 |
SwiftVets.com
Service to Country
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
|
 Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2005 4:44 pm Post subject: Free speech—or Un-American? |
 |
|
Whaaaaat!!!!! This is so sick!!!
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=69271
| Quote: | Free speech—or un-American?
Bay State town goes to war with H’wood
By Jessica Fargen
Friday, February 18, 2005
A controversial play with an Oscar-winning actress portraying Laura Bush reading to dead Iraqi children will go on despite a local official blasting the show as ``anti-American propaganda.''
``I'm not an anti-free speech nut,'' said Bill Donovan, a North Adams city councilor who was outraged that the Tony Kushner play was being held at the C-T Plunkett Elementary School in Adams. The play is not school-sponsored.
``The play (implies) over and over that the American military fighting the war on terror are baby murderers. That's what I object to,'' said Donovan, whose son is serving in Afghanistan.
The play - ``Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy'' - stars actress Marcia Gay Harden, who also starred in Kushner's Broadway production of ``Angels in America'' and in the Boston-filmed movie ``Mystic River.''
Caryn Heilman, co-founder of the Topia Arts Center in Adams, which is putting on the show, welcomed the discourse on the ``procovative'' play.
``It's wonderful the play is beginning to be noticed,'' she said. ``This is exactly what Tony Kushner is looking to do is to provoke dialogue.''
The 30-minute performance is followed by a 30-minute discussion. Donovan said he objected to the play's content and that it was being put on in a public venue. He asked the Adams-Cheshire School District to bar the play, but they declined.
The superintendent was unavailable for comment.
The center, which is raising money to revive the Adams Theater, paid a $200 rental fee for the 500-seat auditorium.
Heilman defended the play. ``This is one type of art that is an important part of the American fabric. It's very good that dialogue is beginning,'' she said.
In the play, the first lady reads to dead Iraqi children and ``goes through complex emotions,'' about the war, Heilman said. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
|
| Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2005 4:56 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Communist propaganda 101. Just remember when the radicals find useful idiots such as this actress they are just that, useful idiots.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
|
| Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2005 5:29 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I found this Byron York article from last September with some of the dialog of the play.
Apparently. the author is short on historical fact. President Bush and Laura
were not in the White House in the 1999 bombing of the factory.
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200409021027.asp
| Quote: | September 02, 2004, 10:27 a.m.
Laura and Her Killer Bushie
Playwright Tony Kushner’s Iraq Bush-family fantasy.
New York, N.Y. — "No one wanted you dead! Oh God no, I mean God no, what sort of animal would want that? No, it's a terrible sin and I'm sure we'll all have to pay for it, me and Bushie and — I call him Bushie, my husband."
The actress Holly Hunter, wearing jeans, an anti-Bush t-shirt, and speaking with a broad southern accent, was playing First Lady Laura Bush in “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy,” a "work in progress" by the playwright Tony Kushner. The reading of the unfinished play, at the New York Theatre Workshop, a 250-seat room in the East Village, was billed as part of the creative community's response to the Republican National Convention. So on Wednesday night, as Vice President Dick Cheney was preparing to address the convention, the theater was packed — organizers had to turn people away — as Hunter, playing Mrs. Bush, addressed a group of Iraqi children.
At the beginning of the play, as she is preparing to read to the children, Mrs. Bush notices they are all wearing pajamas. Why is that?, she wants to know.
"I was about to explain," says an angel, played by the Sex in the City actress Cynthia Nixon. "In Paradise, all dead children wear pajamas."
It turns out the First Lady is in fact speaking to the ghosts of Iraqi children killed by American bombs and missiles. "You are the first Iraqi children I've met and you look real sweet in your PJs," she says. "And I'm sorry you're dead, but all children love books...How did you die, darling?"
In 1999, the angel explains, an American bomb hit a power station that supplied electricity for a village water-purification system. With no clean water, the child contracted a vicious intestinal parasite. "He died of dehydration, s***ting water, then blood, then water again, so much!" the angel says.
"That's really awful," says Mrs. Bush.
"Yes," says the angel.
"Saddam Hussein is a terrible man."
At that point, the East Village audience laughed at Mrs. Bush's southern-accented wrong-headedness. And then the First Lady explains to the children why they had to die.
"What can I say to you?" she says. "Oh how can I say this? It isn't right that you should have had to die because your country is run by an evil man who is accumulating weapons of mass destruction. But he is, you see, he really is, everyone knows this and he will kill many, many other children all over the world if he isn't stopped. So, so it was um, necessary for you to die, sweetie, oh how awful to say that, but it was, precious."
As the play goes on, however, Mrs. Bush becomes increasingly distressed by the children’s deaths — and the brutality of her husband's acts, both in Texas and the White House. She tells the children about her favorite author, Dostoyevsky, and how he narrowly escaped execution. "If my husband had been in charge back then, Dostoyevsky would've been dead for sure," she says. "My husband, he executed everyone they told him to, everyone they let him, I should say, my God, a hundred-and-something people and he never even missed his early, early bedtime, nor for that matter, from what I could see as I sat up reading and rereading Dostoyevsky, ever even stirred in his sleep!"
Finally, she concedes: "I think there is guilt when a child dies, even if the death was in a just cause, and one person's guilt is for everyone," she says. "We suffer that guilt, me and Bushie and Poppy and Bar and the U.N. Security Council." (At another point, she refers to "Bushie, or as I sometimes call him, the Chimp. You know, those ears." The crowd loved it.)
Kushner wrote the scene during the run-up to the war in 2003; it was published in The Nation in March of that year. Since then, it has been staged at a number of anti-Bush events, most recently a few weeks ago in New York as part of a fundraiser for the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org. On Wednesday, Hunter and Nixon read a second scene as well, written recently by Kushner.
In that scene, Hunter played Kushner himself, while Nixon played Mrs. Bush. As it begins, the First Lady critiques the first act, saying, "I didn't like your skit very much."
Kushner had mentioned the time the president once joked that his wife was "the lump in the bed next to me" when he arrived at home very late at night. "You make rude remarks about my private intimate life with my husband," Mrs. Bush told Kushner. "You're sort of a weird combination of filthy-minded and Victorian, not to mention — "
"So I guess my point is — " Kushner interrupts.
"Yes?" Bush says.
"That we're all like you. That we're all being f***ed by your husband."
In notes accompanying the performance, James Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, decried what he called the "sometimes overheated rhetoric" that is being heard during "this impassioned political season, and most particularly as the Republicans gather in our city." Nicola wrote that the production of “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy” was "our own small attempt to restore a considered thoughtfulness to the public discourse."
Kushner's play was the first act of the night's bill. The second was anti-Bush author Mark Crispin Miller's two-man play Patriot Act: A Public Meditation, in which Miller warned the crowd that the Bush administration is simply a front for "a movement that is dedicated to the transformation of the United States into a theocracy." If the Bush movement succeeds, Miller said, the U.S. will see the "replacement of the Constitution by the first five books of the Old Testament," under which citizens will face the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, and premarital sex.
After the performance, organizers handed out a list of websites, including democrats.com, **, and moveon.org, for audience members who wanted to learn more about the issues involved. The production was part of a larger project called the Imagine Festival, a loosely organized series of hundreds of events across the city that organizers say is designed to "use art, not politics or protest, to confront the critical issues facing the nation" during the Republican National Convention.
* * * |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
