INTERVIEW WITH BOOK WRITER AND LYRICIST TONY KUSHNER
Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Tony Kushner about his work on Caroline, or Change.
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
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Tony Kushner
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
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