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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: This way out

October 10, 2003 by Terry Teachout

Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview
with playwright Tony Kushner, published in Seattle Weekly:

How important is it to be political in the arts right now?


You can’t find any important work of American art, in theater or anywhere else, that doesn’t have a very powerful political dimension. [But] whatever you do with your day job–and writing plays is what I do–is no replacement for activism, which is a necessary part of being a citizen in a democracy. And not to be foolish and think that writing a political play is going to do it, because there’s only one thing that does it–organizing and voting and demonstrating and fund-raising and e-mailing and joining groups. Art is not [it]. I mean, I admire theater groups that mobilized around the antiwar effort, but I don’t think that’s essential, and it can be incredibly misleading because you wind up with everybody getting up and doing sort of a performance piece about the war. What we really have to be doing now is organizing people to get out and vote for the candidate that the Democratic party nominates for president. It’s the one thing that counts right now. And nothing else does.

I’m sure Kushner believes every word of this. But…all important American art is political? Really and truly?


Rather than belabor the blindingly obvious (though I can’t help but wonder whether Kushner is tone-deaf), I want to share another quote from you. As I was proofreading the Teachout Reader, I came across something John Sayles once told an interviewer. It struck me so forcibly that I made a point of including it in an essay I wrote last year about Sayles’ film Sunshine State. Asked why so few American directors make politically conscious movies, he replied:

It’s easier not to, and sometimes it’s really not the point of a movie. Sometimes it would really get in the way. I think more than being political or not political, it’s often the problem of being complex: The characters aren’t heroic. Sometimes they do things you don’t like, even if you may like them, and it’s hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised. And if you put that into your average adventure movie, it makes it complicated in ways that slow the movie down and really aren’t appropriate for that particular movie.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why I love John Sayles’ movies and don’t much care for Tony Kushner’s plays, even though I doubt that Sayles’ politics are noticeably different from Kushner’s.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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