PI ONLINE:
12-24-04

The first item I ever wrote for this column, a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, was about Tony Kushner. His play Homebody/Kabul had anticipated that awful day in a way that was totally blowing the minds of arts patrons and journalists.

I quoted Peter Marks at the New York Times, quoting Kushner’s play: “At one point…an Afghan character, an educated woman who suffers greatly under the Taliban, complains bitterly about how the United States bears responsibility for bringing the ruthless regime to power. ‘Well, don’t worry,’ she observes, ‘they’re coming to New York!’”

It seemed so impossibly prescient of Kushner. Had a work of art ever been so tightly bound up with politics and war?

Since then I’ve written time and again in this space about September 11th and all that came after. I’ve written about the 9/11 memorial and its attendant controversy. I’ve written about the Dixie Chicks’ public proclamation of shame in their president. I’ve written about the efforts of playwrights like David Hare to make sense of the Bush administration, and the efforts of pop stars like Bruce Springsteen to defeat it.

I wrote about the first play produced in Iraq after Saddam’s fall, and about the ancient artworks plundered from the country’s National Museum while the fighting still raged.

This is my final ArtsLine column, and I write it with a deep awareness that the world of the arts is never at a far remove from the worlds of politics, and commerce, and sometimes even war.

Brother Can You Spare (Yet Another) Dime?

If there has been another constant in this column, it has been the lack of enough money to make art. This season is no exception. The New York papers are full of stories about how hard it is to get a play on Broadway. (August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean almost didn’t make it, and he’s August Wilson.) Meanwhile the Toronto Star has explained how the famed Stratford Festival is stumbling: “Attendance continues to fall, dropping nearly 40,000 compared with the previous season,” wrote Robert Crew on Dec. 8. “Average paid attendance at the Festival’s four theatres was 68 percent of capacity.”

Add these to the ledger of stories we’ve seen, over and over again, about struggling arts institutions and failing arts institutions. This year, though, we saw a couple of bright spots—like Boston, where, in March, the Herald got to report on a theatre building boom. Similar deal in Washington, D.C., where a bunch of theatres are adding seats and looking to the far suburbs: “We’re going to pay special attention to the way we market ourselves to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Charlotte,” one optimist told the Washington Post. “Those are communities where people find it relatively easy to get to Washington.”

That’s the spirit.

But Where’s “The Humpty Dance?”

Most of the music stories this year had to do with either pop stars railing against Bush, or record companies trying to protect their copyright. We’ll end with a story about an artist who at this juncture in his career seems weirdly apolitical—but who once wrote some of the most political songs in the world.

Bob Dylan got mixed reviews for his appearance on 60 Minutes on Sunday Dec. 5. Dana Stevens at Slate.com thought Dylan dull and the interview perfunctory, noting that “Dylan’s new autobiography, ‘Chronicles: Volume One,’ is published by Simon and Schuster, which, like CBS, is owned by Viacom.” She wondered if “this uninspired interview [was] just another compulsory stop on the press junket?”

Randy McMullen in the Contra Costa Times had similar suspicions: “You come away from the interview dissatisfied and wondering what Dylan’s really all about, and you find yourself thinking ‘Hmmm ... maybe I should buy his new autobiography ...?’”

I would defend Dylan from these slanders…only, the guy did do a Victoria’s Secret commercial this year.

In other Dylan news, his song “Like a Rolling Stone” was named number one in Rolling Stone magazine’s sort of silly 500 Greatest Songs issue. Why silly? For one thing, the sidebar listing Brian Wilson’s personal 10 favorite songs included five Brian Wilson songs.

The Rolling Stone issue actually got a lot of press, for what was essentially an arbitrary list of some famous people’s favorite songs. Reuters clearly had some intern comb through the issue for stats; the news service carefully explained, “The lion’s share of songs from the list hail from the 1960s, and only a handful were released after 1990, including Nirvana’s 1991 hit ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ at No. 9.”

The most recent song to make the list, by the way, was “Hey Ya!” by Outkast.

Full Circle

The Christian Science Monitor reported in its Nov. 26 edition about a theatre festival in Kabul, Afghanistan that “will include a play written by a woman (a teenage schoolgirl, to be precise), with real actresses, about the brutal suppression of women under the country’s now-ousted Taliban government.”

Indeed, the national theatre festival—the country’s first ever— “devotes a day to ‘women’s theatre’ which challenges Islamic fundamentalists who would block women’s ascent to the stage—not to mention school, jobs, and other aspects of civic life.” The author of the article, Maseeh Rahman, details the history of theatre in Afghanistan, from “storytellers enacting religious myths and legends,” through “the first production, about 1920…of a patriotic play…performed in the royal garden retreat of Paghman.” The Taliban, of course, did not permit theatre, and “the bombed-out hulk of Kabul’s National Theatre stands as stark testimony to the assault on Afghan culture during the mujahideen civil war.”

Rahman stresses what a breakthrough it is now to see theatre, and especially theatre by women, in Kabul. “To those who support this flowering of Afghan theatre,” she writes, “drama is an effective way to spread the message of a modern, democratic Afghanistan.”

Kushner, no doubt, saw all this coming.

Closing Lines

Over many years I have thoroughly enjoyed my association with PerformInk and with Carrie Kaufman. My sincere thanks and best wishes go to her, and to all of you.

We’d like to thank Ben for four years of great writing. He added a wry and witty voice to PerformInk and we will miss it. Good luck and enjoy a very bright future.

-Nicole Bernardi-Reis.

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