Thank you. Thanks very much. I’m always glad to be in Washington, and now that I’m on the National Council on the Arts, I expect to be here even more often than usual. As a matter of fact, I’ll be back on Wednesday. I’m giving a lecture about modern art sponsored by the Phillips Collection, my favorite museum. You’re all invited, assuming that you don’t get enough of me tonight.

I wanted to spend Tuesday in Washington, too, but I have to go back to New York to review a musical that night. Now that I’m the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, my life revolves around opening nights, and March and April, the two months before the Tony Awards, are the busiest time of the season. I looked at my calendar the other day, and I’m going to be seeing twenty plays in March and April. Some of them I picked, but most are Broadway openings and the important off-Broadway shows, which I pretty much have to see.

The fact that I don’t always get to choose the shows I see isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To be a working drama critic is to engage with what’s out there, good and bad alike. Just because I expect to dislike a show doesn’t mean I can afford not to see it. Besides, I’ve been a critic long enough to know that only a fool writes his review on the way to the show. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been surprised at the theater.

The most recent play to surprise me was a one-woman show called Nine Parts of Desire. In it, Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American actress and playwright, plays nine characters based on a group of real-life Iraqi women whom she interviewed. Definitely timely--but I hesitated before going to see it, because I feared that the characters would be carefully chosen, and their utterances carefully edited, to support a particular point of view about the war in Iraq, and that this point of view would be well to the left of center.

Why did I make these assumptions about a play I hadn’t seen? That’s simple enough. Somebody once asked Harry Luce why he hired so many liberals to write for Time and Life, since his own political views were so conservative. He said, "For some goddamn reason, Republicans can’t write." Well, they finally learned how, but for some other goddamn reason, they don’t write plays! I don’t know any playwrights in New York who are openly conservative--not one.

And that’s why Nine Parts of Desire surprised me. I never felt, not even for a moment, that Raffo was stacking the political deck. Some of her characters supported the war, others opposed it. Most expressed no clear-cut opinion about it, even though its continuing effects permeated their lives, and it soon became clear to me that her purpose in writing Nine Parts of Desire was not to make a statement about the American presence in Iraq, but simply to suggest something of what it feels like to live there.

Now, that’s one kind of "political" play--a play about a political subject. But there’s another kind of political play. An example of this kind is Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell. Shepard, who is one of America’s most celebrated playwrights, described it in an interview as a "satire" of "Republican fascism." And except for the fact that satires are supposed to be funny, I’d call that a fair enough description. This is the plot, such as it is: a smirking, prancing fellow made up to look like Paul Wolfowitz invades the home of a Wisconsin farmer and his wife, festoons their kitchen with American flags, hooks the genitalia of the man of the house up to an electronic torture machine, and administers painful shocks until the poor fellow agrees to surrender his heifers to the government for use in an unspecified but self-evidently nefarious secret project.

I wish I could tell you that The God of Hell was an aberration and Nine Parts of Desire the norm, but as I look back on the specifically political plays I’ve reviewed in my two years at the Journal, I find far more of the former than the latter. A case in point is Trumbo, an admiring tribute to a Communist screenwriter who went to his grave without once publicly expressing the mildest of reservations about the policies of Joseph Stalin, whose murderous regime he had enthusiastically supported throughout the thirties and forties. Another is Embedded, an antiwar tract in which Tim Robbins, the author, put into the mouth of the political philosopher Leo Strauss a phony quote that he’d found in a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche.

Now, these plays are bad, by which I mean they’re both crude and predictable, a fact that should surprise no one. Any work of art that seeks to persuade an audience to take some specific form of external action, political or otherwise, tends to be bad. But the line isn’t a bright one, and it’s perfectly possible to make good, even great art that’s meant to serve as the persuasive instrument of an exterior purpose. That’s why the great cathedrals of Europe were built, after all. For that reason, it serves no purpose to assert that political art is ever and always bad--as a significant number of conservatives are inclined to do.

