Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

If you’re a visitor to New York, here’s a little trick to play on your hotel concierge: Slip him or her a nice tip, say $100, and let it be known that you’d be so eternally grateful for a pair of tickets to Elective Affinities, the new one-woman show starring Zoe Caldwell.

It’s not going to happen.

You’ll have no better luck if you’re a New Yorker, but the experience will be less fun, because the abject failure will be yours alone.

Elective Affinities, you see, is a very tough ticket, probably the toughest in town. Following a few preview nights, it opens December 2 and will run a mere 12 performances, with an audience of just 30 individuals for each show—which means that over its entire run, the production will play only to about as many people as fit into a small Broadway theater on a single night. The venue is a gracefully appointed Fifth Avenue town house on the Upper East Side. Its precise location is being kept secret, revealed only to the lucky holders of those magic little tickets by email, approximately 48 hours before curtain. (Not that we’re saying there’s a curtain.)

The reason for this bit of subterfuge has nothing to do with art. That would be precious, you see, and Ms. Caldwell, who is 78 and has been a professional actress since the age of 9, detests such pretensions. The reason is practical. Should the address be widely disseminated, a desperate mob might descend on the place, and things could become unpleasant.

Human unpleasantness—the cruelties we inflict on one another, in the name of protecting those we love, or defending our way of life, or simply because we can—is the subject of David Adjmi’s play, an extended monologue in which Alice Hauptmann, a very rich, very civilized old lady, treats a few visitors to tea, lady fingers, and some very uncivilized political views on human rights, genocide and the torture of prisoners.

When she was first approached about the role, Ms. Caldwell turned it down flat. “A one-woman show? Oh no, no, no, no,” she recalled thinking. Dressed in a black long-sleeved scoop-neck top and jazz pants, her hair cut short and fashionably mussed, she was sitting in a beige arm chair in the Theater District pied à terre she has kept in the city for some 40 years. “A one-woman show? I couldn’t do that. I did it once with Lillian”—the 1986 play based on the life of playwright Lillian Hellman—“who was a very difficult woman to have in your bloodstream. But my son Charlie said, ‘You might at least read it before you dismiss it.’ And so I did.”

Ms. Caldwell was floored by the play, she said. But there was a problem. “I rang and I said, ‘It’s terrific, and I’d love to do it but of course I can’t, because I can’t remember my lines anymore. But I find what you’re doing thrilling, and I’ll be there in the audience.’” Soho Rep artistic director Sarah Benson, who directed the show, suggested they place written prompts around the room. “No, no, no, I couldn’t act doing that,” Ms. Caldwell said. What about an ear piece? “I couldn’t possibly—no, no, no,” she responded. A few days later, Ms. Benson came back to her again and asked if she’d simply read it. “And I said, well yes, if you would like me to.”

“I just kept stalking her,” Ms. Benson told The Observer. “I’d seen her in Master Class when I was a teenager, and I was like, ‘Who is this amazing woman?’ I’ve had a theater crush on her for years.”

So here she is. “Oh dear, oh dear, I am very nervous,” Ms. Caldwell said, her accent bearing strong traces of her native Australia. “I’m always nervous, but more so now because I’m older and more likely to be a little frail. I’m right to be nervous!”

Still, Ms. Benson’s persistence is not hard to understand. Alice Hauptmann—by turns girlish, gracious and monstrously self-centered—seems a classic Zoe Caldwell role. The recipient of four Tony Awards, Ms. Caldwell specializes in complicated women: Lady Macbeth. Cleopatra. Miss Jean Brodie. Lillian Hellman. Maria Callas. Mary Tyrone. Medea.

Her approach to each role is deeply experiential. She began swilling vodka and took up smoking to play Lillian Hellman, walked around Manhattan with an awkward stoop to help her relate to the hunchbacked nun in The Devils, and practically destroyed her feet wearing the precise heels Callas favored.

She has changed her weight drastically, depending on the role. “That’s why I’m such a mess right now,” she said, though she didn’t seem it. “When I played Emma Hamilton in London, I was 180 pounds. That was very big. But then as Medea, I thought, I can’t be going through all these problems fat and healthy!”

Ms. Caldwell has a very specific pre-performance ritual, she said. “I arrive at the theater three hours before curtain, and I take everything off of myself. And then I put everything of them on.” She laughed. “It’s a bit creepy.”

She looked down at her nails, Alice’s nails, which had been painted a flaming red. “The last time I had nail polish on was when I was 16,” she recalled.

Ms. Caldwell has also had an influence on the production, Ms. Benson said. “Everything from what kind of chocolate she would have to what art books would be on the coffee table—Zoe has really informed that.”

