COMMUNITY CULTURE COLUMN

‘Caroline, or Change’ and 
the beauty in ambiguity

SAMMY SUSSMAN
Daily Community Culture Columnist

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
E-boys and E-girls: a new, 
nonchalant counterculture

GRACE TUCKER
Daily Arts Writer

6 — Thursday, February 20, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

WHISPER

SUBMIT A 
WHISPER

By Bruce Haight
©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/20/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/20/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Thursday, February 20, 2020

ACROSS
1 Play with strings
6 Blubber
10 __ buco
14 Want in the worst 
way
15 Lounge around
16 Place to talk 
shop?
17 Tackled the job
19 Passionate
20 Second sequel’s 
number
21 Sacred chests
22 Thrash
23 Winter coat?
25 Range for a 
manhunt
28 Arizona 
landforms
30 TourBook-issuing 
org.
31 Designer 
monogram
32 “Hasta la vista”
33 Comic strip 
frames
36 Tot’s plaything ... 
and a feature of 
17-, 25-, 48- and 
59-Across
40 Forklift load
41 Stuffy-sounding
43 Many AARP 
mems.
46 Issa of “The Hate 
U Give”
47 Dire
48 Intercepting, as at 
the pass
53 Christmas poem 
opener
54 “Hasta la vista”
55 “The Daily Show” 
host
57 Nos. on driver’s 
licenses
58 Sharp turns
59 Ready to start 
the day
62 Succulent plant 
genus
63 Gumption
64 __ toast
65 Sew a patch on, 
perhaps
66 Possessive 
pronoun
67 Roundup critter

DOWN
1 Deep rifts
2 New recruits
3 Hobbyist’s 
contraption

4 Sch. founded by 
Jefferson
5 Prefix with bytes 
or bucks
6 Oddball
7 Tons o’
8 “The Rookie” 
actress Larter
9 Club alternative
10 Home of 
Minor League 
Baseball’s Storm 
Chasers
11 Cooking show 
adjective
12 Covers with 
goop
13 Bud from way 
back
18 “Grey’s 
Anatomy” 
settings, for short
22 33-Down’s 
purview
24 Path to the top
26 Charged
27 Normandy city
29 Trips where big 
cats are spotted
33 Ship owner who 
described Ahab 
as “ungodly, 
god-like”
34 Stand buy
35 “Good thinking!”

37 Custard dessert
38 Considering 
everything
39 Conduit created 
by volcanic 
activity
42 Cigarette ad 
claim
43 Superhero 
acronym 
involving 
Hercules, Zeus, 
Achilles and 
three others

44 Killian’s, originally
45 Former 
Southeast Asian 
capital
49 Gave a shot, say
50 Studio sign
51 Formatting menu 
list
52 It’s not hot long
56 Ones acting 
badly
59 “So gross!”
60 Ante-
61 Exacta or trifecta

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This past week, as the media hype continued 
to build over the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 
upcoming Broadway production of Tony Kushner 
and Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline, or Change,” I found 
myself reanalyzing and re-understanding this 
complex work. 
“Caroline, or Change” follows the relationship 
between Noah, a young boy in a wealthy Jewish 
family and Caroline, the family’s maid, a single 
mother of four. It takes place in 1963, the days of 
Vietnam, LBJ and the civil rights movement.
The work’s central conflict comes after Noah’s 
parents ask Caroline to keep the spare change that 
Noah keeps leaving in his pockets before putting 
them in the laundry. When Noah leaves a $20 bill 
in his pants pockets, he is forced to pick between 
giving Caroline the money or asking for it back.
Noah’s feelings in this scene quickly devolve to 
anger. He exchanges racist insults with Caroline, 
leading her to quit her job working. Noah and 
Caroline’s relationship is destroyed, their brittle 
friendship utterly shattered.
I’ve never had the chance to see this work live. 
I’ve studied the piano vocal score many times 
after getting it a couple of years ago, both playing 
through it at the piano and following along with it 
while listening to a recording.
And the more I’ve studied, the more I’ve 
struggled to understand the work’s theme, it’s 
message. What is it trying to teach me, I find myself 
asking. What should I learn from this work? How 
should I be affected by this art? How should I act 
differently?
The ending to this show, after all, is not exactly 
hard to predict. Caroline and Noah’s connection 
is overrun by the race-based socioeconomic 
stratification endemic to Southern culture in 1963. 
The music is uplifting — a unique, joyous mix of 
blues/Motown and klezmer — though the cultural 
context that overshadows it all fills one with 
despair.
In talking to my friend about this show, I was 
reminded of another Jeanine Tesori’s musical about 
race, “Violet.” The department of musical theater 
presented this show in fall 2017 as that semester’s 
studio production.
Unlike “Caroline, or Change,” “Violet” explicitly 
confronts race. It follows Violet, a young girl with 
a facial disfigurement, as she travels by bus from 
North Carolina to Oklahoma in 1964. She befriends 
a young black soldier, Flick, and his colleague, 
Monty — the show’s interpersonal dramatic arc, as 
one might expect, is Violet’s attempts to overcome 
her prejudices and befriend Flick at the expense of 

