Can there be such a thing as “Republican theater”? Or is that an oxymoron? It’s a serious question. Much of the funding for the arts comes from the administration in power, but most arts groups have a hard time saying nice things about Republicans, even though some very wealthy ones support Dallas arts in a big way.
Imagine a Republican play on a local stage. Can’t, can you? It’s been a long time since Addison’s Cato—reputed to be George Washington’s favorite—got a decent production. I hear that Kitchen Dog has repeatedly passed on it.
These days, all you can picture is something like this:
The curtain rises. Karl Rove is on the phone, half-sitting on his desk, looking out his window. “Heard it?” he says, wearily. “Who do you think sent it to the cartoonists? But it’s supposed to be ’ride’ with Ted Kennedy, not ’drive.’ They put ’drive’? Those idiots are—the whole point is the contrast. I’d rather hunt with Cheney—that’s active, you’ve got the gun, you take your chances out there, you’re Republican—than ride with Kennedy. Ride is passive. That’s welfare state stuff. You’re Mary Jo, you’re the victim. Drive screws the whole thing up. Any bozo could—who did this? Okay, I remember him. No, come on. He did it on purpose. Find out something about his wife.”
| And the Winner Is … Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana celebrates excellence in high school theater with the annual Betty Lynn Buckley Awards. When Casa Mañana president and executive producer Denton Yockey, in conjunction with the Junior League of Fort Worth, established an awards program in 2000 to honor Tarrant County high school theater students, there was no doubt he’d name the awards after Betty Lynn Buckley (above). “If you put Broadway, Fort Worth, and excellence in a Google search,” he says, “you’ll get Betty Lynn Buckley.” Buckley got her start performing at Casa Mañana in a production of Beauty and the Beast. Now she’s back, teaching intermittently. “Because teachers changed my life,” she says, “I want to do the same.” Casa Mañana offers theater classes throughout the year for children and adults. Yockey modeled the Betty Lynn Buckley Awards, given in 16 categories, after a similar program in Pittsburgh. The judges are local theater professionals—performers, directors, critics, and the like—and winners receive a $500 college scholarship. Any high school in Tarrant County that produces a musical can participate; they need only register. Yockey says this program helps The winners are kept secret until the night of the awards ceremony, May 22. |
Make Karl Rove gay, ramp up the outrageousness, name him Roy Cohn, and you’ve got one of the main characters of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the first half of which Risk Theater Initiative is staging this month at the Bath House Cultural Center.
Roy Cohn is the ur-Republican in Kushner’s Inferno, a homosexual who brags in the play about having gotten Ethel Rosenberg executed and who threatens to ruin his own doctor’s career if he reveals that Cohn has AIDS.
Cohn refuses the label “homosexual” when his doctor tries to get him to be honest. Why? Not because he denies his proclivities, but because he’s interested in “who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors.” Cohn deconstructs the word in an analysis of power that Michel Foucault himself might honor:
“Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?”
Written in the presidency of the first George Bush about AIDS during the Reagan era, Kushner’s play has Cohn’s friend in the Justice Department, Martin Heller, make this speech late in 1985:
“By the ’90s the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees. … We’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate. … A permanent fix on the Oval Office? It’s possible. By ’92 we’ll get the Senate back, and in 10 years the South is going to give us the House. It’s really the end of liberalism. The end of New Deal socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.”
Kushner knows, of course, just how boon and hale this prospect sounded to many Americans in 1985, as it sounds even now when much of it has been realized. But he associates it with the despicable Cohn, the weaselly Heller, and Joe Pitt, a Mormon and Cohn’s protégé, a closeted and deeply divided man. For Kushner’s audience, such a political stance is self-evidently benighted and evil. The question is, will Republicans—not Rove types, just people married with kids, churchgoers, say, who like theater and might go to see Evita at Lyric Stage or maybe even The Crucible at WaterTower—go to see an explicitly gay play featuring a sexually arousing angel and be moved by it?
