Caroline, or Change

by Tony Kushner, Jeanine Tesori (Collaborator)

“ Caroline is a breakthrough—a story so grounded in the ordinary details of life that it almost seems to have discovered a new genre.” –Richard Zoglin, Time

“Acute, smart and a telling snapshot focusing with sharp clarity on characters captured at a fraught turning point in history—a culture’s and a family’s.” –Charles Isherwood, Variety

“Thrilling. You’ve never seen anything quite like Caroline, or Change and likely won’t again anytime soon. There’s never a moment that the part-pop, part-opera, part-musical-theater score Jeanine Tesori has conjured up doesn’t ideally match Tony Kushner’s meticulously chosen words with clarion precision.” –Matthew Murray, talkinbroadway.com

“A monumental achievement in American musical theater. Joyful, wholly successful, immensely moving, told with abundant wit and generosity of heart.” –John Helipern, New York Observer


Louisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship after Noah's stepmother, unable to give Caroline a raise, tells Caroline that she may keep the money Noah leaves in his pockets. Through their intimate story, this beautiful musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.


Tony Kushner ’s plays include Angels in America ; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown ; The Illusion , adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs! ; A Bright Room Called Day ; Homebody/Kabul ; Caroline, or Change , a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures . He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln . His books include The Art of Maurice 1980 to the Present; Brundibar , with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict , co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

Jeanine Tesori composed the scores for Tony Award-winning musicals Thoroughly Modern Millie and Shrek the Musical as well as Violet and Caroline, or Change . She is the recipient of multiple Drama Desk and Obie Awards, and her film composition credits include Nights in Rodanthe , Winds of Change , Show Business , and Wrestling With Angels .

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama, Music, Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also co-author, along with Eric Roth, of the screenplay of the 2005 film Munich, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and earned Kushner (along with Roth) an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Reviews

[Rick Urban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read the "book" for Caroline or Change, Tony Kushner’s musical about a black woman who works as a maid in a white Louisiana home in the 60’s, and then having heard the cast recording, and THEN having seen a local, incredibly well-done full production of it, I have to say that I cannot give this artistic work its due by simply reviewing the text. Sometimes, when reading the text of a play, and especially one that relies upon the written word for it power, as with Shakespeare or O’Neill, the language, the ideas and the emotion of the piece can be gleaned from a close reading. With something such as Caroline or Change, so much of the impact of the work is in the construction of the musical element, and in the acting, and even in the set design and costuming, that the text is but the barest frame on which to judge the entire enterprise.

That being said, you can see what Kushner is striving for here, and understand the structure of the story he is trying to tell. Caroline Thibodeaux is a broken down woman who has four children, a husband who has run off, and a job toiling in the employ of a Jewish widower and his young son, Noah. Caroline is seen as a mother figure to Noah, whereas her feelings towards him, while indulgent, are more complicated and muted. She knows she has her own children to tend to, which causes her the grief of knowing she is giving more of her time to this white child than her own kids. Complicating matters, Noah’s father has remarried, and the new wife, Rose, is anguished by the fact that her stepson feels closer to the maid than to her. For her part, Caroline makes do, taking pride in her inner strength and fortitude, while secretly tending her sorrow at the loss of the love of her life, who took off after his aimlessness and abuse of her led to her striking back in a fit of rage. Things seem to be maintaining their equilibrium in the world of Caroline until Rose decides that any change Noah leaves in his pants pockets can be kept by Caroline when she finds it in the process of doing laundry. The simplistic gesture by Rose, which she sees as a generous thoughtful gift, causes Caroline to see her position in the social and economic life of the Gellman household as even more fraught than it was previously, and helps bring about the change referred to in the freighted title of the play.

The musical revolves around ideas of inequity and inequality in class, race, religious identity, and gender, and packs in quite a lot of very nuanced subtext among the text, as can be easily seen by a close reading of the book. Kushner’s compassionate depiction of his characters means that everyone comes in for both an affectionate, as well as pointed, examination of their attitudes and beliefs, and the characterizations are rich and melancholy; even the allegorical characters, the Moon, the Radio, and the Bus, seem fully inhabited. Of course, being a sung-through musical, the language is economical and potent, and matches well with the song styles employed in the full production, from blues and r&b to recitative and even klezmer music.

