Un-Conventional Reception
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Zzzzzzzz… The low rumble you hear echoing around Manhattan is the collective snore from last week’s festivities. After all the predictions of chaos and dismay, the Republican National Convention came off with few hitches, aside from the infringement of a civil liberty here and there. Even the city’s theaters, which entered the week with a bulls-eye around their collective necks, escaped disaster.
The show, as it must, went on. Before the convention, actors grumbled about performing for audiences full of GOP delegates at a Sunday matinee. Their union, Actors Equity, pointed out certain relevant clauses in their contracts. By all indications, everybody showed up on time.
Protesters, too, threatened calamity. “This is a call to all corners of America to DISRUPT their merry-making and TAKE OVER BROADWAY!” read one online protest notice. It conjured visions of scenes from “Les Miserables” spilling onto 45th Street. But a stroll through the Theater District on Sunday afternoon, when the delegates were attending eight Broadway shows, revealed some commotion but no serious disruptions.
On one side of 44th Street, a long line of primly dressed people – tourists, by the looks of them – queued up outside the Majestic; on the other, a dishabille crowd – locals, I’d wager – gaped, shouted a little, and generally wondered what all those people were doing at “Phantom of the Opera”; in short, not so different from any matinee afternoon.
As for the performances themselves, who can say? Convention planners went out of their way to pick the most anodyne shows in New York. To be fair, it asks a bit much to expect delegates to be sent to Tony Kushner’s provocative Laura Bush play, “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy” or Tracy Letts’s radically unnerving “Bug.”
What’s most upsetting is that Broadway makes it so easy to satisfy this craving for milquetoast. I bet it was easier to find eight Broadway shows that would offend or disturb absolutely nobody than to find eight Hollywood movies that could do the same. “Benji: Off the Leash!,” anybody? As far as I know, there was neither mental exertion nor physical discomfort at any of the eight musicals – though countless head and neck injuries could have been sustained by nodding off midshow.
The real pain and suffering was inflicted upon the Theater District itself. Broadway producers seem to have had a bad week of world-historic proportions. And the total fallout is always much worse than the raw box-office numbers, as you have to factor in the lost revenue for the restaurants, gift shops, and other businesses that cater to theater audiences. On a good night, a crowd the size of a small city flows in and out of Broadway. Last week it was cops and tumbleweeds.
Down at the Garden, the delegates were still taking in a kind of theater, of course. The convention itself was a grand pageant of political showmanship. Each night’s program contained ritual elements: the invocations, anthems, presentation of colors, roll call of states. But last week, as at all modern conventions, this was the veneer of ritual without its guts. With its fake news reports and gauzy videos, the convention functioned as a long-form commercial, a megaphone for certainties. (The Democrats, in Boston, were scarcely more lively.) If the delegates found themselves feeling antsy and unengaged, it may be because they were treated as props, not co-stars; onlookers instead of the collaborators they should be.
Though they might disagree about everything else, the delegates could find sympathy on this score among New York theatergoers, who are long accustomed to those sensations. Like the political conventions, theater suffers its own lack of the spirit of ’76, the year that Gerald Ford barely edged Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination – a drama played out during the convention itself, with every vote and argument vitally necessary.
The election season has seen plenty of overtly political shows, from Mr. Kushner’s play about the First Lady reading Dostoevsky to dead Iraqi children (a marvelously subtle character study with plenty to challenge both sides), to political tirades with titles too puerile to print here. The trend continues in the next few weeks. Beginning next Tuesday night, the Zipper presents “Campaign ’04 Unzipped.” Hosted by Judy Gold, the show will wrap the news of the week into a comic revue, plus stand-up comedy and song. The finale comes on election night, which is billed as “a 24-hour celebration of democracy in America.”
Even more promising is a new coproduction from the estimable Naked Angels and the Culture Project. Opening September 14, “DEMOCRACY, you never know what you’re going to get” is a rotating program of plays and music about the political process. Contributors include the playwrights Kenneth Lonergan, Theresa Rebeck, and Warren Leight. The program also features a post-show Q&A, moderated by someone from the world of arts, politics, or academia. The moderators announced so far include former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, and Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley.
There’s a distinct leftward tilt to the Naked Angels list, and I find it hard to imagine that Mayor Giuliani will reprise his gleeful convention performance at the Zipper. Still, here’s hoping the shows will challenge an orthodoxy or two, and not just stoke partisan tempers – that they’ll be more Tony Kushner than Zell Miller. Politics and theater alike could use it.