The Arts Are Messy, And That's a Good Thing

So, apparently several members of a touring company of Les Misérables scheduled to perform at the Kennedy Center on June 11 have decided to boycott that performance rather than participate in what CNN calls a “high-dollar fundraiser” for the Center with President Trump in attendance.

The cast was apparently given the option of sitting out that performance, and about a dozen of them decided not to go on.  Exactly who gave them the choice and under what circumstances is unclear.

Naturally, Kennedy Center director Richard Grenell, yet another spectacularly unqualified but heartily sycophantic Trump appointee, got in a tizzy about that, declaring those actors “vapid and intolerant,” while delivering banalities that neither he not his boss believe about spectators of different political perspectives enjoying a show together.  Grenell appears to be incapable of independent thought, at least in his public pronouncements, so we can assume that he was sent out by Trump to spin the story.  Whether, as well-known theatre wag Howard Sherman suggests in a Facebook post, 47 is “completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself” may be a matter of opinion, there is no doubt that there’s a fair bit of irony present.

The CNN article also refers to Trump’s February post, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST,” (yes, it was in all caps, because Trump is incapable of using an inside voice) while casually neglecting the inherent censorship involved in that proclamation and the fact that the single show in question was about as innocuous as it could possibly be, the drag queen in question behaving very much like a panto dame.  So much for the “leftist” press.

OK, let’s tease this out a little in as objective a manner as possible.  Chris Peterson’s double-header posts on the OnStageBlog site, first about the cast members’ announcement and later about Grenell’s response, were, to steal his phrase, “gloriously on brand.”  The actors are to be praised for being “rare and gutsy,” “putting their values before the stage lights,” and “principled,” and a host of other epithets.

Yeah, no.  The actors are quite likely (not necessarily, but probably) a gaggle of petulant virtue-signalers who think that not fulfilling the terms of their contracts and refusing to perform at a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center somehow makes them righteous.  It does not.  They’re risking little if anything: Grenell’s threats are similarly puerile and almost certainly meaningless, unless we really are headed for another McCarthy/HUAC era witch hunt, in which case those actors would likely be blackballed whether they perform next month or not.

Curmie strongly suspects that if the performers’ identities are indeed ever known, they’ll get more rather than fewer gigs in the future: theatre producers (and audiences!) are, in general, a rather liberal lot, and whereas actors’ notoriety may not be quite the same as fame, it’s still good for box office. 

Yes, productions at the Kennedy Center are likely to be (stealing Grenell’s phrase here) “vapid and intolerant” at least until Trump is no longer calling the shots, and there are those, as a Friend of Curmie recently posted on Facebook, who would rather see the Kennedy Center burned to the ground than turned over to the Emperor of Trumpistan.  But it is impossible to praise the US Army Chorus for their in-your-face rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing” (as Curmie did) and also commend these folks for refusing to do so.

Is this a tempest in a teapot, then?  Taken in isolation, yes.  Both the actors and the Kennedy Center brass behaved utterly predictably, and neither looked good in the process.  It’s almost as if the arts were… you know… messy.

Curmie remains baffled, however, by the apparent belief that art is somehow apolitical.  Check out that image at the top of this post, Gentle Reader.  You will, no doubt, recognize it as one of the most famous paintings by Pablo Picasso.  (Curmie was visited as soon as he typed that sentence by the ghost of René Magritte proclaiming “Ceci n’est pas une peinture,” but you know what I mean.)  It is impossible to believe that “Guernica” doesn’t have a potent political message.  There’s a famous story that a Gestapo officer had barged into Picasso’s apartment, pointed at the painting, and demanded “Did you do this?”  The painter responded, “No, you did.”  Even if, as one might reasonably suspect, that anecdote is apocryphal, it rings true.  And if it’s fiction, it’s something of a work of art in its own right.

