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 it 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 you posit through the politics of 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.•
Sharon D Clarke and the company of
Caroline, or Change in rehearsal Photo: Jeremy Daniel
CAROLINE, OR CHANGE UPSTAGE GUIDE
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