I’d never been to the HERE Arts Center before I saw Life After Bush; as soon as I walked in, I felt like I had suddenly wandered into a different century. New York City, fostering an artists’ colony? In 2008? Surely you must be joking!
The shock was fitting, as both the politics and the art of Life After Bush were very much throwbacks. The play’s creators, Noah Diamond, Amanda Sisk, and their Nero Fiddled theater company, are not above straight-out Bush-bashing, and their frankness would make more modest political playwrights blush. The two writer/directors have realized that depicting Bush as an idiot, his future Presidential Library as the Death Star, or the Supreme Court as picking away at Roe v. Wade doesn’t automatically discredit the intelligence of a work of art. This is the kind of blunt-object theater that American culture and media has shied away from, but that still thrives overseas. What Life After Bush shows is that there’s still a place for bluntness in American political culture (and not just on The Daily Show either).
But just because Life After Bush is obtuse doesn't mean that it's stupid. If anything, Life After Bush may be too smart. With political reference points, cultural memes, and brilliant linguistic wordplay coming at machine-gun speed, an audience can be forgiven for missing more references than they catch (but blessed be those who got the joke of a broken down John McCain calling Sarah Palin a “snow cunt.”) Life After Bush is the first play I’ve seen in a long time that effectively used absurd political humor as a weapon and not a crutch. The play is not whiny, it’s not tasteless, and it’s not even all that extremist (well, maybe a little).
What particularly impressed me about Life After Bush is how the play took a far-left political attack—a format straight out of the culture wars—and brought it into an era that, like Nero Fiddled’s main superdude Barack Obama, is pushing to move past the political conflicts of the past 40-odd years. Life After Bush mixes intelligent rhetoric with jokes about Bush’s affinity for Cadbury Creme Eggs, songs about triangulation with songs depicting Hillary Clinton as a tragic Evita Perón (“Don’t cry for me, Appalachia!”). The HERE Arts Center is planning an election bash as the play’s last hurrah. Contrary to what I expected when I first heard of the bash, I can see Life After Bush making fine use of whatever events come that night (though it may complicate things if McCain starts winning).
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