Becoming these characters can wreak havoc on one’s relationships, Ms. Caldwell noted. “I mean, it’s not good for husbands and boys and dogs and stuff.” Her husband, Robert Whitehead, the legendary Broadway producer who staged signature works by Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams, among many others, died in 2002. When he produced Medea on Broadway in 1983, with Ms. Caldwell starring, they had two young sons at home—“two little boys whom I simply adored...before I set off each night to kill them,” she said with a devilish smile.

Ms. Caldwell said her performance as Alice was influenced by a close friend, Gladys Pulitzer Preston, better known as Patsy, who was the granddaughter of Joseph Pulitzer and whose husband, Lewis Thomas Preston, was the chairman of J.P. Morgan. While Ms. Preston, who died just two weeks ago, was by all accounts a lovely person who shared none of Alice’s terrible prejudices or fears (in fact, was a staunch supporter of women’s rights around the world and once caught a record-setting 1,230-lb. black marlin), she was, like Alice, to the manor born. “The performance was informed by the world Patsy had allowed me into,” she said. “I went to wonderful dinner parties with Brooke Astor and stuff like that because of Patsy.”

Though Elective Affinities was written a decade ago, Alice, an unabashed one-percenter, seems to have been invented with the present moment in mind, as Americans increasingly take to the streets in protest of economic inequality. As Alice puts it, “People say to me, ‘But you’re so rich, you must be spiritually empty.’ And I say, ‘But I’ve managed to find spiritual fulfillment in material things.’”

Ms. Caldwell was asked if she’d been following the demonstrations. “Have I ever!” she replied. “Of course. I’m so admiring of them. Don’t you love the way they do their speeches? So unusual. But I know if I put a big placard around my neck, I’d fall right over.”

She laughed. “The change the world has undergone in the last few years is just astonishing—how they can just pick up a king who’s been there for 37 years. Pop, out he goes! They’re dropping like flies.”

Ms. Caldwell is best known as a theater actress, which is to say that despite appearing opposite such world famous actors as Paul Robeson, Charles Laughton, Albert Finney, Sean Connery, Jason Robards, and Christopher Plummer, outside of ardent fans of the stage, she is scarcely known at all. “Actors idolize her,” Ms. Benson said. “So many of them have contacted me begging just to come watch a rehearsal. She’s an icon.” Ms. Caldwell’s last great role, as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class, was unanimously judged a triumph, but when it came time to turn it into a film, Faye Dunaway was cast in the lead, perhaps because she was also the director. (The film has yet to be released.)

For those who haven’t been lucky enough to witness Ms. Caldwell in action, there is a stunning clip on YouTube of her turn in Medea—deviously sweet-talking Creon one moment, trembling with rage the next. That’s about it, in terms of recorded media. Except for a turn in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, another in the Nicole Kidman thriller Birth, which she called “really a bummer,” and a small role in Stephen Daldry’s forthcoming adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, she has remained steadfastly loyal to the stage.

“I can do anything in front of 2,000 people,” she insisted, “but I can do practically nothing in front of a camera.”

Ms. Caldwell prefers the theater, she added, because it’s more immediate—and more dangerous. Why dangerous? “Because,” she said rising slightly in her seat, “We...are...alive! Anything that’s alive is dangerous.”

She placed a hand on our arm. “People used to communicate by looking in each other’s eyes,” she went on, doing just that. “I am alive. You are alive. That’s how you communicate.”

All propaganda plays date quickly—unless the play transcends the propaganda. Who today remembers Tim Robbins’ anti-war docudrama, Embedded? But then, who remembered it two minutes after the curtain came mercifully down? Mr. Robbins’ smug sanctimony was enough to turn a liberal Democrat into a right-wing Republican. Mr. Robbins is no writer, however. Let’s raise the stakes.

George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman gives the Devil his due as much as Don Juan—making the great play, as Eric Bentley said, “not propaganda, but drama.” Brecht’s preachy polemics are out of fashion today, but the secular, universal message of war and suffering in Mother Courage and Her Children still endures—provided it is staged well. (Roundabout Theatre’s recent, ludicrously campy Studio 54 version of Threepenny Opera couldn’t have done better had it set out to kill Brecht’s most popular work and Kurt Weill’s renowned score along with it.) Brecht, the most overtly political playwright and propagandist of the 20th century, didn’t change a thing politically, however. Nor has any play in history. Remember, no Lysistrata ever stopped a war. No play or work of art ever changed the world. They change the way we perceive the world.

