GEORGE BUSH

It’s the eternal question that’s plagued philosophers for millennia: do major publications explore certain issues because Laura Axelrod brought them up, or is it that once Laura brings it up, we’re predisposed to see the issue manifested everywhere?

Two new pieces in the Times: Jason’ Zinoman’s look at two new Off-Off Broadway shows that differ in form (one-person show vs. full-cast musical) while sharing one key element of content: fierce criticism of the Bush administration. In both cases, as Zinoman points out, the critiques are superficial and poorly argued, and in the case of Dubya And The Gang Of Seven, slightly reeking of anti-Semitism in its depiction of Paul Wolfowitz. Money-quote:

If the hopes of the Democratic Party rested on the political critiques of "Homeland Insecurity" and "Dubya and the Gang of Seven," John Kerry would be in deep trouble.

Next, an excerpt from Tony Kushner’s apparently serial new play, Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. Actually, the Times only excerpts a bit of it; to read the first two scenes in full, start here and finish here.

Only We strikes me as the worst Kushner writing I’ve ever read. In fairness, Kushner may not be aiming very high with this piece. Who knows, he may never write any more if it, it may just be a skit for fundraisers and the like. There certainly doesn’t seem to be an arc so far that would be worth pursuing further. The first scene involves Laura Bush reading Dostoevsky’s "Grand Inquisitor" section of The Brothers Karamozov to dead Iraqi children in the afterlife. She’s portrayed as a weak-willed and loyal wife who secretly despises her husband and can’t bear him touching her.

If Kushner had just left it at that, I would call the play revolting rather than weak. I have nothing nice to say about the Bush administration, but it’s inexcusable in my view for a major playwright – or hell, any playwright – to put words in the mouth of a semi-public figure saying nasty things about her marriage. (I’m not saying it should be illegal, I’m just saying it sucks.) Talk shit about Bush’s policies until your lungs give out, god knows I do, but leave his marriage and his spouse alone. This first scene is worthy of a Clinton-era Republican.

However, Kushner didn’t leave it at that. He wrote a second scene in which a different Laura Bush character (in the world of the play, the "real" one) is able to enter and critique the scene she had just watched. She is able to condemn the portrait of her behavior and her marriage and stand up for her husband. The scene that follows involves a meandering argument between the "real" Laura Bush character and the fictional Kushner which fails in a milder way than the first scene. It isn’t interesting in either of the ways it could be interesting. The characters of Bush and Kushner don’t engage in any way that would count as drama, and they also fail to have an interesting political discussion. So I’m not sure what the scene is good for, other than as a cabaret act for a fundraiser for John Kerry (which, outside the consideration of theatrical quality, is definitely a good thing in my view).

But then – why have an interesting political discussion in a play? Seriously, why? Every couple of weeks, Slate will bring in two or more experts in a given field to have an online discussion of an issue related to their expertise. (Isaac has started a one of these discussions on his own blog on the future of conservatism.) This format is so much better for presenting political discussion than a play. There are no time constraints, readers can read at their own pace and digest the ideas at their leisure, and there’s no need to tell a story at the same time.

So many so-called political plays are attempting to do what other media do better. Some plays sound like protests. Some sound like aggressive stump speeches. Some sound like op-ed pieces. Some sound like text-books. Some sound like Slate discussion forums. So few of them look or sound like stories told though the medium of theater.

How should a playwright write about the political? Let me suggest a thought process.

Let’s say you’re a playwright who hates George W. Bush (or, to be specific, the policies of the Bush administration). That seems as good a place to start as any, as there are so many out there. So you’re yet another playwright who hates Bush. You want to use your playwriting to oppose Bush in some way. So, okay: what play should you write?

1) Maybe you could write a play depicting members of the Bush administration as dangerous buffoons. 2) Maybe you could write a play in which people not unlike you and your friends talk at length about what dangerous, devious buffoons the members of the Bush administration are. 3) Maybe you could cut out all the middle-men and write a one-person show where you yourself stand onstage and tell the audience at great length what dangerous, devious, dastardly buffoons Bush and his administration are.

Except… well, the first idea sounds like a comedy sketch, and you’re a playwright, and perhaps you’re not all that good at comedy sketches. Perhaps you know actual comedy writers who would do that sort of thing a lot better than you. Also, maybe you don’t really know how the members of the Bush administration behave when they’re carrying out their policies. You might start wondering if you were willing to take on the Woodwordian task of actually researching how Bush administration officials behave when they carry out their policies, or, if you weren’t willing to do that, you might start wondering if in depicting something you know nothing about, if you might not be, you know, lying.

