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Sunday, March 30, 2003
Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy
Shakespeare's Henry IV, fearing the people's perception of his reign as illegitimate, advises his slacker son, Prince Hal, to direct the public's attention elsewhere.
"I had a purpose now to lead out many to the Holy Land, lest rest and lying still might make them look too near my state. Therefore," says the old politician to his drunken, frat-boy son, "(let) it be thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."
Ashamed of the boy who carouses with Falstaff and friends, Henry nonetheless educates his unlikely heir in Realpolitik. The kid converts, dumps his party animal pals, and becomes "the mirror of a Christian king." Newly crowned, he takes his dad's advice. We meet him in "Henry V," seeking support for war from his financially needy advisers. Then, careful to distinguish the manly English from the effeminate French, he invades France.
Shakespeare's evergreen history plays – always equivocal about the uses of power and lately subject to darkly ironic readings – parallel recent American events so closely it's eerie. But Shakespeare wrote nearly 200 years after Henry the elder's death in 1413, dramatizing this Lancastrian family ambition when Elizabeth I was securely on the throne.
Today's playwrights aren't waiting. Living in democracies where heads aren't supposed to roll for art, they're bolder than the Bard, quicker with the mighty pen.
Tony Kushner struck a week before the American bombs rained down on Iraq, publishing the first scene of his bleakly exuberant new play about a baffled Laura Bush sweetly reading to Iraqi children. Iraqi children in their dear little pajamas – dead Iraqi children.
Kushner won every theater award in the known universe for his dazzling two-parter "Angels in America" (1993), about the state of the nation during the Reagan era and the age of AIDS. His most memorable creation was Shakespearean in dimension: the closeted, red-baiting attorney, Roy Cohn. Kushner next proved prescient months before Sept. 11 with his "Homebody/Kabul," about a curious Englishwoman dismembered in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Now, in his "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," First Lady Laura Bush arrives in heaven (or is it?) to read to the children. Well-meaning and innocent, though clueless as to who she actually married, the former librarian asks questions to the young ones seated around her. Being souls, they cannot answer. But an angel interprets.
One died in 1991 when a smart bomb mistook a shelter for a nuclear plant, the angels tells her. Another from dysentery when a bomb polluted the water near a cement factory. And so on.
The first lady responds with a long monologue about her favorite writer, Dostoevski, her favorite novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," and her very favorite scene – the harrowing Grand Inquisitor sequence. It's a little advanced, this scene, for the children, but being dead, she thinks, perhaps they "command a broader view."
She says she was already miffed at Bushie for teasing her and for going to bed so very early every night. And now, for staining her conscience with the blood of these children, which not "all the perfumes of Araby" can wash away. In a final turn-the-tables passage of "Exorcist"-like horror, she begins to fear that the messianic leader and liberator of Iraq, her husband, may actually be what she thought Saddam was – Satan.
No word on when the entire play will be premiered. But Kushner has made the first scene available free for readings or performances. Permission "will be happily granted," he says, at MysteryGuardians@aol.com.
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