Caroline, or Change

MAID IN AMERICA Fry, left, watches Butler keep a clean house.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Considering how difficult it already is to get people to go to a musical they’ve never heard of, Caroline, or Change still asks a tremendous lot of its audiences. You have to accept, for example, that slavery on U.S. soil didn’t end with Lincoln’s proclamation. You must get past the unsentimental notion that impoverished African American Christians can be more stubbornly volatile than noble, and that the natural compassion of enlightened middle-class Jews has hard limits. And you can’t be mad that there’s no splashy number kicking off the show to explain the themes and characters, a la Damn Yankees or Rent. But howling Caroline, one of this country’s great dramatic works of the last few decades and among its most honest examinations of our democracy’s accidental caste system, trusts you to leave all this baggage at the door. I suggest you accept the challenge. Charles Newell’s steely, graceful production blows a hole through the heart.

The story, like Newell’s precise and lean staging, is disarmingly simple. In 1963 Louisiana, a black maid and laundress (Butler) working for a Jewish family is encouraged to keep the leftover pocket change she finds in the young boy’s trousers; it’s the step-mother’s crafty plan to teach her son basic fiscal responsibility. (Normally patrician Fry glows in the dark in this conflicted role.) The decision whether to snatch a discarded $20 bill the kid received for Hanukkah could be the defining one of her life. We watch her choose.

At once a harrowing American electric-soul opera and a delicate period tragedy of manners, Kushner and Tesori shift the expected focus by rotating the drawing room of the traditional domestic drama so that the servants are in the foreground and the troubled lives of the gentry are on the more distant horizon. It’s an upstairs/downstairs play—and, if you want it, a North Side/South Side play—as seen from a swampy basement laundry room. The progressive sound of Tesori’s clockwork-jive score, coached by young musical director Doug Peck in an early career high, floods the intimate Court space like a rhythm-and-blues hurricane tearing clean through a dam.

I do not agree with Hedy Weiss’s infamous 2004 assessment in the Chicago Sun-Times that Kushner’s nakedly autobiographical work is that of a self-loathing Jew, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I can see where she was coming from. The Gelman family’s Klezmer-based music is incidental, brittle and neurotic compared to that of the soaringly scored black voices. But the crude broken English in which the black characters address each other—if they weren’t singing, Butler and the wonderfully puckered Jacqueline Williams as her busybody friend would sound uncomfortably like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen—is key to the equilibrium in this unlikely dramatic equation. Incubated at New York’s Public Theatre—which also gave us the transcendent polyglot musicals HAIR and A Chorus Line—Tesori’s pioneering composition and Kushner’s loving-but-cagey libretto let us hear what each of these tribes sounds like to the other. Nothing else like it in American musicals has ever been successfully rendered.

I’d like to tell you about Butler’s historic, humbling accomplishment as the titular character—and as a woman who makes $30 a week when she comes across a stray $20, she’s really playing both titular characters—but instead I must offer an apology. I don’t have any words.