Two years ago the run-up to America’s Iraq invasion was driving Tony Kushner crazy, so he started writing a play in response. In early 2003, The Nation magazine published the first scene of this work in progress, “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.” In the scene, a frankly audacious and compelling polemic, First Lady Laura Bush reads “The Brothers Karamazov” to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children.
In recent months this scene, along with part of a second one, has been presented at dozens of staged readings across the country. On Oct. 29, Evanston, Illinois’ Next Theatre hosted a benefit reading for the League of Women Voters. Steppenwolf Theatre Company artistic director Matha Lavey read the role of Mrs. Bush. Northlight Theatre artistic director B.J. Jones played the angel; Writers’ Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam played a wryly conflicted Kushner.
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Playwright Tony Kushner was a volunteer for the John Kerry campaign. He is photographed in Chicago, Illinois. (MCT) |
At the time Kushner was in Broward County, Florida, volunteering for the Kerry campaign. Four days later, the election handed President Bush his second term. The following day I caught up with Kushner back home in New York City. The eloquent provocateur’s plays include “Angels in America,” “Homebody/Kabul” and the civil rights era musical “Caroline, or Change.”
Some excerpts of a conversation held on what Kushner called “a pretty horrible day”:
Q: What were you doing in Florida, exactly?
A: I was mostly working out of Democratic party headquarters in Broward County, and also with the Dolphin Democrats, the gay and lesbian Democrats in Broward. I loaded plastic chairs in and out of a truck for half a day, delivered water to people in lines during the early voting, stood in front of polling places and waved placards, and I helped a bunch of PWAs (people with AIDS) get to a polling place.
It’s certainly discouraging that Bush got a clear win out of this, and what happened in the Senate is really horrifying, and, of course, 11 states passed anti-gay initiatives. ... All of this is bad news. Yet none of it is terribly surprising. I think we’re in for some very, very bad times. I certainly wouldn’t want to be living in Fallujah right now.
Q: A friend of mine emailed me saying that when so-called moral issues trumped the economy and the war in Iraq, he knew that, in his words, the culture war had raged out of control.
A: I hate that term “culture war,” though. It’s not about culture, or morals. It’s about some people believing that the United States government should follow the lines of their morality, like a theocracy. “Culture wars” is a term like so many we use in this country ― left and right, red states and blue states ― which indicates a kind of value-free equilibrium, which is, of course, not the case. I don’t care who believes in Jesus or what they do; I’m not trying in any way to stop them from doing that. They are, of course, determined to stop me from living a life unfettered from their morality.
Q: Already, some people are drawing a back-to-the-1950s parallel. Although with Eisenhower, a lot of the country wasn’t living in fear of the next foreign policy adventure.
A: There’s no comparison. Dwight Eisenhower, for all his serious limitations as a person, was a fairly creditable president. Now, of course, we’ll have to endure the tiresome claim that, well, maybe Bush is really crafty after all. He’s gotten what he wants; isn’t he the little rascal. The guy’s an idiot. We saw it in the debates. He’s surrounded by a lot of incredibly ruthless and skilled political operators who are willing to lose more than 1,000 American soldiers to get them an election. And it did. It got them the election.
In some ways, though, yes, people are going to try to go back to the 1950s, by overturning Roe v. Wade, and clobbering gay people, and on and on. The problem is, the people they’re doing it to are not the same people.
There’s a vision of what America is that has roots in the best American democratic tradition: America as a secular pluralist democracy. The separation of church and state is adhered to, not for the purposes of suppressing religion, but for the purposes of guaranteeing religion or faith to all citizens.
Then there’s the other side of it: a kind of unholy alliance between theocracy and plutocracy. That’s the divide. In America there are people who have a vision of democracy that has to do with social and economic justice. And there are people for whom those words are essentially meaningless.
Q: What can you say at a time like this, except: Onward?
A: Onward. It’s important to say it. Onward. An incumbent president during wartime, with the economy not tanking: That’s a very hard man to beat. We did our best. And I think we should continue to strategize and organize.
As (songwriter) Joe Hill said: Don’t mourn ― organize.
By Michael Phillips
(Chicago Tribune)
(MCT Information Services)