To reiterate, this is a musical to be savored in a full production with fine actors with strong voices, an orchestra of technical virtuosity, and a stage designed to meld the allegorical phases of the moon with the banality of a concrete basement in humid Louisiana. Though this book is a fine starting point for discovering this underrated Tony Kushner collaboration, it only fully blossoms when seen in its complete, breathtakingly soulful realization.

[John Boyack · Rating 5 out of 5]

9. Twenty Dollar Bill.

Reading EPILOGUE: EMMIE'S DREAM with the final two minutes of "Electric Church Red House (Live)" by Jimi Hendrix (Jimi: Blues album) on you ear goggles is STRONGLY ADVISED.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Don't let my sorrow / make evil of me."

[Jessica López-Barkl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw this play with my best friend Betsy in 2004 before I moved to Albuquerque, NM. I remember that I was amazed by the raw nature of this play. I didn't even notice that it was "through-composed" because it was so seamless and sit-at-the-edge-of-your-seat-good-acting-singing-etc. Later, I was teaching Musical Theater at the Public Academy for the Performing Arts in Albuquerque, NM, and it was in the textbook I was looking at as THE example of "through-composed". I finally read the play because I had it in my Reading Series to choose our next season offerings. I was so pleased that the students loved it as much as they did. They seemed surprised by every technique it added and subtracted from the many tropes we use in live theater: inanimate objects as characters that sing, cathartic 11 o'clock numbers, and juxtaposing unlike things to show universality. This play received the second most votes to be produced after ANGELS IN AMERICA: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES. Which, of course, makes me wonder whether or not Tony Kushner is our poet laureate for understanding American Identity. I used to think it was Eugene O'Neill, but...the students really responded to both of the Kushner plays. I am, again, nervous about casting this, especially the young people roles, but...terror is a wonderful playmate in theater, so...I'll walk toward the stage every time, and not run away from the things that make me anxious.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Kushner I've read, and I was a little disappointed. As I'm sure (and my housemates have reassured me) this is probably in large part due to the fact that I am reading a musical. A show is completely and utterly different when you take it from the page and onto the stage: even more so when it is a musical which relies upon music so heavily. I really enjoyed the idea of the play, the issues it highlights and explores, and the arc of the story. I absolutely loved the Channukah scene and the Yiddish, Hebrew, and bits of Jewish culture and religion highlighted in that and sprinkled throughout the rest of the play. My disappointment spread, mostly, from a feeling like there wasn't enough. It felt truncated and half-finished to me. Was that purposefully done by Kushner? Is he pointing out that these issues haven't been resolved and that there are millions of Carolines still struggling, suffering, and giving up? I'm not sure. But I'd really like to see the show performed and try and get a better grasp of it and feel for it.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not generally a fan of musicals, but Caroline, or Change is the very moving tale of an African-American woman struggling to provide for her family (by cleaning house for a white family) at the height of the civil rights movement. Kushner has a great facility for complicating matters that society tends to treat as (pardon the pun) black-and-white.

[Tiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't remember how I heard about this book (from another book), but it was quite DELIGHTFUL to read!! It read like a song...and would LOVE to see the play (musical?!). Each character was pretty sad in their own way, but the writing was so singsong and cheerful you kind of forget!!

[M.E.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

BEST musical/play I've ever seen...The book and soundtrack are fantastic as well...

[ashwini · Rating 5 out of 5]

To date, my favorite theatrical experience ever. This musical/opera is pitch-perfect, and the writing is powerful.

[Pati · Rating 5 out of 5]

If reading the words was this amazing, I can't imagine actually seeing the work performed on stage. Wow.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

After Angels brilliance I was afraid this wouldn't be as compelling. I'm glad to say fears were unnecessary.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly love this. I hardly feel there's a wrong step from start to finish, and it includes so many dramatic layers. This one means a lot to me.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Will write more later.

[Michael McClain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revive Caroline, or Change!!!!

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's something undeniably magnetic about Caroline, or Change; I found, after seeing it for the second time, that this musical had definitely gotten under my skin, lingering in my consciousness long after the final curtain fell. But even with the thing dancing around my brain, I still can't figure out what it's about. There's a grandeur to this show, that of a big, failed, noble effort. But it just doesn't work, at least for me--the dramaturgy seems full of holes. If prizes are given for seriousness of intent, then Caroline wins hands down; but I can't locate a coherent meaning here, and if I can't do that then I can't call a theatre work successful.