Excuse me, but fat chance. That doesn’t mean people won’t go—just not Republicans. Obviously, people expect Uptown Players to be doing gay plays like Southern Baptist Sissies, which apparently focuses on, according to the company’s mission statement, “contemporary and alternative lifestyle themes that explore complex and varied situations such as relationships, family, prejudice, and values.” Right. But the other mainstream theaters have been scheduling gay-themed plays as well, from Visiting Mr. Green at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas to I Am My Own Wife at Dallas Theater Center. Is it because gay marriage is a burning social issue? It has been definitively rejected in every state where it’s been on the ballot, including Texas.
No, what this gay boom means, if I’m not mistaken, is very much political. Like the producers of Brokeback Mountain, artistic directors know that making iconic American institutions, such as cowboys and baseball, gay undercuts Republican symbols. For example, this summer WaterTower is doing Take Me Out, about a gay professional baseball player. Both cowboys and baseball, by the way, were associated with Ronald Reagan—and, hey, wait! George W. Bush!
Frankly, it worries me that professional theater in Dallas turns aside a large potential audience by assuming that they have to correct the people who don’t come anyway. (Talk about preaching to the chorale.) So I take my worries to the director of Angels in America, Marianne Galloway, whose work I have admired since her debut with Waiting for Godot two years ago. I ask why she’s doing the play now.
She starts by talking about wanting to do the play on an almost bare set, especially after the HBO movie starring Al Pacino as Roy Cohn.
“It feels like minimalism,” she says, “because it lets the story breathe on its own. What seems to have happened with stage productions is that the play got this name of being an epic, so now people want to produce it on an epic scale. That’s why we’re doing it in the Bath House.”
She goes on to talk about AIDS, which was still front-page news when Kushner first wrote the play. She mentions the international AIDS crisis now. Then, a little hesitantly, she gets to the real point.
| Save the Dates Through May 20 Kitchen Dog Theater presents Nickel and Dimed in America, an adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about living on minimum wage. (Save your pennies.) The MAC, 3120 McKinney Ave. 214-953-1055. www.kitchendogtheater.org. May 24-June 4 Through May 13 |
“Tony Kushner is so—his political sensibilities are so strong,” she says. “And what’s so interesting about this script—I hate to go down this road, because I hate for people to come in and think, ’This is the political bent the director wants me to go on.’ I want people to walk in and decide what they will. I don’t want to decide what you should walk away from Angels in America with.”
Well, okay. On the other hand, hasn’t Kushner already decided what we should walk away with? Galloway is too smart to think that she can get away with that answer.
“Having said that,” she goes on, “there are a lot of references in the script to the Reagan administration that reflect what’s happening in the Bush administration now. I just think it’s time to put this on its feet and go, ’Wait, that’s where we were 10 and 20 years ago. Where are we now?’ And put it up on stage and have a talk afterward and say, ’Well, what do you think?’ In Dallas, in a very conservative area. So that’s why.”
Galloway and I go on to have a fine talk ourselves, probing into Cohn and the place of Joe Pitt’s wife in the play and other issues, such as how to get an angel into the Bath House. But if you ask me what the audience will think? That Kushner was a prophet, that things are much worse now than in 1985, that George W. Bush has been a disaster, that—come on. Sure, it’s in Dallas, but who’s going to be in the audience, Republicans from the Park Cities?
And what if they were? What if they were outspoken, highly educated, articulate, pro-family conservatives who considered Rush Limbaugh a vulgar buffoon, thought of Karl Rove as the latest incarnation of Flem Snopes, and bore no spiritual resemblance either to closeted Joe Pitt or to Pitt’s agoraphobic wife or to Roy Cohn?
What am I saying? I’m saying that we should broaden the conversation and not simply give Dallas theater—or the people who might not want to see it right now—a label. Maybe Cohn was right about that much. The more smart people we can get into the theater, thinking about serious plays and what they mean, the better things will be for the culture, both in Dallas and in the country as a whole.
That’s not going to happen with Angels in America, I suspect. Coriolanus or The Eumenides, maybe. Or are they too Republican?
Angels in America—Part One: Millennium Approaches, runs May 11-28 at Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Dr. 972-943-8915. www.risktheinitiative.com.
