Opening Remarks by Tony Kushner at 'Broadway Stands Up For Civil Liberties' NYCLU Benefit

July 17, 2007

     Hello everyone, and thanks for coming to Broadway Stands Up For Civil Liberties, or as I like to think of it, Show Queens Sit Down For Civil Liberties.

     As you've probably read, George W. Bush has been whiling away his lonely hours recently in deep, deep conversation with philosophers and scholars and historians he's invited to the White House, or to the ranch; together they ponder the larger mysteries, like: why does everyone hate me? Why doesn't Jesus make the Iraqis do what I tell them to? What the heck is a stem cell, anyway? How come Dick let those jerks take over the Congress when he promised me they never would, and how come my Supreme Court justices can't fix that mess up for me they way they did in the 2000 Presidential election? After I'm done being President, am I gonna have to keep on reading biographies of other presidents and news summaries or can I stop, since all that lip moving is giving me mouth cramps? And since I'm almost done here anyway and they tell me I can't run for anything else, would it be OK, when I get back to Crawford to stay, do you think anyone would mind if I, you know, kick back and snort a little coke now and then? And how come Jerry Falwell doesn't call me up anymore like he used to?

     Since he's President of the United States, Bush can summon to the White House any philosopher, scholar or historian he wants -- Midge Dechter, Dr. Phil, Camille Paglia, Tim Hardaway, Cardinal Bernard Henry Law, Ed Koch, Al D'Amato, the nun who was Clarence Thomas's first grade teacher, and, on any day other than Tuesdays, Morrie. Given the talent available to him, imagine my surprise when, last week, my cellphone rang and I was summoned to the White House for a late night talk! Who knew W was into theater?

     It was great. I felt like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy. There I was, in the Oval Office, just me and the President and the Secret Service and a big bowl of pretzels between us. Maybe it was the bowl of pretzels that made me nervous, since I remember W has had his troubles swallowing those, or maybe it was not knowing what sort of difficult, searching questions he was going to ask me. I'm only a playwright, after all.

     But I needn't have worried. We talked about Christine Ebersoll and Isherwood's review of Xanadu and, you know, like that. We argued about whether John Doyle's approach worked better for Sweeney Todd or for Company, and how gay is Bobby supposed to be, and how much we both love Raul. We sang as much as we could remember of "Being Alive," it was like open mic night at Don't Tell Mama, and you know, W has a lovely voice, a surprisingly high tenor, he's a bit pitchy but very expressive. He said Laura's really looking forward to Patti Lupone in Gypsy, but for W, Bernadette Peters was the definitive Mama Rose. I asked if Condi Rice had enjoyed Spamalot, which I remembered she'd been attending while Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans. He said she'd liked it a lot, but she'd spent the day schlepping around those bags of new shoes, so she was maybe a little tired.

     It was totally awesome, just me and the most powerful man on the planet, taking a break from his grueling job, spreading democracy around the globe, protecting us and our liberties from terror, defending the tax cuts that will make America a fairer place, guarding against the spread of big government, blocking creeping socialism in the guise of a national health care system, keeping America competitive by resisting the hysterical scientists and Al Gore and other peddlars of junk science who want to take our cars away and hobble our industry and slow our economy down, standing up for the rights of the unborn, championing the sanctity of marriage, making sure no child is left behind, well I could go on and on, I mean, I haven't even mentioned the spectacular progress we've made in the middle east and please don't get me started on the war! The world hasn't seen such brilliant, honorable, farsighted executive management since, since Garth Drabinsky! And there he was and here I was, talking about how exciting it was when Mary Louise Wilson took home the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.

     Then W asked the question he'd invited me to answer, the question that had clearly been gnawing at him. Why, he wanted to know, and it's bothered him for as long as he can remember, has the Broadway musical always, always pushed a liberal agenda, what is it about musical theater stars that make them such rarities in right wing and Republican circles, so much more likely to come out to do a benefit in support of the NYCLU than, you know, a benefit for the NRA or Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth? Actually the President didn't say "a benefit in support of the NYCLU," he said "a benefit in support of the WNYCLUF of O," but I think I know what he meant. What's going on, he asked me, why do all the great musicals seem to be about sex, love, tolerance, mopey weirdos and poor people and misfits and people being sad about things? Why aren't there more musicals about, you know, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes and theocrats, why aren't there more musicals about people who own sports teams, or who sit on the board of Halliburton, about the people whose incomes rate in the top .01 percent, why aren't there songs about how swell it would be to kill the capitol gains tax, or about how lonesome Alberto Gonzales feels right now, or Karl Rove -- he's a bachelor, you know -- why aren't there musicals celebrating things like waterboarding and rendition, snowmobiles in national parks, assault weapons on college campuses, walls along the Texas border, the Supreme Court using Brown versus the Board of Education to guarantee segregated schools, Scooter Libby's commuted jail time and nuking Iran; why aren't there any Republican musicals? The Republican Party is for rich people, after all, and if you've looked at ticket prices recently, you'd know that the same is true for Broadway! We have so much in common; why does the American musical theater lean so decisively to the left? The NYCLU is interfering with the city's Ring of Steel plan to install surveillance cameras everywhere by insisting on things like supervision and accountability. Why would Broadway support any group that's against cameras? Don't all Broadway actors want to be on film?

     Indeed they do, I explained to the President, but I suspect that theater, like all art, is made by people, practiced by people who are led places by their joy rather than by their fear, and this is perhaps something theater lovers, art lovers, and democracy lovers share. Joy. And not the grim tight illusion of selfish safety that lovers of repression, lovers of out-of-control executive branches, lovers of torture and arbitrary arrests and the crushing of dissent, lovers of inequality, injustice and the silencing of free expression mistake for joy, but real joy, recognizable actual human exuberance, actual joy which requires actual human freedom and actual human courage -- actual freedom and courage, as opposed to out-of-control psychotic-anarchic belligerence oppression and bullying pretending to be freedom and courage -- but actual freedom and courage to follow, to find. Joy is an essential ingredient of art, and of democracy, it's the vitality that, as Sondheim has it, drives us to the difficult tasks, the hard work of putting it all together, step by step, law by law, civil liberty by civil liberty. In our resistance to repression, in our stubborn, insistent support of secular pluralist constitutional democracy, in our support of the essential guardians of our democracy, like the indispensable NYCLU, in this ongoing, unending and even often very very tough work, we express our joy. Joy isn't cheap or selfish or blind to the future, joy is civic and free, and that's why we're here, that's why Broadway Stands Up for the NYCLU.

     So that's what I told the President, and then W and I sang "Putting It Together" -- well I sang the words, he just sort of went "huh-huh-huh," he doesn't kknow the words, he says Sunday In the Park went way over his head.

     It's a joy for me to join you tonight, a joy to welcome you, and now it's a joy for me to get out of the way and let the splendid people who are waiting to come out and take the stage and entertain you, to reward you for supporting the New York Civil Liberties Union.

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