Librettist/lyricist Tony Kushner has set his play in Lake Charles, Louisiana in late 1963; in fact, the story opens on November 22 of that year, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Caroline Thibodeaux, 39, is a single mother of four who works as a maid for the Gellmans for $30/week. The Gellmans are a Jewish family consisting of Stuart, the father, who plays and teaches clarinet; Rose, his second wife, a transplanted New Yorker whom he recently married following the death of his first wife, who was Rose's best friend; and Noah, 8. The central relationship in the play is that between Caroline and Noah; he idolizes her (says she's the President; stronger than his dad); she indulges the boy by letting him hang around the laundry room and light her cigarettes. Noah is unhappy because his father is horribly distant, his mother is dead, and his step-mother still feels like an intruder in his life; Caroline is unhappy because her eldest son is in Vietnam, her daughter is becoming rebellious, her husband (who beat her) has abandoned the family, her salary is too small and she can't afford even simple things for her kids, and her dream was certainly never to wash clothes and clean house for a bunch of white people. Noah and Caroline seem to intuitively understand that their bond, such as it is, is based in part of this shared unhappiness. Noah thinks Caroline is his friend. Caroline knows that she's not.

The "change" referred to in the play's title is of two types. First, there's pocket change--i.e., nickels, dimes, quarters; specifically the coins left in his pants pockets by forgetful young Noah. Rose has what amounts to a fetish about this: she scolds Noah for leaving the change behind, and eventually decides to teach Noah the value of money by instructing Caroline to keep whatever she finds in the boy's pockets when she does the laundry. Caroline balks--she doesn't want to take pennies from a baby, she says; but Rose is persistent and Caroline's relative poverty eventually overtakes her moral objections. When Noah inadvertently leaves the twenty dollar bill given him by his grandfather for Hanukah in his pants, a crisis is precipitated.

Kushner also means, though, change in the sense of motion and transformation. Noah's home life is certainly in flux, and by the end of the play, he and Rose appear to have at last managed some kind of adjustment; in this sense, Noah seems to me to be the protagonist of Caroline, or Change, for he is the major character who actually grows, from willful babyhood to a more mature acceptance and awareness of his circumstances.

Caroline, meanwhile--the burgeoning Civil Rights movement notwithstanding--is steadfastly resistant to change. This is presented mostly by placing her in counterpoint with her daughter Emmie, who is developing a budding activist spirit, and with her friend Dotty Moffett, another maid who is going to night school and trying to improve her opportunities and her lot.

Now, as you can see, Kushner has put a lot of stuff into his play. The question is, what does it all add up to?

I still don't know. The parts of Caroline that work for me are the ones that show Caroline interacting with Dotty and Emmie and her other two young children. These scenes have an emotional richness--musically, too--that I find affecting; they harness the complexity of Caroline's situation in interesting ways. In contrast, the scenes depicting Noah's family life feel flat and forced; Kushner simply doesn't give us enough information to make any of Noah's relatives more than two-dimensional constructs. Sequences like the one where Rose's communist father carries on about the evils of capitalism before presenting Noah with the twenty dollar bill come out of nowhere: are these grudges that Kushner has been carrying around for years, maybe?

A little joy, in fact, would go a long way in Caroline: this show is so relentlessly determined to be serious that, while it does grip our emotions from time to time, it never transports, never enlarges, never ever approaches catharsis. Worthy intentions ultimately do not make up for poor implementation; whatever its creators' objectives, Caroline, or Change finally doesn't work.

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's "Caroline, or Change" is a challenging, genre-blending fusion of musical, straight play and opera, building on the Gershwin/Hayward fusion of blues, jazz, opera and Jewish influence that created "Porgy and Bess" and taking it much farther. Reading it on the page, this mostly sung-through, somewhat free-form show, recalls nothing so much as Joseph Moncure March's loosely rhyming, rhythmic but irregular "epic poems." They also share a common theme, the way that prejudice sinks in and influences every layer of interaction between people in an unfair society.

