At Playbill, reading is always center stage—whether it’s a script on the subway, a Playbill in your seat, or the latest feature on Playbill.com. And while you’re waiting for the curtain to rise, why not open a good book? We’ve partnered with BookTrib.com, the leading source for book news and reviews, to bring book recommendations perfectly suited to the stage-minded reader. Read on for our first pick!
Fans of the Broadway production Good Night, and Good Luck by George Clooney and Grant Heslov will find the same pulse-pounding excitement in Otho Eskin’s thriller Black Sun Rising.
On the surface, the play and novel belong to different worlds—one set in the smoke-filled tv studios of 1950s CBS, the other in the darkest corners of contemporary Washington, D.C. But both explore a moral battlefield that is strikingly familiar: the fight to defend truth against those who distort it for power and the act of challenging rising political extremism, even at great cost.
Good Night, and Good Luck is based on real events: at the height of the Red Scare, Edward R. Murrow and his team confronted Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who was forcing broadcasters to remain silent in the face of his takeover of the government. Murrow and producer Fred W. Friendly risked their careers to expose Senator McCarthy’s campaign, which threatened American democracy by terrorizing “un-American” citizens. Murrow reminded Americans that “we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”
Eskin’s Black Sun Rising is fiction but based on some unsettling current events. The protagonist, homicide detective Marko Zorn, uncovers a violent neo-Nazi organization plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Zorn, cynical yet deeply moral, navigates the Washington institutions that are meant to protect democracy—but are either compromised or complicit. The deeper he investigates, the clearer it is that history is repeating itself. McCarthy’s witch hunts may be gone, but fear and lies are still the primary tools of those striving for power.
Both Murrow and Zorn oppose the seductive appeal of authoritarianism and reveal the apathy that enables it. What binds them is not just courage, but a refusal to be silent in the loss of human rights. They remind us that the fight for integrity is less about grand acts of heroism and more about steady, everyday courage.
If you caught the stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck (or are streaming it online), Eskin’s Black Sun Rising strikes the same nerve: propulsive, disturbing, and all too timely. What was once broadcast in black and white now plays out in high definition.
History isn’t repeating. It’s broadcasting live.
What is past is prologue.
