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Agnes Eggling’s comfort zone doesn’t extend far beyond her home. So it’s understandable that Lindsay Allen’s protagonist, an actress, turns a blind eye to remote evil—even in 1932 Berlin. A Bright Room Called Day brings that menace down to a recognizable size, when Agnes’ lover, Husz (Grady Weatherford), invites the Devil (Matt Dunphy, hamming it up as Gottfried Swetts) to enter Agnes’ parlor through her fireplace. But that’s just one atypically audacious scene. Generally, the growing power of the Nazis makes itself known through quaintly lettered title cards projected on an overhead screen and, as the play goes on, through the enervation of Agnes and her band of lefty artist friends. You see, it’s not that Agnes doesn’t try to speak truth to power. Allen’s plain-faced yet vivacious homebody first charms us when she’s developing agitprop featuring the tussles between a Hitler figure and a bright-red baby doll that seems to have the weight advantage. Soon, though, skits aren’t enough to keep the wolves from nipping at her friends’ heels, and as they flee to safer locales, Agnes stays put in scenic designer Jacob Muehlhausen’s shabby-chic flat with its deceptively cheery floral wallpaper. Tony Kushner’s script juxtaposes Agnes’ story with vitriolic dispatches from the future, where Zillah (Elizabeth Chomko), a Reagan-era Siouxsie Sioux look-alike, writes poison-pen letters to Ronnie with the hope of bringing down his regime. (How quaint the ’80s seem in the black-and-white video vignettes in which Zillah appears!) This was one of Kushner’s first plays, and it shows: The lavishly poetic monologues—everyone gets one—are sometimes poorly integrated, the Satan visit seems to come out of nowhere, and the 50-year time shifts are awkward. But under Rahaleh Nassri’s deft direction, Allen, a recent Helen Hayes nominee for Journeymen Theater Ensemble’s An Experiment With an Air Pump, ably and sympathetically carries the play, and Alexander Strain’s foppish Baz, who tells a tale of rescue from suicidal despair via sex in the shrubbery, epitomizes the hunger for happiness and pleasure that both informs the struggle against fascism and leads to Agnes’ surrender to it. For she eventually surrenders, yes, but not all the way: Kushner was inspired to write Bright Room after seeing a photo of a Nazi rally in which one lone woman, dowdy and downtrodden, is the only figure not giving a one-armed salute.—Pamela Murray Winters