The second idea sounds like that same conversation you have once a week with your friends in the middle hour of hanging out with them - after catching up on gossip but before discussing your personal lives. You might wonder if the audience likely to attend your play would be made up largely of people much like you and your friends, and it follows that you might then suspect that they have the same conversation about the Bush administration once a week that you do. So you might wonder if it’s fair to charge these people $15 dollars to sit through the type of conversation they have all the time, except at your play they won’t get to talk and there won’t be any beer.

The third idea just sounds unbearable.

But you still want to write this play! The urgency is unbearable! Well, let’s go back to the drawing-board and think.

Maybe you’ll write a play showing the damage a particular Bush administration policy has inflicted! Well, let’s see… maybe a play about a family in Iraq who lost an innocent civillian loved one to an American bombing in the war! Or… how about a librarian arrested under the Patriot Act?

Well okay, but… how much are you willing to learn about Iraqi life? The Iraqi family who lost the innocent loved one, well, their life isn’t anything like your life, their values and behavior are markedly different from yours in some aspects. Plus, this family wouldn’t exist in a vacuum. They’d have a lot of friends and neighbors. Some of them would go to work somewhere, some kind of Iraqi work. What kind of jobs do Iraqis do? What are the hours? You’d need to know something about how these characters would normally their days in order to depict the way suffering disrupts their norm. Are you willing to do the tremendous amount of work required to even be able to write about this family in the right context? And if not, there’s that lying issue again. Plus, you might idly wonder if maybe there are Iraqis out there who might be planning on telling their own stories of grief, war, and change. Maybe their treatment of this subject would be more valuable than yours.

The Patriot Act one isn’t so tough, though, right? You could base the American librarian on someone you know. Hell, maybe you even know an actual librarian. Let’s say the librarian refuses to turn over lists of books checked out by Muslims who patronize her library. So then she’s arrested, she goes to jail, there’s an interrogation scene, maybe a media circus…

Well hang on a second. It’s starting to seem like this whole play is happening to the librarian. She doesn’t seem to be making anything happen herself beyond the initial decision to not turn over the check-out lists. Don’t they always tell you to write proactive protagonists in playwriting school? When Harold Pinter wrote that one play about an interrogation in prison, he made the interrogator the lead because the interrogator was the one actually trying to accomplish something, right? How can we make the librarian more a master of her own fate?

But now there’s a new problem: you’re getting sidetracked off into a tangential thought. You’re thinking, why do I always have to have a proactive protagonist? Why does that rule exist? You know, I look around me, and most people I see don’t seem to be doing anything to master their own fates. Shit, I can’t remember the last time I did something to master my own fate. Why is that?

Actually, you’re thinking, if people were masters of their own fate, George Bush wouldn’t be sitting on a nine-point lead in two major polls coming off a moderately disgraceful convention and an extremely disgraceful ad campaign. Argh! It makes you want to scream a primal playwright scream! Don’t people see through this? The disingenuous rhetoric, the misrepresentations, the outright lies? Are we really about to re-hire a contractor who did lousy work the last time we hired him? This is a democracy! Why can’t we do something about this elected official of ours who has proved to be so profoundly insufficient?

Uh-oh. Now you might be cooking with gas. Why is Bush sitting on such a huge lead? Remember, that lead isn’t just numbers, the numbers reflect people who’ve answered a question. Who are the people who support the administration you despise? Maybe a minority of them are extremely well-informed people who just have very different opinions than you do. But you suspect that the majority of people who answered "Bush" are being duped and misinformed. They have only the vaguest notions of what’s going on in the world around them based on the few minutes a day they have to attend to matters not immediately related to work, family, and recreation.

These people making this incomprehensible choice are Americans, theoretically the most powerful people in the world, and yet they can seem so powerless. So why? Is it because they work so hard and so long that they’re too tired for anything that seems even a little abstract? Is it because they spend so little of their lives not watching television or films or listening to music or surfing the internet? Is it because attending to their families – the teething baby, the college-age daughter, the mother-in-law in the assisted-living home – draws so much love and energy out of them that there’s barely any left for their country and their society? Are these people happy? Are they at least exhilarated? What do they dream about at night during their little REM break from these harried lives?

