Trashing the first lady at the ART
On Presidents' Day, the Cambridge Forum and the American Repertory Theatre will stage a benefit reading of Tony Kushner's playlet "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy." A press release calls "Mystery" a "controversial work-in-progress." Kushner "intends his plays to be part of a greater political movement," we read. "He brings the lofty into the sphere of the approachable by creating everyday characters who collide both comically and tragically on stage."
As Kushner's vulgar pastiche of Laura Bush says in "Mystery": Oh gosh.
The play places Bush onstage with three dead Iraqi children. Although the piece was written before the US invasion, the children are victims of American bombings or of economic sanctions. The fact that the sanctions were imposed by the United Nations, not the United States, is of course never mentioned, and the suggestion that there might have been a reason for the sanctions -- well, pshaw.
Bush is portrayed as a not particularly well-meaning idiot, a three-way clone of Marian the Librarian, Lady Macbeth, and Martha Stewart. (Bush once told an interviewer that she keeps a clean house; therefore she must be compulsive.) Bush talks like the YM reader Kushner must think she is: She notes that, "Oh gosh," the slaughter of Iraqi children has a "bright side" -- a low student-teacher ratio! At one point, she realizes the children she is addressing "are probably Muslims . . . That's nice! There's nothing wrong with that!"
The play's title comes from the Grand Inquisitor scene in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov." Bush also made the mistake of telling an interviewer that the Inquisitor scene was one of her favorite pieces of literature, thus providing more grist for derision from the liberal intelligentsia. Women married to conservative, born-again Republicans can't be allowed to appreciate the moral ambiguities of Great Literature. At the end of "Mystery," predictably, Kushner puts the Inquisitor's famous last line in Bush's mouth: "I adhere to my ideas." Meaning: Iraqi children must die in order for my husband to remain in office.
Welcome to Kushnerworld -- Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angels in America" Kushnerworld -- where heterosexuals are repressed homosexuals trapped in loveless relationships, gays are generally noble and capable of spiritual enlightenment, religion is soul-suffocating bunkum, and Republicans occupy a moral plane similar to that of the Nazis. "You're nice. I can't believe you voted for Reagan," Louis tells Joe, the repressed Mormon gay man in "Angels."
The men and women who glean their news from NPR and the Guardian newspaper are always startled to learn that 48 million Americans voted for Reagan. Many of them must be the same yahoos and rubes who -- gosh -- voted for George Bush in 2000.
Kushner says I've got his play all wrong, that he hasn't portrayed the first lady as an object of derision and hatred. "I do hate George W. Bush, absolutely, and I feel that she is a functionary of the Bush administration, operating from an office in the White House that I help pay for," he says. "She is a very active spokesperson for the White House. I see no reason why she is less available for scrutiny." He then expatiates on the irony of the "leaden political ideologues" of the White House -- for example, Condoleezza Rice, who majored in Russian studies -- purporting to enjoy Dostoyevsky, the "great poet of moral ambiguity."
Is Laura Bush a "leaden political ideologue?" I ask. Now there is a silence, because Kushner and I both know the answer: No. "I don't know that she's not a leaden political ideologue," he replies. In other words: Who cares? She's available for trashing.
I wish the Cambridge Forum and the ART much success in staging this wonderful work of hate. I am sure there are members of the Cambridge booboisie who will pay the top ticket price of $300 to finance more bile like this. I wish only that the sponsors wouldn't tout their production as "controversial." There is nothing controversial about pandering to an audience's bigotry and narrow-mindedness. A controversial play would place Ariel Sharon's late wife onstage with the souls of the dead Palestinian children her husband's armed forces have killed. But who would pay $300 to see that?
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
