There's No Place Like Off Broadway for the Holidays: Or Berlin, When the Nazis Just Won the Election

AN APARTMENT IN BERLIN, 1932 Nikki M. James, center, is a German actress living through changes in her country’s government in “A Bright Room Called Day.” Jonathan Hadary, far left, and Crystal Lucas-Perry, far right, play unseen visitors from the future. (Set design by David Rockwell.)

“A Bright Room Called Day,” by Tony Kushner, Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, publictheater.org. 2 hours 45 minutes. Opened on Nov. 19. Limited run . Closes on Dec. 15.

SCENES FROM THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (IF THEY CAN KEEP IT)

IN 1985, TONY KUSHNER, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Angels in America,” was 29 and just a year out of NYU grad school. Ronald Reagan was.settling into his second term in the White House, and Kushner was uneasy about what he was seeing.

Kushner’s first play, “A Bright Room Called Day,” reflected those fears, making pointed comparisons to the rise of Hitler and German Fascism half a century before. That play, set in Berlin in 1932 and 1933, bombed badly at the time (Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times when the play made it to New York, dismissed it as “a fatuous new drama” with a “juvenile line of attack”) — but it’s back. For obvious reasons.

IF I WERE A PUBLICIST for “A Bright Room, Called Day” I would urge you to see it for a number of reasons, but especially for the actors. This 11-person cast would be any New York theater director’s dream. (The director in this case is Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director.) Estelle Parsons, for one, turns up. As Die Alte, she looks like a drunken ghost and raves about how much she used to love wearing corsets. The list of accomplished stage actors goes on.

MARK MARGOLIS MAKES an appearance as Gottfried Swetts, a contemporary Satan figure. Kushner’s play may be too abstract, and writers are always getting into trouble comparing anyone to Hitler (even now), but the script is heavily laced with memorable if sometimes overblown lines: “I know the price of things, and I know how to give things up.” “Isn’t fear the only true moral response to power?” “This is no time for alliances that aren’t portable.” “You can’t build coherent political theory out of orgasms.”

GRACE GUMMER (SHE’S MERYL Streep and Don Gummer’s middle daughter — Mamie is three years older) plays a sophisticated Berliner who adores opium. In one scene she explains to the unenlightened: “This is psychoanalysis. There is no point.” Costume design, with a clear-eyed affection for the early 1930s, is by Susan Hilferty and Sarita Fellowes.

WE KNOW MICHAEL URIE (in photo with James) from “Torch Song” and “Buyer & Cellar.” Here he plays Gregor Bazwald, a gay man in the land of the pink triangle. At one point during the play, he tells others about finding himself in a movie theater sitting two rows behind Hitler. Gregor has a gun in his pocket at the time but does nothing. Afterward, he kind of wishes he had taken action. (Totally unrelated fact: I once sat two rows behind Donald Trump at the VH1 Fashion Awards at Chelsea Piers. I do not own or know how to use a gun.)

TIME TRAVELERS The distinctively named Zillah (Crystal Lucas-Perry) is a character from the original script. A visitor from the days of the Reagan administration, she comments on the play’s action from her 1980s perspective. In the revival, she is joined by Xillah (Jonathan Hadary), who represents Kushner, the playwright. He’s visiting from 2019, apologizes to the audience for the play’s wordiness (“I know it’s long. I’m keeping you from Rachel Maddow") and breaks the news to Zillah that Donald Trump was elected president three years ago. Naturally, she thinks it’s a joke.

AS LIFE CHANGES in Berlin, two strangers (Max Woertendyke and Nadine Malouf) drop by the apartment just to ask a few questions. “A Bright Room Called Day” also includes a group rendition of the Internationale, a discussion of Realpolitik and the observation that Charlton Heston knew he was a bad actor.