An entire generation of leading British playwrights, for example—from Caryl Churchill to David Hare to Howard Brenton—continues to see theater as a catalyst for social justice. But have they been politically effective? Their early conscience plays coincided, in fact, with the triumph of Thatcherite capitalism. Should they quit political drama, then, and leave political reporting to investigative journalists or documentary filmmakers like Michael Moore? Do we, in any case, relish going to the theater to be lectured?

Sir David Hare—a British socialist and egalitarian who manages to see no contradiction in his accepting a knighthood—continues fighting the good fight in his political plays. If only he would stop spinning them for us like Tony Blair selling the necessity of war. In two interviews about Stuff Happens at the Public, he compared himself to Shakespeare and Tolstoy, no less. From his swell London home in literary Hampstead—or Yasnaya Polyana, as we’ve come to think of it—Sir David Hare is obviously concerned. But Stuff Happens, his lengthy account of the march to war in Iraq, is no Shakespearean history play.

It’s basically a straightforward docudrama—a verbatim reconstruction of known events from the public record with a few invented, unsurprising scenes. That we need at this stage of the nightmare game to be informed by Mr. Hare that an inarticulate President Bush sold America a lie, or that Prime Minister Blair is his craven poodle, is itself a reflection of the sorry state of much of U.S. political theater. I am with those critics who believe that Stuff Happens arrived here from England too late. Two years ago—when to oppose the war was unpatriotic and even dangerous—staging the play might have made timely sense. Today, Stuff Happens tells us what we already know. It’s a perfect, prestigious example of preaching to the converted—safe and even comforting, disturbing no one, challenging no one, changing nothing.

It’s why I found Nilaja Sun’s one-woman show of such tender mercies and heart, No Child … (which she also wrote), a priceless achievement. I’m happy to report that Ms. Sun has now transferred to the Barrow Street Theatre off Broadway, where she continues to tell her stories about New York lives that we only imagine we know. Ms. Sun is a smashing actress who worked for eight years as a teacher in the Bronx. No Child … is about the difference that a single human being can make in the kingdom of the damned, and the extraordinary play gives a good name to the theater of social conscience.

So, too, did a brilliant monologue by David Adjmi that I caught recently at an evening of political play readings downtown. Mr. Adjmi’s short piece, Elective Affinities, was blessed by a beguiling performance from America’s First Lady of Theater, Marian Seldes. But the monologue itself stood in its own right—a disturbing, slyly amusing piece about the blithe ignorance (and self-ignorance) of a sophisticated, upper-class American lady who in her civilized, patrician way argues that political torture is reasonable.

She could be Mrs. Barbara Bush, who thought the devastated homeless of post-Katrina New Orleans were better off suffering en masse without food and water in the Superdome. Yet Mr. Adjmi makes his heroine oddly appealing as she rambles on charmingly. “I’ve managed to find spiritual fulfillment in material things,” she confides happily at one point. The great actress’ key to the virtuoso role was to have located a near-infectious, ghostly way of laughing. The hollow sound of the lady’s frequent bursts of laughter told us that ignorance is bliss, and harmless, and very, very dangerous.

So there’s hope for our political theater! Its imaginative possibility and daring—its effective emotional fury and largeness—were best revealed for me by Tom Oppenheim’s excellent revival of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day for the Stella Adler Studio. First produced in 1985 when Mr. Kushner was unknown, his early play takes place during the rubble of history as the Nazis rise to power in the 30’s, transforming the lives of a group of Berlin artists and their friends. It’s a passionate and uneven piece, epic in form, engaged, biased, dark, trivial, lyrical, magical, uncompromising, bursting with ideas, theatrically over the top and overlong. Mr. Kushner, you see, hasn’t changed much.

It’s also a naïve piece that angrily links Hitler’s Final Solution with President Reagan’s morally debased indifference to AIDS. In its desperate, despairing cry for change, compassion and political involvement, A Bright Room Called Day is the path to all of Mr. Kushner’s future work, including Angels in America. In one staggering speech, the case is made against compromise—not of the mutely, passively indifferent, but of decent people who aren’t quite decent enough, of the well-meaning who aren’t well-meaning enough, and those who are tormented by events and afraid. People like us.

A Bright Room Called Day reveals Tony Kushner as a willing disciple of Brecht (with a touch of operatic magic realism). It’s why we look forward so much to his new adaptation of Mother Courage with Meryl Streep, which is about to open in the Public Theatre’s production in the Park. In many ways, it’s perfect casting. Brecht might not have changed the world, but he and Mr. Kushner aren’t about to give up trying.