The Closest of Strangers

Tony Kushner's latest play, Caroline, or Change, left me contemplating its curious title, which suggests an indecisive playwright. Why not just Caroline, or simply Change? Are two titles better than one?

In this case, absolutely. Caroline, or Change, a collaboration with composer Jeanine Tesori and director George C. Wolfe at New York's Public Theater, is a work in which so much hinges on that little "or" in the title. Built around parallels and contrasts, duos and dualisms, the play brilliantly constructs a series of either/ors and then defies our efforts to choose between them. Call it the theater of indecision: drama that counters everything with its opposite. Or call it the right way to tackle a subject with a history too knotty for the sort of pat treatment it might, in other hands, receive: the longtime love-hate affair between blacks and Jews.

It's best to start with plot. Kushner would have it no other way: "Theater is as much a part of trash culture as it is high art," he once said. "It has to have the jokes and it has to have the feathers and the mirrors and the smoke." The tenor of a metaphor is only as good as its vehicle. Caroline, or Change erects symbolic castles in the air but never loses sight of the literal; it is first and foremost an entertaining musical treat and--thankfully--a good story.

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