Ask Curmie what his favorite movie of all time is, and he’ll probably respond with either “Le Roi de Cœur” (“The King of Hearts”) or “Casablanca.”  Both are set in times of war: WWI and WWII, respectively.  At the end of the former, the denizens of the local insane asylum, having been released into the town, witness the deaths of dozens of opposing soldiers, then solemnly return to the relative sanity of the asylum.  Our hero, Private Plumpick (Alan Bates) climbs aboard a troop transport truck to head back to his unit… but then jumps off outside the asylum, strips naked, and rings the bell to enter, carrying only a cage with his beloved carrier pigeon. 

Curmie’s favorite sequence in “Casablanca” is the one in which Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) tells the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” to drown out the Nazi officers who are singing the German anthem “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”).  Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) nods his acquiescence, the band plays, and everyone in the bar joins in.  (Apologies that I was unable to find a clip without a commercial.)  It is a triumphant moment, and everyone who sees it—well, maybe not Elon Musk, but everyone else—is uplifted, even if only briefly. 

Of course, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) has to shut down the bar in response.  His pretext, that he is “shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here.”  This moment, of course, is immediately followed by collecting his winnings. 

OK, Gentle Reader, does anyone want to argue that those films aren’t politically loaded? 

Curmie has argued for decades that the Dionysian Festival in Ancient Athens was founded more to consolidate the power of the tyrant Peisistratus than to celebrate a hitherto little-known demi-god.  Shakespeare’s dramaturgy changed when a female monarch died, to be replaced by a gynophobic one.  Expressionism in Germany and shingeki in Japan are unquestionably linked to socialist politics.  The list goes on.

Many artists throughout history have served at the pleasure of the politically powerful.  Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were all court musicians.  In theatre, Shakespeare, Racine, Calderón, and Zeami all received royal patronage.  But there were those who worked against the power structure: Euripides self-exiled from Athens; the plays of Václav Havel and Gao Xingjian were outlawed in their homelands; Athol Fugard was an outspoken critic of apartheid while that policy was still in place.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to agree with an artist’s point of view to appreciate the work.  You needn’t be Hindu to like The Recognition of Shakuntala, Buddhist to be engaged by The Lady Aoi, or Christian to enjoy The Second Shepherds Play.  And you certainly don’t have to believe in Apollo or Athena to treasure The Oresteia.

Things get a little messier when we talk about political perspective.  You can appreciate the artistry of “Birth of a Nation,” “The Battleship Potemkin,” or “The Triumph of the Will” without being a racist, a Communist, or a Nazi, but there’s friction, nonetheless.  That’s OK. 

We also need to understand that the same theatre artist can enjoy working on the plays of Shakespeare or Racine, which never contemplate even the possibility of a political structure other than monarchy, and also on plays by Bertolt Brecht or Lillian Hellman, who were Communists… and for the same spectator to enjoy them all, as well.

Performing before an audience, or even an audience member, you don’t want to perform for… that’s a different matter.  Should you take that lucrative gig in Russia or Saudi Arabia or China that you suspect will be used for propaganda purposes? 

Curmie is reminded of Dusty Springfield’s abortive tour of South Africa in 1964.  The British singer had apparently sneaked a clause into her contract that she would not perform for segregated audiences; the authorities were not amused.  She was de facto deported for her stance.  As a dear friend of Curmie wrote about the incident when posting about it on Facebook a few years ago, “Sometimes you don’t know who the punk rockers are until it’s punk rock time.”

How do we reasonably analyze the current kerfuffle?  Here’s Curmie’s take: if you’ve got a contract to do a show and you fake an illness or something to get out of a particular date, whatever your reasons, that’s unethical.  But if you’re given a choice of whether to go on or not, you damned well ought to be able to make your own decision. 

Would Curmie boycott the show?  Anyone who’s ever heard Curmie sing will know he’ll never have to make that call about being in a musical.  But yeah, it would take some cogitation.  Are you performing for President Trump or for President Trump, who really is in a separate category from literally anyone else ever to hold that office?  This is not a black and white scenario.  The question is about what shade of grey we’re talking about.