Monty.
The analogy in “Violet” — the comparison 
between Violet’s disfigurement and Flick’s race — 
is almostly obviously overt. And when I first saw 
the show, I was briefly obsessed with this concept. 
What an interesting means of confronting a delicate 
subject, I thought to myself, distorting the visual 
aspect to perceptions of race.
But as I tried to analyze the work further, as 
I tried to move past this one dramatic device and 
delve into the intricacies of the work’s message, I 
found little material to work with. “Violet” was an 
inherent criticism of judging others based on their 
looks. But it seemed to be little more than that.
Audience members leave “Violet” believing that 
they should try to see past visual appearances, 
that they should, (in a perhaps cliche manner), 
avoid the pitfalls of judging a book, or a person, by 
their “cover.” They leave assured that this was the 
impetus behind the work they just experienced.
“Caroline, or Change,” on the other hand, has no 
obvious meaning. It has no clear meaning from one’s 
first listening to one’s last. It has many individual 
meanings — many interesting devices that provide 
for individual meaning — but it lacks the hierarchy 
to pull them all together under one primary focus.
Rather than just confronting the visual aspect 
to perceptions of race, “Caroline, or Change” pulls 
apart the intersection between race, religion, 
wealth and social class. And rather than providing 
audiences with a clear message or takeaway, 
“Caroline, or Change” raises many questions while 
providing few answers.
When I think about the means of consuming both 
works, too, I’m struck by the differences between 
the clarity of thematic material. “Violet” is easier 
to watch. It is short, entertaining and powerful. 
“Caroline, or Change,” on the other hand, requires 
more time, attention and emotional stamina.
But perhaps there’s some beauty in the ambiguity 
of “Caroline, or Change.” Perhaps there’s something 
to be said for a show that is difficult to understand, 
a show that all but demands multiple viewings with 
intense analysis in between. 
Though our natural inclination may be to 
gravitate 
towards 
clarity 
and 
simplicity 
of 
messaging, perhaps there’s something to be said 
about resisting this urge. Perhaps this obsession 
the show’s ambiguity provoked in me is something 
it will provoke in many of its viewers.
And while this type of show may not guarantee 
commercial success, while it might generate positive 
feelings in relatively few viewers, it is the depths of 
these feelings that makes it all worthwhile. There 
is a meaning beneath the show’s surface, I have 
to believe, for those willing to put in the time and 
track it down. And just because I haven’t gotten to it 
yet doesn’t mean that I am never going to.

