Tony Kushner talks about Caroline, or Change
Caroline, or Change is loosely based on an incident from my childhood and the people I knew when I was growing up. For years I wanted to write the play, to explore the civil rights movement, race relations, African-Americans and southern Jews in the early 1960s, from the perspective of my small, somewhat isolated home town. I took notes over the years and dredged up various recollections. I had a story, but I couldn’t find the right way to tell it. So I put it away.
Then San Francisco Opera asked me to write a libretto. I’m an ardent opera fan. My parents and my brother are professional musicians. Music was a central component of my childhood. Perhaps writing for an opera company, connecting the narrative I’d invented to music, provided the missing key to these characters, these incidents, that time. So I said yes, and wrote the text for Caroline.
The intended composer for the opera, who’d never written an opera, decided he didn’t want to try. I left the opera with no hard feelings, maybe even with a small sigh of relief, and brought my libretto back to the theater.
“Nothing ever happen” are the first words you’ll hear at a performance of Caroline, or Change, and shortly afterwards you’ll hear a washing machine singing “consequences unforeseen!” That’s what I remember about the early 1960s, at the beginning of what would prove to be a decade of immense transformation and turmoil all across America and around the world; it seemed as though nothing of great importance ever happened where we lived, in Lake Charles, Louisiana; and yet something new, unknown, unforeseen, heard at a distance coming from the world beyond, something exciting and alarming was slowly making itself known. Change was coming. Change is exciting. And when change comes the familiar is gone; in change there is loss.
Act One of Caroline begins on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. While working on the libretto, I read Kennedy’s speeches, impressed by his eloquence, gravity and decency. (American presidents, it’s good to remember, have been capable of these things.)
In his television and radio address of June 11, 1963, Kennedy announced the commencement of a political project that would result in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, most significant among many changes the Federal government would undertake to enfranchise all American citizens, something long overdue and still not completed. Kennedy opened his address by acknowledging that the political transformation to come had been catalyzed by the civil rights movement’s demonstrations, non-violent resistance, and community organizing. “The events in Birmingham [Alabama] and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them,” Kennedy said, and continued:
“The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, north and south, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests... We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets... It is time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.”
His choice of words is illuminating. Prudence – fear, in other words, of domestic unrest – demanded change. But Kennedy immediately moved beyond the obvious concern for national security to identify the root cause of the nation’s insecurity, namely a crisis of moral clarity. Rather than pander to easy reaction fueled by fear, Kennedy told his listeners that justice, and not repression, was the path to public order. In describing the discord of the times as a motion of democratic progress, a give-and-take between popular protest and a government capable of hearing and responding, the president was asking those who were frightened to be guided by principle; and he was asking those demanding change to believe that a social revolution was achievable through electoral politics.
In the same address, Kennedy struck at the heart of conservative resistance to change by asking white Americans to try to imagine what it feels like to be black and to suffer the murderous conditions of Jim Crow segregation. He continued:
“... who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay? One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.”
Kennedy’s implication is clear: complacency in the face of the suffering of others is not patience, but rather a failure of empathetic imagination.
“Can I see another’s woe/And not be in sorrow too?/Can I see another’s grief,/ And not seek for kind relief?” That’s Blake, whose imagination was infinite. It’s hard to conceive of real justice that isn’t shaped by empathy, and hard to speak about empathy without speaking of grief and loss.
I never like to say what a play of mine means, or what it’s about. I certainly don’t write plays to make this or that point. I began Caroline guided by a sense of loss, both personal and political. If you spend time in the company of loss, in its dark woods, it may lead you to interesting places. I was brought to read about and remember a time when the political life of the American republic seemed charged with possibility, nuance, complexity, electric contradiction and the dawning of a politics of difference, a new kind of democratic pluralism. The courageous people of the African-American civil rights movement desired and fought for freedom and justice with such ardor that those mighty abstractions, impossibly remote yet essential to life, became immanent, graspable, present in the world. Caroline is, in part, an homage to that hopeful time.
–Tony Kushner
