s central protagonist, and Gotchling, her friend, artist and devoted Communist. They’re watching their group of friends disintegrate and separate as Hitler’s power expands across Germany, and Gotching delivers a speech which stopped me in my tracks.
“Pick any era in history, Agnes. What is really beautiful about that era? The way the rich lived? No. The way the poor lived? No. The dreams of the Left are always beautiful. The imagining of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger, these alone are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces. As an artist I am struck to the heart by these dreams. These visions. We progress. But at great cost. How can anyone stand to live without understanding that much?”
It reminded me of my forever go-to José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, where he writes:
“Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
A Bright Room Called Day is about life in the borderlands, about what it means to live on the membrane between the present and the future, between a world that’s not enough and a future world (we hope) will be more than we need. Life on the membrane is tough; you know you can’t stay in the world as it is, but you haven’t yet broken through to what’s on the other side. You hold both realities in your hand at once, yet you can’t truly have either one. You can’t commit to an inadequate Here and Now. You can’t yet touch what’s Then and There.
That’s where we are now. Who can live in this present world, this hateful, anti-science, anti-education, anti-Black, anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-community, racist, ableist, Islamophobic world? It hurts to walk through this Here and Now, like walking barefoot across shards of glass. We can see the better world — it’s right there, shining, a bright room called Day — but we can’t touch it. We can’t get through to it. All we can do is carry the dream of our bright room, the dream of our There and Then, and try to keep it safe from the fascists Hell-bent on keeping us in the dark.
So what do we do now? Near the end of A Bright Room Called Day, Agnes agrees to house an escaping Communist Party agent named Rosa Malek, who we saw earlier in the play, during Agnes’ flirtation with becoming a Communist herself. Rosa gives us a glimpse into some answer to that question.
“On the border, in Karlsbad, there’s a house: 30 Herze Street. Memorize the address, don’t write it down. 30 Herze, like the mountains. The front of the house is in Germany. The back of the house is in Czechoslovakia. The people who live there are . . . friends of ours, and the Nazis don’t know about it yet—the system is full of little holes like this. Go there by train, at night, if it gets bad here; knock on the door and tell them you’re looking for the Green Front. They’ll take you to the back door, and you’re out.
If you need to. Ask for the way to the Green Front. The borders are full of holes.”
The borderlands that leave us in this perilous present might also be the answer to our liberation. The house that straddles national borders is a means of escape. So, too, can our straddling of borders be our escape. We’re on the membrane, but we can be on the membrane together. We can gather in our dreams of the Then and There and pierce little pinprick holes in the membrane. We can let the light in.
And maybe we can fill the borderland with stars that light the way out of the Here and Now.