Tim on Zillah in A Bright Room Called Day

From: tmdonza@sas.upenn.edu (Timothy M Donza)
Subject: Zillah 
To: whseminar@dept.english.upenn.edu
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 00:10:46 -0500 (EST)

	Hello all, it's my job to give a description of the character of 
Zillah in Kushner's play "A Bright Room Called Day" - so here goes

	"A Bright Room Called Day" takes place in a low rent apartment in 
Berlin in the early 1930's. The play follows a group of friends involved 
in the Communist party and also the arts during the period of Hitler's 
rapid ascension to power. Zillah, however, exists almost completely 
separately from the action of the play. She, meanwhile, lives in the 
present day - and occupies space on one side of the stage seated at a 
table piled high with books. Every couple of scenes, the group in Germany 
is left behind to hear a rant by Zillah, who Kushner describes in the 
character list as "a contemporary American Jewish woman. 30's. Boho/East 
Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies." I will do my best to try 
and get at what this means.
	I don't want to steal any thunder from Rivkah's report about the 
"Reagan/Hitler" equation that is going on the play, but Zillah is the 
character responsible for making an overt connection between Germany in 
1932 and the present of the play in the 1980's or early 1990's. The 
German friends essentially abandon one another and flee their country 
when Hitler gains power - instead of standing up for their beliefs, they 
get the heck out of Dodge. Agnes, the owner of the low rent apartment, 
however, decides to stay put and not change with the times. Her only hope 
is that the future will come quickly, and she will be able to keep the 
lease on her apartment (which is rent controlled.) 
 Zillah, on the other hand, as we discover during her "interruptions," is 
one not content with her times, but also not content to simply sit back 
and let them happen around her. Her first scene is spent writing a letter 
to the president wherein she attempts to contain all of her hatred of his 
actions. She admits during her rant that she knows that she's a crackpot 
- and her letter will never be read by the president - but she writes 
nonetheless saying: "the loathing I pour into these pages is so ripe, so 
full to bursting, that it is my firm belief that anyone touching them 
will absorb into their hands some of the toxic energy contained therein." 
Some of those hands will eventually touch the president. Hence Zillah's 
definition of grass roots.
As the play progresses we find the connection between the two worlds. 
Zillah, "a humorless paranoiac" has some connection to Agnes through 
time. It is alluded to that Zillah has dreamt of Agnes - perhaps a chance 
for Agnes to right past wrongs. Agnes did nothing while Hitler rose to 
power and became the height of all that is defined as evil in recent 
years. Zillah connects president Reagan to the notion of evil - that 
during the conservative 80's too many people were content to bow out of 
the way and let the president do what he wanted. She rants that because 
of Hitler we have a standard of what is evil. Perhaps no one will ever be 
able to go down the check list and do exactly as Hitler did - but they 
might come close - and in Kushner's typical over-the-top fashion - he 
makes Zillah voice her frustration at having to reserve the word. She 
asks "is a 25% Nazi a Nazi or not?" Are times really that different?
Zillah concludes the play by saying that she is there trying to force 
herself to remember - to attempt to seek out all the holes in history - 
to find any place in trouble - and to worry about it. This play has gone 
through many different interpretations, one of which gives Zillah a 
monologue about how she seeks to immerse herself in the life of a 
neo-refugee. In one of her final lines in this version she claims to want 
to "go where things are falling apart, not coming together. I don't want 
to be a settler, I wanna be an un-settler. Head for the bad weather, the 
turbulent air. Where the nightbats fly. Where you can see dangerif 
there's safety anywhere it's there."
Zillah, however, is problematic in this play because she is yet another 
manifestation of Kushner's clunky political writing. It's not enough to 
have the characters of the play show us something - he is not comfortable 
with that alone. Instead, he seeks to hammer the politics home. When one 
does not stand up and fight, the way Agnes refused in favor of a safe 
life in a rent controlled apartment, one risks forever living in fear 
haunted by ghosts. Though Zillah is paranoid and always on edge,  she can 
have faith that at least she's not in danger, she will always be ahead of 
the game and be able to find a way out. 
Kushner writes in the afterword that this play has undergone numerous 
revisions and that Zillah may be removed or edited. An odd statement 
until you consider another statement by Kushner, when he calls "A Bright 
Room Called Day" an immature play.He says this, I believe, because  the 
work is neither far enough away from the atrocities of WW2 nor from the 
Reagan era to really hit home with viewers. Similar to Arthur Miller's 
"The Crucible," which likens the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism, 
Kushner wants to connect history and the present. Zillah serves to make 
the overt connection for the viewer, but she may not be necessary as time 
goes on.

OK, thanks, I hope this helps give some insight into other Kushner works!
Tim