A letter from the Dramaturg

"[I]n an important way it’s actually a play about money and I was very pleased on that level. It’s something I’ve been interested in trying to do—to write a play in which money, an economic system, is sort of in a privileged position in terms of the narrative, in terms of what you are experiencing in watching, and so I feel really good about that. I am happy there are songs in the show that are simply about how little money this woman has—that don’t sentimentalize; that simply deal with an economic anxiety or economic difficulty and that the tracing through of this kind of game with the change sets a little engine in place that accomplishes various things and dismantles various things. To that extent it’s Brechtian." - Tony Kushner, 2007


Caroline Thibodeaux is a family maid. She works in the Gellman household for thirty dollars a week. She leaves work one day because of a disagreement over money she finds lying around the house. Then, about a week later, she comes back to work. In a sense, this is the entire plot of Caroline, or Change. Tony Kushner sets the play in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in November of 1963—to the west of the bloody states of Alabama and Mississippi, which were exploding in a violent process of desegregation, and to the east of Dallas, where President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade—but the main action of the play is intensely focused, almost microscopically so, on the people in the Gellman house and the daily wages of their maid. The Change referred to in the play’s title has a similarly compound nature; in the play, “change” can mean the large historical changes buffeting the nation during the period—the assassinations, the marches, the freedom rides, and so on—but it also stands for loose change, the coins jangling in all of our pockets, the money that tells us what we can afford to be, where we can afford to go, who we can afford to be.


In Caroline, or Change, Tony Kushner set out to write a play about America’s potential for social change, and the provocative point the play raises is that this change is often made more difficult, if not impossible, by the power that money holds over us in society. Caroline, or Change is not really a play about character, even though it is filled with expertly drawn portraits of recognizably realistic people. It isn’t even a play about action, since we essentially end the play where we begin it, with a maid working for a family in the south (for the same wages). What Caroline, or Change seeks to represent is the extent to which money shapes and conditions our lives, our personalities, our decisions, and ultimately our politics. These are not new ideas. In the first production of this season at CENTERSTAGE, Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, Dolly Levi remarked that, “The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous—and can shatter the world.” Or, as the characters on fellow Baltimorean David Simon’s dear departed television show The Wire would utter as an ominous and all-too-necessary refrain: “Follow the Money.”

~ Drew Lichtenberg, Production Dramaturg