Student production grapples with fascism

With fresh waves of authoritarianism threatening modern-day democracy, acting students at the University of Winnipeg are travelling back to the latter days of Weimar Germany for a production they call “aggressively timely.”

A Bright Room Called Day, in its original format, was written by Tony Kushner — the playwright of Angels in America and screenwriter of director Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln and others — during the Reagan era as an allegorical warning about creeping fascism.

Inspired and exasperated by the election of Donald Trump to the office of American president, in 2019 Kushner retooled his decades-old work to address encroaching authoritarian nightmares.

Next week’s performance at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film will be the Canadian première of the modernized script, entitled A Bright Room Called Day Revisited.

“We read the original script and so seeing the differences between the two was really interesting,” says Chael Donald, who portrays the fictional film actress Paulinka Erdnuss, one of several artistic characters whose national pride is shaken, challenged and at times, dangerously engaged, by the rise of the Nazi party.

The revised version, which features a pseudo-Kushner commenting in retrospect, “adds even more of a modern context to what’s happening in the writing that I believe is super beneficial in terms of modern ears understanding what’s going on,” Donald says.

A 150-minute show, which features a cameo from the devil himself, A Bright Room Called Day Revisited would seem right up director Christopher Brauer’s alley. Brauer, an associate professor of theatre and film, is well-acquainted with Kushner’s work, having directed the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s acclaimed revival of Angels in America in 2012 and 2013.

Like Donald, and production dramaturge Lynne Pieper Martin, who worked closely with the cast and director to make the epic work accessible, Brauer didn’t find the original script gripping.

“It had been on my radar, but I’d never really wanted to do it. It felt clunky,” says Brauer. “And then looking at the political landscape, and the speed with which democratic institutions are getting chipped away, I thought, ‘Well, it might be interesting to have another look at it.’

“It suddenly was a whole other play for me. Partly, that’s because of Kushner’s changes, and partly, because of the political moment,” says Brauer, who only could read the 2015 revised script, not the one that faced Broadway in 2019.

None of Brauer’s contacts had a copy of that as-yet unpublished script, so the university production relied on a manuscript version that the publishing agent supplied.

“I think it’s a very important play. I’m sure it’ll stir people up,” says Pieper Martin, who in her preparation did extensive research on not only the Weimar era, but on the rise of fascist ideologies in Canada during the 1930s and beyond.

A Bright Room Called Day Revisited is performed by the fourth-year honours acting class, with technical and design support from the university’s production and design students. A 20-minute audience feedback session with Pieper Martin will be held following the Dec. 4 show.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman