At The Playwrights Center Ubu Bake-Off, Paula Vogel and Jeremy B. Cohen (Photo by Whitney Rowland)

Four days ago, the US theatre community fostered the birth of more than 100 new short plays, on our federal holiday of Presidents’ Day. These were not, however, created in a spontaneous outpouring of national pride, but rather a coordinated – if entirely voluntary – effort that specifically sought to conflate the current presidency with Alfred Jarry’s absurdist and profane play Ubu Roi.

Held at nearly two dozen theatres and theatre-related organisations, the Ubu Bake Off was the brainchild of award-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who, please pardon the expression, cooked up the idea while musing on Facebook just five weeks ago. The interest from her Facebook friends and acolytes was immediate.

The Ubu Bake Off followed guidelines Vogel has previously used in her teaching career. It was an exercise designed to prompt people to quick, instinctive creativity, helped along by a 48-hour writing time limit, coupled with a five-page limit. Vogel also provides a set of ingredients, so that the resultant playlets are all variations on a theme.

For Monday, the ingredients included Pa Ubu 45 (supposedly 6ft 3ins, a trim 239 lbs, in “excellent health”, and, yes, the hair is his and real), angry ambassadors from every country that Pa Ubu has insulted, a strange use of the English language that sounds like it is supposed to be English (ie, words for ‘shit’ are prolonged like ‘pshitte’), covfefe, and a double-triple-quadruple-octahedral cheeseburger with special sauce.

Among the companies that participated were the Vineyard Theatre (a creative home for Vogel) and the New Ohio Theatre in New York; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (which Vogel attended), Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Antaeus Theatre in California. I even got into the act, hosting a small group under the auspices of my day job at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This decentralised, far-flung realisation of Vogel’s idea means that no one person saw, or even read, all of the one-act plays that emerged. Almost like carefully organised insurgent cells, each location, each playwright, was part of a larger whole, carrying out their own missions, not knowing what else might be happening for the benefit of the cause elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, we were secure in the knowledge that other partisans were fighting the good fight in the same manner at the same time.

In my little troupe, we read nine plays over two hours, with playwrights and actors joining to give voice to the texts brought into the room, none adjudicated in any way. The Playwrights’ Center deployed eight actors to read all of the plays – in this instance, an astounding 41 plays by 44 playwrights in an event that lasted more than five hours. No doubt the solutions were as varied as the locales.

Based on the circle at my office, and the plays read, the Bake Off inspired instant camaraderie (I had previously met only one of the participants). It was great fun, in the name of expressing frustrations with our present leadership, while concurrently paying homage to a literary classic. The low-pressure, everyone-is-welcome spirit also stripped away any sense of theatrical hierarchy or critical judgement. It even freed me to try my hand at playwriting for the first time in about 40 years.

But perhaps most importantly, Vogel’s inspiration and recipe yielded a great deal of work in a very short time, demonstrating that her educational tool offers a significant opportunity for involving many voices on the same subject.

Without the demands of rehearsal, staging, ticket sales and fundraising, Vogel’s Ubu Bake Off stripped theatre to its most rudimentary essentials, yielding experiences that were, if my own metaphorical kitchen was at all representative, unifying and cathartic. It certainly provides a model for rapid-response theatre applicable to almost any topic. I suspect we have more national Bake Offs in our future.

Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

This week, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins will have its first major New York performances since the 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production*, in a concert version as part of City Center Encores!’s Off-Center series. Given the controversy sparked last month by The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, in which Caesar and his wife were portrayed as analogues of Donald and Melania Trump, prompting the withdrawal of sponsors, sparking disruptions of performances and precipitating threats against the production, the theatre, the artists and the staff, it seemed an appropriate moment to speak with Weidman about how Assassins has been perceived over the past 26 years and how the newest incarnation might be received. Weidman, a former president of The Dramatists Guild, currently serves as president of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, founded to, according to the organization’s website, “advocate, educate and provide a new resource in defense of the First Amendment.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Howard Sherman: Given the state of discourse about public expression, given what happened with Julius Caesar in Central Park, it seems that putting up this show at this moment carries not necessarily more weight than other times, but that people may bring some other baggage to it in a different way they might have at other times. Back in 1991, it did not move to Broadway, the reason given being it wasn’t the right time, it was the first Gulf War, etc. Then there was the first planned Roundabout production, coming right after 9/11, when you and Steve and others felt it was not the right time to do the show. So is there ever a right time or ever a wrong time to do Assassins?

Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman

John Weidman: I don’t think there’s ever a wrong time to do it.  I think the reception of the first production was honestly more a function of the fact that people did not know what to expect when they came into to theater. They were not prepared for the shock value of the opening number, which was a deliberate choice on our part to kind of knock the audience off balance. I think that, 25 years ago, even though there had been many adventurous musicals that had been done, some people simply assumed that the musical theater was not an appropriate place in which to tackle material that was this fundamentally serious.  I think we’re well past that assumption at this point, given the kind of musicals that have been written in the last 25 years.

When the show was scheduled to be done at the Roundabout, and when we decided to delay the production after 9/11, that wasn’t a good time to do Assassins.  But it wasn’t because we thought people would find the show problematic, that they would resent a show about presidential assassins in that sudden new political moment.  In order to engage an audience, given the way the show’s designed and the way it’s written, it requires an audience which is, frankly, prepared to laugh in certain places, to take the humor on board.  That’s part of the roller coaster ride of the show.  We all felt that at that time, it was unfair to ask an audience which was grieving to come into a theater and to engage this kind of material in a way that was intermittently humorous. The show in that context simply wouldn’t work.  And If it wasn’t going to work, it made sense to delay the production.

As far as now goes?  When the show first opened, we had a conservative Republican in the White House, and then for eight years we had a centrist Democrat in the White House, and then for eight years we had a conservative Republican in the White House, and then we had a centrist Democrat who was black, and now we’ve got this guy.  The show’s been performed continuously over the course of those 25 years in all kinds of different political and socioeconomic contexts.  This is just a different one.

That said, people will obviously come into the theater from a different place, because the world outside the theater is a different place. Which will affect the way in which the members of the audience take the show on board.

But I don’t think it makes it a particularly good or bad time to do Assassins.  Personally, I think it’s always a good time to do the show, because the  show is meant to be provocative, and hopefully people will walk out of the theater talking about it, that it will provoke the kinds of conversations that Steve and I hoped it would provoke when we wrote it.  That should happen now the way it’s happened with previous productions.  They may be different conversations, but that’s what I would hope would happen.

Sherman: Have you and Steve made any changes in the show since it was last seen in New York, since the 2004 Roundabout production?

Weidman: No. The text of the show that’s going to be performed at City Center is exactly the same as the text which was performed at the Roundabout. And the text at the Roundabout was exactly the same as the text that was performed at Playwrights Horizons with the exception of “Something Just Broke,” the song which we added in London. The show’s really been what it’s been since it was first performed 25 years ago.

The 2017 Yale Repertory Theatre production of “Assassins” (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sherman: Assassins was performed this spring at Yale Rep. Was there a difference in response to the show than for previous productions?

Weidman: You know, I was curious to see if there would be a difference in the way in which the show was received after the last election, and Yale was the first significant production that was available to me.  I didn’t feel, sitting in the audience, as if there was any kind of shift that I was aware of in terms of the way in which the audience was connecting to the material.

Sherman: Speaking to you both as an author of the piece, and also in your role with the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, it’s fair to say that there was some very heightened conversation, and actions around the Julius Caesar, admittedly by people who didn’t see it, didn’t take the time to understand it or understand its context. In the wake of that, are you concerned at all about how, not even the audience, but how people external to the audience might choose to speak about this piece?

Weidman: The word you used was concerned.  I’m not in any way worried about it.  At the same time, I’m sensitive to the possibility that in this current political climate, there will be people who will react to the idea of a musical about the people who tried to attack the President, that they will react to that in a way which is similar to the way in which some people reacted to the show in 1991, when they hadn’t seen it and weren’t going to see it.  They simply knew what the show was about, and they had a problem with that. That happened then and that could conceivably happen now.

I do think that we’ve had 25 years in which this show’s been performed a lot everywhere, and so people have a better idea of what the show’s ambitions are and what its intentions are.  I’ve got Google alerts set on my computer to Assassins, because I’m always curious to see how the show’s being received. The reviews tend to be really good, which is always nice, but the main thing is people writing about the show all over the country, in a variety of different kinds of publications, seem to understand what Steve and I were intending. That’s really reassuring. People get the show. They can like any show, they can like it a lot or not like it a lot. But they seem to understand what we were doing, and I assume that that will be the case this time around as well.

Sherman: In reading some of the press about the prior productions and some of the commentary, one of the ways in which the show is described is that it’s about, and I’m not quoting here, I’m paraphrasing, it’s about an America that causes people who feel they have no voice to take extreme actions. As we look at politics today, there are those who say that where we are is about people who felt they were disenfranchised from the political system, and that has brought us to the real polarization that we’re at now. Might that affect people’s perceptions?

Weidman: As Steve and I started to talk about this material 25 years ago, I realized at a certain point very early on that what drew me to the material was an attempt to explain something to myself which I had not understood since I was 17 years old when Kennedy was shot. The Kennedy assassination was my first real experience of loss and  it was devastating to me. Two of my friends and I got together and we went down to D.C. and stood on the sidewalk as the funeral cortege went by, and all the subsequent attempts to try make sense of what happened — conspiracy theories. Was it the Cubans, was it the CIA, the FBI?  It all seemed like, on some level, a waste of time to me. The fundamental question was: how could so much grief and pain be caused by one angry little man in a t-shirt with a rifle in Texas?

When Steve and I started to talk about these other personalities who had articulated a variety of wildly different motives for attacking the President, we said, ‘Well if we gather them together and look at them as a group’ – something which had not been done much, even by academics – ‘would some common grievance, some common complaint beyond what they articulated begin to emerge?  And if it did, that would be a useful thing to write about.’  That is at the heart of what the piece explores. The people who, with one or two exceptions, picked up guns did tend to be, when you look at them as a group, people who were operating on the margins,  the fringes of what we would consider a mainstream American experience.

In the last election, a lot of people who you and I would have identified as operating on the margins of a mainstream middle-class American experience, cast their votes in a particular way and elected a particular guy President. That does seem to suggest a different way of looking at the characters on stage in the show.  I’m not quite sure what the change is.  I’m not quite sure what it means in terms of how one observes their behavior and listens to what they have to say.  But we are in a different political moment, and that moment will undoubtedly have an impact on how the audience responds to the piece.

I do think it will probably make for conversations on the way out of the theater which will be different from the conversations people might have had five years ago or ten years ago.  I’m not sure if any of that’s clear. If it’s not, it’s because it’s something I’m still working through in my own head.

The 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production of “Assassins” (photo by Joan Marcus)

Sherman: Given that the run is sold out, if there is conversation about why this show at this time, and if people choose to try to politicize it, is there something you would like them to know beyond the simplistic plot descriptions of a marketing brochure or a PR release about the show?

Weidman: I have always felt that that it’s essential with this show that it be allowed to speak for itself.  It obviously can only speak to the audience that’s in the building, but that’s true of any theater piece.  You know, somebody can describe to you what Hamlet means, but if that’s all it took to appreciate Hamlet, then you wouldn’t have to waste time listening to Shakespeare’s language for three and a half hours. I think you need to experience the piece itself, and I think that’s true of this piece. That said, Assassins is an exploration of where these vicious acts came from, in an attempt to get a better handle on how to prevent them from happening again in the future.

Sherman: Speaking to your role with the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund: is there any sense that there has been a change in people wanting to assert their own prerogative over what happens on stage? Has that changed in the past six to eight months? Does DLDF have more concerns now than in the past, or is it just consistent with the kinds of challenges that you’ve faced?

Weidman: I’m not aware of any kind of seismic shift, in terms of what people are either attempting to repress or ways in which people are self-censoring, although it would be hard to know about the second one. It may be the decisions at the high school level, it may the decisions at the amateur level, but also at the stock level, that people are making more cautious decisions in terms of what they think a school board or parent body or a subscriber base is going to be comfortable with.  It’s entirely possible that they are shying away from things which they think are likely to be controversial.  I would obviously hope not, because this seems to me a period when it’s important for controversial material to be produced and to become part of the national conversation.

When DLDF gave an award last year to Jeffrey Seller, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Thomas Kail, and the cast of Hamilton for the speech that was made from the stage when Mike Pence was in the audience, I wrote the citation and I handed the award to Jeffrey. The point I wanted to make most forcefully was that Mike Pence apparently had stood there and listened and that was fine, but the President-elect the next morning had not only castigated the cast for being rude, but he had instructed them to apologize.  I said if censors tell artists what they’re not allowed to say – here we have someone going beyond that, instructing artists what they’re required to say.  The latter is a genuinely frightening prospect, and I wouldn’t have thought five years ago that it was something we had to be concerned about, but I think we all feel like we’re living in a new world where anything is possible and nothing is surprising.

* There was a one-night reunion concert of the 2012 cast, held as a benefit for Roundabout.

Does anyone remember last summer’s The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park? It opened with an entirely non-Shakespearean beauty pageant and talent show, led by a buffoonish figure costumed to look very much like a billionaire presidential candidate who has owned, and exploited, beauty pageants of his own. Coming in a production in which the entire cast was women, in a play that is widely considered to be misogynist in our era, it was a broad parody, a buffoonish portrayal of a political figure who had yet to consolidate his electoral power. But there was no mistaking that this was meant to be Donald J. Trump.

Now Trump is president and, by all accounts, he is once again on stage at The Public Theater’s Delacorte Theater—or rather Julius Caesar is on stage costumed to evoke the now-president, complete with a fashionable spouse who reportedly speaks in an Eastern European accent. Because Caesar is – as we all know – killed, the layering of present day politics in America over a 400-year old play (set even centuries) earlier is being said by some to have crossed a line. Lumped together with Kathy Griffin’s less classically oriented gory political theatre in which she posed with a bloody head, strongly implied to be that of the president, The Public’s Caesar quickly became a target for such media outlets as Breitbart and Fox News, even drawing a certain Donald Jr. into Twitter commentary.

“I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers?,” tweeted the presidential scion. “Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?” A Fox News tweet, headlined “NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of @POTUS,” was appended.

The tweet itself, for those inclined to look at such things analytically, undermined itself with its intellectual flabbiness. There is no hard line between art and politics, no absolute moment when one becomes the other. The Public Theater is hardly a stranger to melding the two, with shows ranging from Hair in the 1960s to Hamilton in 2015. It staged David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide. Always socially minded, it is at least as outspoken as ever under the leadership of Oskar Eustis, the proud and vocal product of a left-wing youth. Indeed, there has been very little at The Public during Eustis’s tenure that hasn’t been easy to examine through a political prism.

Yesterday, when pressure from Breitbart, from Fox, from the Trump family, reached a point when it may have seemed to them politically, corporately, and publicly untenable from a perceptual angle to underwrite (with many others) the production, Delta Airlines disavowed The Public, pulling their support from the theatre entirely. Bank of America followed suit, but somewhat more guardedly, only pulling their support of Caesar itself. In doing so, they gave the production – for which tickets are free – vastly more attention than it had already received. Even as theatre die-hards were focused on The Tony Awards, the story of the Trump-like Caesar exploded in the media.

In statements and tweets, Delta stuck to a singular sentiment:

No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values. Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste. We have notified them of our decision to end our sponsorship as the official airline of The Public Theater effective immediately.

Bank of America stated:

Bank of America supports arts programs worldwide, including an 11-year partnership with The Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in such a way that was intended to provoke and offend. Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it. We are withdrawing our funding for this production.

In a report for Deadline, Jeremy Gerard noted that the airline’s support fell in the $100,000 to $499,000 category of sponsorship; airline arts support typically takes the form of vouchers for flights or a bank of so much value that can be used to acquire tickets, though it’s possible that there was cash involved. Certainly, that’s the likely case with Bank of America, which like many corporations has philanthropic arms, though in recent years corporate philanthropy has become inextricably linked with marketing and public relations.

Does The Public have the absolute right to stage the works it chooses and in the manner it sees fit? Yes, it certainly does. It is an independent not-for-profit organization, and what it chooses to produce, to share with audiences, is entirely the responsibility of the staff and, by extension, the board of directors. Does it have an absolute right to sponsorship or donations from any particular organizations? No. That is the result of fundraising, of a cost benefit analysis on the part of any potential sponsor or donor. If they like the work, the mission, the initiatives, of The Public – or any arts organization – individuals, government sources, foundations and corporations may choose to support it.

But there’s no mistaking the actions of Delta and Bank of America as anything but political acts as well, cloaked in the guise of corporate sensitivity. While they have not said exactly what line has been crossed by Caesar, it doesn’t seem that it’s about blood or even gore. Shakespeare is filled with violence and its results, though typically in service of a larger message. But with their decision to publicly pull funding, and even sever a long relationship in the case of Delta, these corporations are saying to those who take offense at an obviously fictional portrayal of Julius Caesar as a Trump stand-in that they don’t countenance such things, that they are shocked, shocked to find politics on stage at The Public, even a mock assassination, and don’t want to be a part of it.

As a number of sources online have noted, Delta’s outrage seems rather selective. In 2012, The Guthrie Theatre and The Acting Company staged and toured a Julius Caesar with a slim black actor being “murdered” in the Senate as Caesar, midway through the Obama presidency. Some critics remarked on the parallel to the then-president, but Delta’s sponsorship there was unruffled. Why was the death of one presidential doppelganger OK while another crossed a line? I suspect the corporate PR department of Delta is unlikely to answer that question.

By pulling their support, have Delta and Bank of America censored Caesar and The Public? Are any First Amendment rights being trampled? On an absolute level – no. Media commentary cuts both ways. The participation of a member of the governing family, however, which has blended the personal and the political in countless ways, is the kernel of official censorship. Yet the show goes on (although it ends its brief run this week) and, so far as any reports have indicated, neither company attempted to get the production altered to make it more palatable to their tastes. Indeed, it’s unclear whether either company has had any representatives see Caesar in the park, or have made their decision, cloaked behind corporate statement, based solely on the media coverage.

Will there be a backlash to the actions of these companies? Will those who support The Public and free expression in the arts now make their feelings known to these companies, and others that might jump on the bandwagon? It’s very likely. It’s also possible that those who support these decisions will affirm it as well. People will refuse to fly Delta and keep their money with Bank of America, even as others will opt in to the carrier and the financial institution. Beyond merely expressing support and dissent, the era of dueling boycotts is probably upon us. Delta and B of A may find they have become the preferred outlets for the right and even the alt-right. By making this choice in their support, and withholding of support, of the arts, they have become politically-tinged corporations, aligned with a certain point of view.

The true danger here is that supporters of the arts will begin to interrogate possible beneficiaries of their intent for each and every undertaking, keeping funds from organizations and initiatives that might be aligning themselves politically by making any comment, right or left, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. After all B of A judges that the production set out to “provoke and offend.” No doubt Eustis wanted to provoke, that’s his stock in trade. But offend? That’s less clear.

Will the fear of media backlash force organizations to choose between commenting in any manner through their work on what the prevailing issues of the day may be and gaining public or private funds to do their work? Could this be the harbinger of a forced conservatism in the arts, because so many companies cannot survive without the infusion of donated funds?

It’s worth noting that the National Endowment for the Arts felt it necessary to make clear it had not supported The Public’s Julius Caesar:

The National Endowment for the Arts makes grants to nonprofit organizations for specific projects. In the past, the New York Shakespeare Festival has received project-based NEA grants to support performances of Shakespeare in the Park by the Public Theater. However, no NEA funds have been awarded to support this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar and there are no NEA funds supporting the New York State Council on the Arts’ grant to Public Theater or its performances.

The issue evolving with Caesar in Central Park is the canary in the coal mine, and an emblem of the potentially Faustian bargain one strikes when asking for major donations. Fortunately, The Public can sustain itself even with hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost support, but they are among the largest of theatres in the country. Indeed, they may take a page from the political playbook and raise new funds off of this action against their work. But smaller companies might not be so well positioned, resulting in a flight to safer work to avoid what has just happened. Strangely enough, it is the commercial theatre, which relies solely on ticket sales for revenue, which may be in the safer position to make political statements, as was the case with the cast of Hamilton sharing thoughts with Mike Pence. Their contract is directly with the audience, and if the work finds partisans for partisan messages, then the shows will run.

Vastly more people will hear about the Trumpian Caesar than can possibly see it. They will form opinions based on media accounts, and they can and will debate whether it’s right or wrong, proper or improper, wise or foolish to stage a show in which a presidential stand-in in killed, even in the context of a classic work, taught in many high schools, where few will be surprised by the emperor’s untimely end. But the actions of Delta and B of A, especially at a time when the administration in Washington has expressed a desire to shutter both the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, risk being the first steps in a new cultural McCarthyism. That serves no one who believes in free expression, whatever they have to say, no matter how ugly or difficult what they have to express may be to hear, no matter what their politics may be. Everyone should be concerned.

UPDATE: June 12, 2017, 5:30 pm: The Public Theater released a statement this afternoon in response to the controversy surrounding Julius Caesar. It reads, in full:

We stand completely behind our production of Julius Caesar. We recognize that our interpretation of the play has provoked heated discussion; audiences, sponsors and supporters have expressed varying viewpoints and opinions. Such discussion is exactly the goal of our civically-engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy. Our production of Julius Caesar in no way advocates violence towards anyone. Shakespeare’s play, and our production, make the opposite point: those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save. For over 400 years, Shakespeare’s play has told this story and we are proud to be telling it again in Central Park.

UPDATE: June 12, 2017, 7:00 pm: The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund has issued a statement of support for The Public Theater. It reads, in part:

Good taste is a matter of opinion and an “intention to provoke” may be an integral part of a play’s mission. The works of Shakespeare are replete with representations of regicide, and potentially objectionable and graphic violence of all sorts, but Delta doesn’t appear to have had a problem with the “values” or “taste” of such depictions before. The fact is that, for hundreds of years, this particular play has been understood to be a critique of political violence, not an endorsement of it.  As director Oskar Eustis explained, “Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.” So those criticizing this production for endorsing violence against President Trump seem to be willfully misinterpreting it, for their own political ends.

UPDATE: June 13, 2017, 8 am: From Oskar Eustis’s remarks before the opening night performance of Julius Caesar on June 12:

Julius Caesar warns about what happens when you try to preserve democracy by non-democratic means and again, spoiler alert, it doesn’t end up too good. But at the same time, one of the dangers that is unleashed by that is the danger of a large crowd of people manipulated by their emotions, taken over by leaders who urge them to do things that not only are against their interest, but destroy the very institutions that are there to serve and protect them. This warning is a warning that is in this show and we’re really happy to be playing that story for you tonight.

What I also want to say, and in this I speak, I am proud to say for The Public Theater past, present and I hope future, for the staff of The Public Theater, for the crews at The Public Theater, for the board of directors of the Public Theater, for Patrick Willingham and myself, when I say that we are here to uphold the Public’s mission, and The Public’s mission is to say that the culture belongs to everybody, needs to belong to everybody, to say that art has something to say about the great civic issues of our time and to say that like drama, democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view. Nobody owns the truth. We all own the culture.

The White House

There’s been a song running through my head for the past week, prompted by a series of press releases I’ve received. Anyone on a press list will tell you, notices from publicists flooding your inbox don’t normally move one to song.

The tune in question is “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” from Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. If you don’t know the song, it’s a cabaret number devised by the lead characters, spoofing the cultural array offered up by the Kennedy White House in the early 1960s. I’ve always been taken with the line, “We’ll have Bernstein play next on the Bechstein piano/And Auden read poems and stuff.” There’s lots of material like that.

The Sondheim wordplay is on my mind because there has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest by the Obama White House in recent weeks, though not remotely for the first time. Without being political or trumpeting national pride, I have to say this makes me rather happy.

A number of Broadway shows were in Washington DC on Monday to tape Broadway at the White House for broadcast next week by TLC, one of our countless cable channels, on our Thanksgiving holiday. It features Michelle Obama as a special guest, with performances from several Broadway shows including On Your Feet, An American in Paris (in poignant timing), School of Rock and Fun Home. On Wednesday, the White House hosted a livestream salute to the Americans With Disabilities Act in its 25th year, which included a performance by the cast of Spring Awakening, which reached Broadway after being developed by the company Deaf West in a tiny theatre in Los Angeles.

This is all on top of New York City’s traffic-stopping special performance of the musical Hamilton two weeks ago, with the Obamas in attendance, in a high-price-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event was widely known about and seen thanks to news reports about the president’s onstage remarks. And it’s worth noting that this was the second time the Obamas, who have visited Broadway regularly throughout his terms, have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s look at early US history (although Miranda’s alternate was on the first time they went).

Sondheim’s ribbing of the Kennedys notwithstanding, it’s incredibly affirming for every theatre geek in the country to know that the form of culture we participate in and love finds favour in the highest corridors of power. To be sure, some might make the charge that theatre is an elitist art if they’re trying to tear down the politicians who attend, but TLC wisely made the taping of their show part of a daylong event for students from arts programs in public schools around the country. Who can argue with that? As for Spring Awakening, the stream was free for all to see.

Diehards like me cling to moments when theatre is recognised by the wider culture. I’m happy to tell you that in the 1950s, the sitcom I Love Lucy sent Lucy and Ricky to Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, while more recently South Park featured Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a brilliantly absurdist episode. There is symbolic power in politicians sitting in the dark watching the performing arts live, because it’s going to reach some portions of the population who might just decide to check this stuff out for themselves.

As Broadway is showcased before our political leaders and donors, it’s worth noting that even though some of the aforementioned shows originated with subsidised companies, there’s a vast array of theatre that isn’t defined by commercial success. Maybe before leaving office the Obamas might stop in at one or more of those companies. Or invite them to their home for the holidays.

This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper in London.