We Can Never Go Back to Before [or Apparently We Can].

Why RAGTIME at the Lincoln Center is the most important creative work of 2026.

The stage is empty save for a spotlighted piano. Anticipation builds as the audience waits to hear the music it might play. Slowly, the lights begin to fade, and the notes begin the Americans’ lament.

I saw RAGTIME on January 9, 2026. By this date, Renee Good had been murdered, the United States was now running Venezuela, and Greenland was preparing for what seemed like a likely US invasion. What a perfectly democratic start to the new year.

However, what do the first nine days of 2026 have to do with a musical production that centers around an America that existed over 100 years ago?

RAGTIME, a musical based on E. L. Doctorow’s novel of the same name, centers around the tumultuous intersection of race, class, and gender divisions in the early 1900s. The narratives of both the book and the musical follow a wealthy white family living in New Rochelle. They are distinctly sheltered by the freedom that their skin allows them. Yet, despite what the family might believe, they do not exist singularly.

Their paths inevitably cross with Coalhouse Walker Jr., a ragtime musician who is searching for his girl, Sarah. Determined, Coalhouse finds out where she is: Sarah is staying with the family from New Rochelle. This is after Mother found an abandoned baby buried in their garden, and the child is revealed to be Sarah's. The weeks pass as Coalhouse calls upon Sarah to no avail. She will not come down to receive him. Despite this tale of courtship and authentic yearning, the society outside the family’s home sees only one thing: a mysterious black man who comes to New Rochelle every week.

While the relationship between Coalhouse, Sarah, and the family unfolds, another story reveals itself in the tenement houses of New York City. Tateh and his daughter face the harsh realities of life as immigrants. Even though Tateh has hopes that his business will take off, it becomes clear that achieving the American Dream is not determined by rugged individualism, but by whether the cards of capitalism have been shuffled in his favor.

As the story progresses on the stage, the audience watches these characters begin to lose their historical distance. Coalhouse’s Model T is destroyed by municipal firemen. Justice cannot be served by those who supposedly have the power to do so. Sarah is killed by police officers at a political campaign for attempting to get the attention of the Vice Presidential candidate. They claimed she had a gun. She did not. Tateh is mistakenly beaten while fleeing the chaos of a worker’s strike. He was not a striker; he was just an immigrant. What I have just described is not a fictional story—it is the current headlines for tomorrow’s paper; it is the first nine days of 2026. The struggle has remained constant with no apparent changes.

According to Mother, though, after all that she has seen and experienced with the loss of Sarah, Coalhouse’s grief, and her deteriorating relationship with Father (her husband), she confidently concludes that “we can never go back to before.” In this context, “before” means the time when Mother was not forced to recognize the diverse lives she shares her existence with. Overall, the message that it is no longer possible to return to a previous version of life rings quite clear in Caissie Levy’s (Mother) powerful vocal performance throughout this musical number, “Back to Before.” In a more significant sense, this lyric points to the forward progression of time as an entity that changes from one state to another. What that implies is that no single time period can exist exactly the same.

Nonetheless, in explicit contrast to this absolutism is a single production detail: the way the characters enter the RAGTIME theatre space. In most scenes, the various performers do not enter from the wings. They actually enter from two staircases at the front of the circular stage, except for a few moments when the wings are used. Interestingly, because of the positioning of these two entrances, the staircases appear to be an extension of the stairs used by audience members to reach their seats. In this way, it is as if the actors are current audience members walking up to participate in the performance. Essentially, these supposedly fictional characters do not emerge from the past to tell their tale to a different generation, but rather materialize from the very present human lives in the audience. The story, then, is not meant to put the past on display, but rather to draw from the present to represent the past.

Even after Mother finishes her Act II ballad, “Back to Before,” and processes her new convictions, the characters continue to use those specific front stairway entrances. The irony is that, despite her belief in change over time, the audience sees that no actual generational difference has occurred: the past continues to be derived from the present.

This is because, as RAGTIME strikingly highlights, people will not change over time if we truly believe that society can never return to what it was before. Point in case, the characters do not suddenly use only the entrances at the wings of the stage after Mother makes her claim. In an entirely twisted sense, the only way to repeat the mistakes of a bygone era is to fundamentally believe that time protects each generation from the sins of the father.

Ultimately, then, RAGTIME teaches us that time means nothing in the wake of fallible, human choice. That is why it is time to accept that apparently we can go back to before. We can always go back to the white supremacy, to the shootings, to the gender inequality, to the internment camps, to the abuse, to the hate, to the violence, to the suffering. It will always be just one choice away, no matter the date.