A Bright Room Called Day

Play for 10 actors (6 women, 4 men).

In 2019, Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright reunites with longtime collaborator and The Public Theater’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis (White Noise) in a scorching new version of his first play, the prescient 1985 masterwork suggesting the possibility of the Reagan counter-revolution eventually giving rise to American fascism.

Agnes, an actress in Weimar Germany, and her cadre of passionate, progressive friends, are torn between protest, escape, and survival as the world they knew crumbles around them. Her story is interrupted by an American woman enraged by the cruelty of the Reagan administration, and a new character, grappling with the anxiety, distraction, hope, and hopelessness of an artist facing the once unthinkable rise of authoritarianism in modern America.

Funny, brilliant, and devastating, this new production of A Bright Room Called Day revisits an epic work that takes a piercing look at the vulnerability of American democracy, and demands to know: when the devil takes up residence in your country… will you act?