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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
A fight breaks out at a new Tony Kushner play as celebrity, political activism and the first lady collide at an antiwar benefit.
Aug 3, 2004 | There was already a distinctly odd vibe as people filed into the American Airlines Theater in Manhattan Monday night to hear the first scene of Tony Kushner's new work, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," to be read by Kristen Johnston, Patricia Clarkson and John Cameron Mitchell -- who would portray first lady Laura Bush. Mitchell had organized the reading as a fundraiser for MoveOn.org, the online progressive advocacy group.
In place of sophisticated theatergoers or well-appointed benefit denizens, the crowd was instead packed with the young, the shabbily attractive, and the incurably geeky, scrambling for the first-come, first-served seats. As the audience waited for the lights to dim, actress Edie Falco hunkered down in front of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and both looked mildly appalled when a large section of the orchestra began chanting "Bring it on! Bring it on!" and catcalling the man depositing bottled water onstage for the actors.
This was not a high-minded theater production or a highfalutin charity do. Instead it was the latest fusion of art and grass-roots politics that has been reinvented in the wake of the Iraq war and in anticipation of the November presidential elections. This audience had to fork over only 25 bucks to see this hotly anticipated bit of drama -- and were more than happy to contribute some charged theatrics of their own, as the fervor created by Kushner's scene threatened to spiral slightly out of control.
Johnston was the first to emerge on stage, flashing a T-shirt that bore a pink image of the vice president with the slogan "dick" printed beneath it; the crowd went nuts. They hooted and hollered as the tall "Third Rock from the Sun" actress explained the setup for the reading: Clarkson would portray one of Kushner's itinerant angels and Mitchell, best known for his embodiment of almost-transgendered singer Hedwig, would play the first lady.
Written in the days leading up to the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the unfinished "Only We Who Guard the Mystery ..." had already garnered a lot of attention. Its premise is that literacy-enthusiast Laura has come to read to three dead Iraqi schoolchildren. The work has been published in the Nation, bitterly excoriated in the Boston Globe, and thrashed by the New York Post's Page Six.
Whatever else it may be, the scene is a powerful piece of theater, and Mitchell was eerily convincing as a preternaturally sweet, morally opaque version of the first lady. (Since it was a reading, Mitchell was disappointingly not dressed, as Kushner's stage directions [read by Johnston] suggested, in "a purple plaid ensemble"; instead he sported a red pullover and matching Converse sneakers). Clarkson played seraphic well, sans "Angels in America"-style wings, as she explains to Laura that the children's deaths were a result of the U.S. sanctions and bombings against Iraq.
When the first lady yearns to hug them, Clarkson's angel must explain that they are "incorporeal."
An increasingly discomfited Laura Bush tells the bodiless kids, "It isn't right that you should have had to die because your country is run by an evil man who is accumulating weapons of mass destruction. But he is, you see, he really is ... So it was um, necessary for you to die, sweetie, how awful to say that, but it was, precious."
