Change at 16 Feet Beneath the Sea

We were at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis Saturday for their superb performance of Tony Kushner's Tony-nominated musical, Caroline, or Change. As described in Wikipedia:

Caroline, Or Change is a through-composed Broadway musical with book and lyrics by Tony Kushner and score by Jeanine Tesori that combines negro spirituals, blues, Motown, classical music, and Jewish Klezmer and folk music....

The musical is set in 1963 in Lake Charles, Louisiana during the American civil rights movement, around the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Caroline Thibodeaux is a black maid for a Southern Jewish family, the Gellmans, spending her days in their dank basement doing the laundry. The Gellmans' young son, Noah, has a strong emotional connection to Caroline, a woman resistant to the sweep of change she sees around her. She provides stability during his grief at his mother's death from cancer. Noah's new stepmother Rose, unable to give Caroline a raise, enlists Caroline's help in a plan to teach Noah a lesson about leaving change in his pants pocket. Rose tells Noah and Caroline that Caroline should keep the money Noah leaves in his pockets. Caroline loathes taking money from a child – but her own children desperately need food, clothing, and shoes. Noah deliberately leaves money in his pockets, dreaming that Caroline's family talk about him as they spend it.

Aside from the casting, music, staging, direction, and production- all of which are excellent- Caroline brings to the stage the challenge of change. Over the last year we have heard a great deal about change that "we can believe in." At the center of Caroline is the theme that in order for change to happen we have to believe in it.

The need for change is often resisted by some- such as Caroline. She is pushed by events and her daughter in the "younger generation" of 1963. She is an angry, unhappy person- but that is all she knows. Yet she has a soul- a great, deep soul that in the end has to look at her own issues in a powerful prayerful cry. The hopeful ending led by her daughter gives us a promise that change can work its miracles.

16 Feet Beneath the Sea is a theme from the opening song, since, as Caroline sings, there is no underground in Louisiana, only underwater, 16 feet beneath the sea. It is the struggle to keep from being drowned by change and the inability to change that drives the story for Caroline or the Gellman family. I was struck by the relationship of this show with another Jewish-influenced musical, Fiddler on the Roof. There too Tevye, the standard of tradition had to struggle with great change. Caroline takes that role here along with young Noah Gellman and his step-mother.

How then does one find change to believe in? Caroline finds it as she comes face to face with herself. Only then can she see either the need for change or be willing to allow it for her children. It is the issue of generational differences and the natural movement of life. As long as one lives in the past, the future is in danger.

Congrats again to the Guthrie for one more in a long strong of exciting productions. It is always a pleasure.