Kushner’s ‘Room’ Is a Dark Gem

Few plays are more shadowy, and more of the night, than Tony Kushner’s remarkable early play “A Bright Room Called Day.”

It’s as if, in his title, Kushner included all of the elements missing from the world of his play--the elements his characters long for.

Most are Weimar-era German Communists, or Jews, or artists, or gay--or all four--and they dream of a better place than the one they’re in. They all sense that a terrible national night is falling and that their efforts to bring back the day may be hopeless.

Kushner wrote this in the mid-’80s, before he scaled the heights of “Angels in America,” at a time when the despair over AIDS was climbing.

Kushner equated the Reagan era and Reagan’s virtual dismissal of the burgeoning epidemic as a kind of new evil, and “Bright Room” was his response.

As such, it is perhaps the greatest AIDS play, because it is metaphorical, leaping beyond the present and imagining a horrible historical moment.

Kushner kept updating the play through the ‘80s, encouraging future productions to inject current political references into the text.

Incredibly, “Bright Room” has never received a professional L.A.-area production, and the one at Cypress College’s Studio Theatre is only the second time it’s ever been done in the region, the first in Orange County.

Director Mark Majarian’s production goes far toward making up for lost time.

Unusually disciplined and daring, Majarian and his college cast display a deep simpatico for Kushner’s tragically misaligned people, and an even deeper sense of the Weimar era’s emotional and political exhaustion.

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What unfolds is less of a plot than a set of devolving relationships, with a little time travel thrown in.

At the center is Agnes (Shannon K. Gallegos), a frumpy, struggling bit actress in the Berlin movie studios who toys with the idea of joining the Communists to oppose the growing Nazi threat. (Kushner’s notes on this critical 1932-33 period are shown from time to time on an upstage screen.)

Many in Agnes’ circle, such as Annabella (Amelia Valdez), her cinematographer lover, Husz (Christian Bargados), and a gay friend, Baz (Travis L. Wood), encourage her to go Red.

Rising star and pal Paulinka (Laura Lossing) isn’t so sure; she had been a Communist for a while, because the Russians were making the best films. Now Paulinka is out for herself.

Two ghosts intercede as political events spiral out of control, and Hitler wins at the polls: Agnes is haunted by an old hag, Die Alte (Raymond Reyes), a witness to past European war horrors; and, audaciously, by the devil himself (Bo Bojorquez), a seducer posing as an importer of Spanish novelties.

Even at this stage in his career, Kushner displays the sophisticated layering of ideas, characters and time that gave “Angels in America” its pulsing heart and intellectual excitement.

Agnes and her friends are ghosts for Zillah (Jamie Zarza), a punked-out American in exile in contemporary Berlin. (In this update, Kushner has placed her in 1990.) She’s experiencing the German Nazi nightmare as few of her peers ever will.

Kushner’s scenes are short, punctuated and titled. (They have wonderful, Germanic-style titles, too: “Evening Meal in a Windstorm,” “Man Isn’t Good--He’s Disgusting!”)

Agnes and/or Zillah are ever-present, and we watch an oppressive, engulfing sadness descend on both. It’s as quiet and unassuming as tragedy gets.

But it’s also an explicitly artificial piece of theater, and it is these two opposite poles that Majarian and his cast balance exquisitely.

As if to suggest a comfortable world turned around, Majarian has placed the set (imaginatively designed by Fred DePontee) on the Studio Theatre stage in reverse; the audience is on risers in the upstage wings, looking on the action and the empty seats beyond. Those seats become more ominous as the play grows more somber.

Led by Gallegos, this is a young cast uncommonly tuned in to the emotions and cadences of loss and disappointment. Laura Lossing is scintillating as a woman who knows who’s buttering her bread but who is torn between idealism and self-aggrandizement.

Valdez suggests a believer in the party, but one saddled with frustration over her friends’ limitations. Bargados oozes mid-European excess, sloth and self-hatred. Sarah Watts and Mark M. Mikawa, as two Communist Party regulars, pierce the gloom with funny political squabbling, driving home Kushner’s notion that Communists let themselves lose to Hitler.

Zarza’s Zillah is as problematic as the role is written: cut off from the main action and yet our anchor in the present, hectoring and angry for no particular reason. She grows in the role, as does Woods as Baz, with an unforgettable Act 3 speech of survival. Only Reyes and Bojorquez aren’t up to the extreme theatrical demands of their roles, mistaking loudness for creepiness.

With a running soundtrack of chanteuse Ute Lemper singing Kurt Weill, a fine variety of costumes by Liz Hubner and mood-shifting, surprising lights by Stephen Shanahan, this is rigorous, humanizing college theater at a very high level.

* “A Bright Room Called Day,” Cypress College Studio Theatre, 9200 Valley View, Cypress. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Ends Sunday. $6-$7. (714) 821-6320. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Shannon K. Gallegos: Agnes

Jamie Zarza: Zillah

Laura Lossing: Paulinka

Christian Bargados: Vealtninc Husz

Travis L. Wood: Baz

Amelia Valdez: Annabella

Raymond Reyes: Die Alte

Sarah Watts: Rosa

Mark M. Mikawa: Emil

Bo Bojorquez: Gottfried Swetts

A Cypress College theater arts and dance department production of Tony Kushner’s play. Directed by Mark Majarian. Set: Fred DePontee. Costumes: Liz Hubner. Lights: Stephen Shanahan.