A Bright Room Called Day is a play by American playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. Synopsis The play is set in Germany in 1932 and 1933, and concerns a group of friends caught up in the events of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The plot is centered on a woman named Agnes Eggling, a middle-aged actress, and all of the action takes place in her apartment. The action is occasionally interrupted by scenes featuring Zillah, a young woman in the 1980s living in Long Island who believes that Reagan is becoming too much like Hitler. In the version performed by the New York Shakespeare Festival, Zillah has moved to Berlin. Zillah has fled to Germany out of frustration and anger at the growing power of the Republican Party in America during the 1980s. The play was based on Bertolt Brecht's 1938 work The Private Life of the Master Race. 2018 version Kushner revised the script in 2018 to include a new character, Xillah, who only interacts with Zillah. As explained by the character in the 2019 Public Theater production, A Bright Room Called Day was a play he wrote 34 years ago that never worked until Donald Trump was elected and suddenly everyone wanted to produce it, so he decided to give it an update. Xillah serves as Kushner's own commentary on his play, occasionally cutting into the proceedings to comment on issues with the play and getting into arguments with his "failed theatrical device" Zillah on the content of the play. Throughout the play, the two characters frequently discuss Kushner's prior comparison of Hitler to Ronald Reagan with present-day Hitler comparisons to Donald Trump. Zillah spends much of the play asking Xillah to write a new ending where she can interact with Agnes instead of having her just write hate mail to Ronald Reagan, while Xillah insists it is naïve to think one can speak to the dead. The result has been characterized by Kushner and Oskar Eustis (who directed the original Eureka production and the Public Theater revival) as turning the play from a critique of the American right to a discussion on the role of art as social or political action. Production history A Bright Room Called Day was first presented in a workshop production by Heat & Light Co., Inc.,