Musically, this is a much more ambitious and difficult work than Tesori's later masterpiece "Fun Home," which uses many of the same free-form musical ideas but in a more accessible way, blending them with book scenes instead of almost completely sung-through. This may be a challenging, complex piece, but it's well worth the investment.

[Matt Glaviano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd read this once before - just read it. It's a hard script to envision without music or set. I still can't imagine what Washing Machine, or the Moon, etc., look like as characters.

At least now, though, I've read the book with the music. This read was while listening to the original cast recording on Spotify. It was quite satisfying.

Read a good chunk of this on my birthday, sitting on the front porch along with the rarest of things - a pleasant, not overly hot and humid - summer breeze.

[Bearhands · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, epic, and vibrant American musical! It uses a domestic tale to explore the challenges of 1960s America, Civil Rights, war, The otherizing of Jews and Blacks, etc. All of this done through rich characters and graceful music. Simply put, Kushner and Tesori are at their best. While I did read the libretto and listened to the music for this book, I long for the day I can see a production. Highly recommend reading!

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have seen Kushner’s “Angels in America” so very excited that “Caroline, Or Change” is coming back to Broadway. I’m hoping that reading the screenplay in advance will allow me to appreciate it even more than I would have.

[Fred Daly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just saw it on Broadway and wanted to read it. Even without the wonderful music, it's awesome. I love teaching Angels in America, and I think it would be nice to find a way to include this in a course as well.

[Joseph Spence Sr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesome book of things impacting one's life and welfare. The poetic lines are excellent and intriguing. Images of one's self must be inspiring and uplifting, like the phoenix rising from the ashes. Great job!

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Production postponed; this’ll do for now.

[Brian McCann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, complex, seething modern musical.

[loey bromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite play i’ve ever read. i wish i could have seen it

[Lindsey]

I cannot recommend enough listening to the songs while following along with the writing. It brings to life the words on the pages in a way that is quite unexpected yet powerful.

[Brianna (Breathe, hope, books) · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75 so rounding up. So sorry if this seems scathing.

I completely understand that this is a play/theatrical text, and that the book is written as so. I did read this while listening to the cast recording so that I could better understand the story, because much of the "dialogue" is spoken simultaneously over multiple characters (hope that makes sense).
Still, I found the story very dull and confusing. WHY did THIS story need to be told THIS WAY? With these characters and these plot points?

Yes, the musical tells the story of the mother of a Black family who works as the maid for a wealthy White/Jewish family in 1960s Louisiana. But there are characters and conflicts set up within the plot that serve no real purpose or have no real resolution (probably the point when it comes to a story about Civil Rights in America, about issues and conflicts about racism in America haven't ever gone away or been resolved). It made the musical feel incomplete and lacking in proper direction and reason.
On top of the that, the appliances that Caroline regularly used during her work were inexplicably anthropomorphized; they had voices and spoke to her. BUT LIKE WHY?! And yeah, duh, the change she collects from the kid's pocket is supposed to represent social change. All of the metaphors are obvious and make the statement they are striving to make. But to what end?
There's a literally a scene where the Black daughter and the Jewish grandfather get into a debate about . . . something? The plight of civil rights in America? It was so confusing to track.
And there are plot lines that go NOWHERE. Like the White/Jewish family is made up of the boy, his dad, his step-mom and her father. And the dad is kinda absent because he's a musical genius but also mourning his dead first wife. okay. So now his second wife, the step-mom, is trying really hard to connect with the boy and be a good mom but not replace his real mom because she was best friends with his real mom but also complains about the boy preferring mean ol' maid Caroline to her but also tries take charge of her household because as the step-mom she is THE woman of the household and WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE POINT THE AUTHOR IS TRYING TO MAKE WITH ANY OF THIS?

This show--because it was a show--tackles a lot of important topics, like family and motherhood and racism and civil rights and society and change. It uses and references actual Civil Rights events as the historical backdrop, but doesn't do much with the discussions it creates regarding its time and place. I'm sure I would feel differently about the whole thing if I experienced as it was meant to be--performed on stage--but as it is I just did not enjoy this very much.

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my top ten favorite musicals.
Great story.
Powerful music.

[Ceilidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lot's Wife... Just... Just stomp all over my heart, Tony Kushner.