A Bright Room Called Day

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.