As a grown-up college-kid, it’s a rite of passage to 
graduate from high school and mock the subgroups 
of my generation who are struggling through the 
same phases of adolescence I conquered just a few 
years ago. One high school diploma and one college 
orientation later, and the same adolescent antics 
that used to carry so much significance in my life 
— making YouTube makeup tutorials and taking 
selfies with my friends on our laptop cameras — 
seem laughable now. It’s easy to forget that I was 
once part of that middle-school aged faction of Gen 
Z-ers — the group that carries an incessant need 
to part their hair in the middle and treats keeping 
Snapchat streaks like it’s a humanitarian duty. 
Yet, despite my most enthusiastic attempts to 
separate myself from this part of my generation, its 
e-boy/e-girl counterparts have made an undoubtedly 
impressive impact on today’s 21st century digital 
sphere — I’m talking about TikTok. One 15-second 
video clip at a time, they’ve converted the app from 
its originally irrelevant, adolescent status to a global 
phenomenon encompassing both mainstream and 
countercultural movements. With Gen Z’s influence, 
TikTok has become a kind of post-Tumblr entity, 
integrating countercultural trends into today’s 
mainstream media realm and promoting a culture 
of inclusivity for today’s middle school-aged folks. 
In middle school, I was never an active user of 
Tumblr. I existed in that short-lived and agreeable 
time somewhere between when the hyper-grunge 
Tumblr community was created and the lip-biting 
TikTok crowd was formed. I didn’t feel the need, nor 
have the curiosity, to explore anything subcultural 
in nature. During that time, my friends and I had 
no way to tap into the moody counterculture spirit 
that typifies today’s “e-boys and e-girls” because the 
only social media we had at our disposal, truly, was 
Pinterest and Instagram. 
But today’s middle-schoolers are immersing 
themselves in TikTok’s digital space in a way I 
could have never imagined when I was in middle 
school. After you scroll past the worrisome amount 
of clips made by 15-year-old girls “whipping” and 
“shooting” in sweatpants and not much else, you’ll 
soon find the great, emo presence of our favorite 
e-boys and e-girls: Gen Z’s current producers of 
mainstream counterculture. 
Noteably androgynous in their appearance, 
e-adolescents, regardless of their gender, have 
slowly motivated a resurgence of all things 
counterculture into the mainstream media. They’re 
giving great power to an app once deemed by many, 
myself included, as juvenile nonsense, and, because 
of this, it becomes harder to mock and make fun 

of them and their mega-influential e-posse. Call it 
cringe, call it weird, call it odd; their TikTok content 
is still making waves in 21st century media culture.
The e-girl puts the style into being sad; she is 
misunderstood in the coolest way. Her doe eyes 
shine through layers of jet-black winged eyeliner. 
Legend has it her neck has never seen the light of 
day due to the abundance of turtlenecks she has in 
her wardrobe.
The 
e-boy 
is 
her 
playful, 
middle-parted 

counterpart. Ears pierced. Nails painted. He makes 
us question what we once found so appealing about 
Zac Efron’s eight-pack and Channing Tatum’s 
gorilla-like shoulders.
Under their reign as TikTok royalty, e-boys and 
e-girls have introduced to us a new kind of cultural 
appeal, particularly for young men. Hegemonic 
masculinity doesn’t mean the same thing it did five 
years ago. With their dimpled cheeks, feminine 
bone structure and aesthetic rebellion against 
gender expectations, guys like Timothée Chalamet 
and Harry Styles are our championed e-boys. They 
demonstrate that there’s something unattractively 
insecure about toxic masculinity and present the 
notion that flexible gender presentation can extend 
beyond the limitations of subcultural phenomenon 
and find itself integrated into mainstream trends. 
Though counterculture and all of the moody 
tropes it promotes have occupied a steady presence 
throughout the decades in its multiple forms, 
Tumblr posts, Urban Outfitters clothing and 
Indie music alike, it has never before been given 
a platform as far-reaching and ultra-popular as 
TikTok. A community that spans from flat-bellied 
middle school girls to hype beasts to washed up 
B-list celebrities, the Tik-Tok-sphere has brought 
countercultural content to its middle-school Gen Z 
audience, thus perpetuating the idea that it’s cool to 
challenge the status quo. It’s cool to lean into your 
own style regardless of gender expectations. It’s 
cool to be an e-person in whatever way you want. 
And that’s pretty cool. 

The Tik-Tok-sphere has 
brought countercultural 
content to it’s middle-
school Gen Z audience, thus 
perpetuating the idea that 
it’s cool to challenge the 
status quo

