Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Tony Kushner about his work on Caroline, or Change, in early 2020.
TED SOD: What inspired you to write Caroline, or Change?
TONY KUSHNER: Memories of my childhood in Louisiana, my mother's death in 1990, curiosity about writing a musical, hopes of striking it rich writing a musical—in other words, delusion—and all the usual stuff: trauma, guilt, revenge. Caroline, or Change tells a story I’ve been thinking about for many years. It’s partly based on an incident from my childhood, grounded in memories from my early life. I wanted to write about race relations, the civil rights movement, and African Americans and Southern Jews in the early 1960s, a time of protean change sweeping the country, and to write about these things from the perspective of Lake Charles, Louisiana, the small, somewhat isolated town where I grew up.
I took notes over the years and dredged up various recollections, but I couldn’t find the right vessel for the story I had decided to tell. I decided to write Caroline, or Change when the San Francisco Opera asked me to write a libretto for an opera for which Bobby McFerrin would write the music. Then Bobby decided he didn’t want to write an opera. I think getting a commission from an opera company made it possible for me to start writing Caroline, or Change.
TS: Will you talk about your collaboration with Jeanine Tesori and George C. Wolfe on the original production? Any insights into how the three of you worked together? What was most challenging for you to write?
TK: I showed the script to George because I wanted him to direct it. He really liked it and we talked about composers and we both agreed that the one we most wanted to work with was Jeanine. We had both seen Twelfth Night that Nicholas Hytner did at Lincoln Center that Jeanine wrote the score for. That was the moment where everyone stood up and took notice of her as a composer. I contacted her and we sent her the libretto and she read it and politely said it wasn’t for her.
A bit later I was asked to write lyrics for a musical version of Don Juan DeMarco, a film that starred Marlon Brando, Johnny Depp, and Faye Dunaway. Jeanine had been hired to compose and I loved working with her. We did a workshop of it at Lincoln Center. Everybody was more excited than I was. I called Jeanine and told her, “I think I’m going to drop out of this project because I don’t really believe in the story, but now that I’ve worked with you and fallen madly in love with you, I really would love to talk to you about why you don’t want to do Caroline, or Change because I think we should do it together.” George and I met with her and what it really came down to was that it didn’t look like a script for a musical; the songs weren’t clearly demarcated, and so on. She just couldn’t find herself in the material—she couldn’t figure out where to start. We did a reading of the script for her and she got excited about it, but she still had reservations and didn’t know how to start.
George had an idea that the appliances Caroline interacts with would somehow become inhabited by the ghosts of slaves who lived in the area around Lake Charles during slavery and that their energies were now in these machines. It gave Jeanine a place to start, so she wrote “The Bus Song” and it took off after that. We started back at the beginning and sequentially we moved through the whole script. I rewrote as we went along. Some things didn’t change at all and some things changed a lot. She wanted more for the kids to do, especially for Caroline’s kids to do. I hadn’t written it originally thinking about where the intermission would be, and we decided that it would probably be a song for the kids to sing after scene six. I went up to Provincetown with my husband and I sketched out a version of “Petrucius Coleslaw” and then we talked about children’s games.
The hardest thing to write was “Lot’s Wife.” It became clear pretty quickly that it was going to be the 11 o’clock number for Caroline, and I think we went through 18 versions of it. Everybody had opinions about it and everybody kept arguing about it and George was really great. He insisted that I stick with what I wanted it to be about and that I keep digging for it. Whenever you work with George, he is incredibly protective of his writers. He won’t let anyone tell the writer what to do. Caroline is a very tough nut and she’s not going to crack that easily. It didn’t feel right to me, what she sang in earlier versions. I finally came up with “Murder Me God.” I really feel like “Lot’s Wife” is the thing that the three of us created together. It was George’s idea to switch from third person to first person with the lyrics “Set me free” on the last repetition.
TS: How did you collaborate with Michael Longhurst, the director of Roundabout’s revival? What information did you impart to him?
TK: Michael and I had a few conversations. As opposed to everything else I’ve ever written, I feel less anxiety about this musical in production because I really feel that Jeanine’s score is a roadmap. There’s some room for maneuvering but there’s a template for the emotional life of the show in the score and as long as you do the score as written, you’re probably going to get it right. That’s why I think it had such a good life after it finished in New York the first time.
I told Michael that the musical would reward specificity. There’s a geographical specificity to Caroline. I’m from the South and you can’t approach it as a generic Southern story. It’s Louisiana and it’s very much about that particular part of the world at that particular time.
The relationship between the Jewish family and this African-American woman and her kids—it’s very much about that particular kind of society. Racial boundaries existed, but they weren’t enforced with violence. The civil rights movement was taking a long time to get to this particular corner in the South. The civil rights movement hadn’t really targeted Louisiana in the way they did Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. I explained to Michael that Lake Charles is not really a Baptist city. This part of Louisiana is Catholic and French and Spanish and Creole. It’s a very mixed part of the world and it doesn’t have the same kind of savage watchdog presence that places like Mississippi and Alabama did and to a great extent still do.
I talked to him a lot about that, what parts of the play were autobiographical, and what parts aren’t, and also about the Jewish family. The only thing that I was a little bit nervous about in England is that the British have a different relationship to Jews. It’s very much an awareness of Jews as “the other”—as not British or not English. Again, I felt that it was important that the Southern reformed Jews be treated with specificity in that they’re not in New York City, they’re not people who spend their summers in the Catskills.
There were a lot of discussions about the historical, political, cultural background of the play because, as I said earlier, I think it helps to start with the specific.
TS: Given what is going on politically in Caroline, or Change, do you think America needs a new civil rights movement and new civil rights laws?
TK: Well, sure. It’s not like there are civil rights movements periodically. The African-American civil rights movement’s beginning is an unprecedented, world-transforming political movement that’s of vast complexity and is fed by many rivers and had many tributaries, and it’s impossible to overstate how significant it was, not just in this country, but in the history of the world.
One way to answer your question is to say that the one thing that all liberation movements have in common is that they are often fueled by the hope that it is possible to achieve justice without sacrificing your rights or putting yourself in danger. Voting is a great way to achieve change because it doesn’t, in any given election, usually necessitate people making heroic sacrifices. You just go to the poll, you make your vote and you have some faith that it’s going to be counted. There’s a giant cultural, political upheaval that’s going on now and it may be necessary for us to turn to the example of other liberation movements in the past. There’s none that’s more glorious as an example and more stirring and valuable than the African-American civil rights movement, where people have had to fight on the streets and protest through non-violent civil disobedience to make it impossible for a political malevolence to continue. Once a system becomes locked in a certain series of gestures that are designed to oppress and destroy, it may be necessary to move outside the machinery of constitutional democracy, to force that machinery to respond in a progressive, sane, decent way. That’s the point where you have to drop whatever it is you’re doing and take to the streets and protest.
TS: What advice do you have for young people who want to write for the theatre?
TK: I would say read everything, starting with Aeschylus onwards. Read every single play you can get your hands on. One of the things that’s unique about playwriting is that it is very much a craft and has a lot to do with practice and performance. Learn how a rehearsal room works, what actors do, learn how a director does what a director does—that’s part of your training as a writer. Write and make sure that everything that you feel good about having written gets into the bodies and mouths of actors in front of an audience. Because there’s no playwriting if it doesn’t exist simultaneously on the page and the stage. You have to do what you need to do to make that happen.