BITS & PIECES

Member travels, activities, thoughts, views, interests

"A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY"

Diane Frank reviews the recent Cleveland performance

Besides seeing Varla Jean at Cleveland Public Theatre, the next night I was in the neighborhood again. There was a theatre outing from my Temple (Chevrei Tikva) to see "A Bright Room Called Day" by Tony Kushner, better known for "Angels in America". We'd seen a bit of Angels presented a few years back by a college group, and I thought it might be interesting to see. A few of us gathered for dinner at Bela's Four Seasons, which is right across the street from Designs by Victoria at Detroit and 58th. The food was good, the company convivial and we weren't out of place given the number of tables filled by groups of men from the gay community. I didn't directly ask if it was a safe place, but I don't think there's any problem. It's nice to have a less expensive alternative to Snickers.

There were a number of things that impressed me on the positive side about "A Bright Room Called Day". The acting was excellent. The set design was truly dizzying. Front stage center was a writing desk inhabited by an androgynous character who presumably voiced the authors thoughts about the gloomy events taking place on stage, at the brink of the Nazification of Germany. To the rear, steeply raked, a sliver of stage ran from the audiences right down to the left, leaving dark the right half of the stage. All the action in the first act took place in these two locations. I say all the action in the first act because despite the imaginative set design and the great acting we all agreed that Kushner's play was just to preachy, too talky and the subject matter more gruesome than we wanted to contemplate with our own election coming up. Besides, I found that my brain just wasn't wired to look at that fun-house stage and I had a splitting headache.