And the more you think along these particular lines, the more you start to wonder: is there maybe a root problem here that existed long before George W. Bush and will continue to exist long after he is gone? In a land of tremendous freedom and latitude to participate on one’s own governance, so many people feel powerless and tired. And maybe, in certain ways, as the day-job you’ve taken to support your playwriting intensifies, as your significant other maybe becomes your spouse and you maybe begin talking about the future and children, as your hobbies (food, movies, drinking) begin to feel less like pleasures and more like refuge from your own life, maybe you begin to see how you might turn into one of these people. These people, for whom anything that exists beyond the demands of the moment is only visible though a heavy, weary smog.

Because if enough people in a democracy live like this, maybe there will always be George Bushes to take advantage of it. Maybe George Bush isn’t the virus but rather the sneeze. Maybe your play should be opposing the phenomenon that created him.

Maybe your play should have nothing to do with George Bush. Maybe your play shouldn’t mention politics at all. Maybe your play should be about some Americans trying to get through their lives – through their jobs, their families, their TV and internet, their addictive pleasures. It could be a family. Or it could be workers in an office. Or it could be students in a college.

All the political drama, in this model, would take place in the mind of the audience. If you pulled it off just right, maybe some in the audience would think, you know, these people could be marks for any con-man who comes along. And maybe a subset of those people would think, those people look like me.

You could try to talk about these people in a protest or a stump speech or an op-ed or a Slate-style dialogue, but really, this a job for a play.

(You know what? As I write this, I realize I saw this play last year. It was Mayonnaise Sandwiches by James Comtois. Hey James! You’re political!)

I guess writing a political play is a lot like writing any other kind of play. You find yourself fired up to write about a subject. As you sit down to work out the details, you’re forced to think more deeply about the subject, more clearly about what draws you to the subject, and you start to follow some strange paths of thought. Your play is rarely the play you imagined it would be by the time you finish. Sometimes it’s not even the same play by the time you start.

--SlowLearner

Comments

[Catherine]

Thanks Mac! I loved this hypothetical digression. So when are YOU going to write this play?

[Michelle]

Fantastic entry, Mac. Really great.

[Yustin]

I truly hope everyone involved in making another soap-box style production reads this. Excellent, thought provoking work, Mac.

[Tim Hulsey]

Hmm. Kushner turns Laura Bush into a second Harper Pitt. I think "G. David Schine in Hell" is weaker than Only We ..., but not by much. Fifty years from now, if Kushner's neurons are still firing, he'll still be recycling material from Angels. It's like the guy is eating the same cheeseburger over and over, with similarly diminishing returns ...

I find myself wondering why theater folk hate Dubya so. It can't be because of his anti-Gay stance, because they hated him long before he took up that dubious cause. I can't be because Dubya killed arts funding, because the budget for the NEA is up by nearly 50% since he took office. Clinton couldn't have managed that.

Perhaps it's because artists see Dubya as the kind of stupid lout who used to beat them up in high school. Perhaps it has something to do with the smirk, or that weird chimp face he makes. Maybe his being from Texas has something to do with it -- the art world is full of New Yorkers, and I've found the New Yorkers I know incredibly provincial. (The world does not end just outside of Yonkers.)

Or maybe, just maybe, the resentment toward Dubya comes from the fact that artists need each other's support in order to survive -- and if their politics aren't appropriately left-wing, they don't get invited to the parties, the opening nights, the networking groups, the places where they could meet potential producers ....

As several "Anybody But Bush" leftists have informed me, there's no reason for them to associate with someone so obviously "unevolved" as to disagree with their ideas. I know that artists, with their superior powers of human empathy, are supposed to be above this petty prejudice, but they're at least as susceptible to old-fashioned hubris as the rest of us. Thus the art world's politics of left-wing hatred and ressentiment becomes self-reinforcing: Artists don't know any conservatives, because if they did they wouldn't remain artists for very long, and conservatives don't know artists, often because many artists won't deign to speak to us -- or for that matter, about us -- without resorting to contemptuous caricature.

[Mac]

Tim, I understand the phenomenon you're describing, and this whole conversation got started with Laura decrying something similar. I should say in fairness that I work with a number of artists who dislike the Bush administration for reasons entirely unrelated to the arts or any peer pressures in the arts world, and I even know a few talented artists planning to vote for Bush this fall. So my own little corner of the arts world isn't quite as monolithic as all that.