So perhaps it’s worth asking: just what is it that art is supposed to do? A lot of smart people have spent a lot of time down through the ages trying to answer that question, and we’re not going to settle it here tonight. The best I can do is suggest some possibilities. To begin with, it’s generally agreed that great art has some mysterious yet ultimately intelligible relationship to truth. The nature of that relationship was nicely described by Fairfield Porter, a great American painter who was also a great art critic. "When I paint," Porter wrote in a letter to a friend, "I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful." No matter who said it first, this statement points to one of the most important things that art does: it portrays the world creatively, and so heightens our perception and awareness of things as they are, and as they might be.

Does political art do this? It can--but the more specific its political purpose, the greater the temptations to dishonesty that are placed in the artist’s path. "Instrumentalized" political art often makes highly specific truth claims, as in the case of The Exonerated, the documentary play recently telecast on Court TV about a group of American prisoners who were sentenced to death but later freed. No matter how artfully written a play like The Exonerated may be, its effect as art will dissipate if its claims to truthfulness can be significantly and successfully challenged (as those of The Exonerated have been).

This necessarily places a heavy burden on the political artist, who has to be not only a good artist but also a competent reporter and researcher. Just as important, though, it may tempt him to cut his factual coat to fit his persuasive cloth. Turning messy fact into orderly fiction necessarily entails simplification. Turning it into artful fiction demands that this simplification acknowledge the full complexity of human nature and human experience. And that’s the problem of political art. For these requirements are tricky--almost contradictory--and they can easily be fumbled by the artist whose principal goal is to persuade an audience of the rectitude of his cause. We don’t expect such an artist to portray the world "creatively," but truthfully--to tell us the unadorned truth about things as they really are. Yet propagandists are rarely prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. And they alter reality not in order to "make everything more beautiful," but to stack the deck.

Note, by the way, that in describing political art I’ve emphasized its persuasiveness. This is a quality it has in common with non-political art. Both seek to persuade us of their believability in order to accomplish the larger purpose of helping us transcend ourselves. As C. S. Lewis said, "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself."

This is the meaning of the cliché that great art "takes you out of yourself." By definition, it then puts you into someone else, and in so doing enriches your understanding of reality. To do this successfully, it must be in the deepest sense sympathetic. The Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as "the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others." Such a capacity is a fundamental aspect of all serious art. It’s what makes Shakespeare’s villains believable: we feel we can understand their motives, even if we don’t share them. Without sympathy there can be no persuasion. Even a caricature, however cruel, must acknowledge the humanity of its subject in order to be funny.

What I find striking about much of today’s political art, by contrast, is its unwillingness to make such an acknowledgment. Instead of seeking to persuade--to open and change the minds of its viewers--such art takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension this kind of art also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal--or, to use the newly fashionable term on the left, "progressive."

One impeccably progressive artist, the novelist Jane Smiley, tipped her political hand in a post-election essay she wrote for Slate. You may have read it last year, but it’s worth a second look. Here’s part of what Smiley wrote:

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not....The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are--they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence.

Two things are worth noting about this article. The first is that it was written by a well-known, much-admired novelist. The second is that it appears to be representative of the political views of a considerable number of other artists who think that all conservatives are evil or stupid, or both.

Now, it’s one thing to feel like this, much less to say so out loud, if you’re a politician. But what if you’re a working artist? What if you not only believe that more than half of your fellow men are ignorant, maybe even evil, but you also allow this belief to color the way you make art? The answer is to be found in plays like The God of Hell and Embedded, which are written not for a hypothetical mixed audience of Red and Blue Americans, but for a 100-percent left-liberal audience whose 100-percent agreement is presupposed.

You might go so far as to say that the authors of such plays suffer from what conservatives call the "entitlement mentality." It isn’t just that they feel no responsibility to make arguments that might prove persuasive to those who disagree with them: they no longer seem to acknowledge any responsibility to their audiences. They appear to believe instead that so long as an artist thinks all the right things, he need not go to the trouble to be amusing, subtle, or even interesting. All he need do is make his characters say those right things out loud, and he’s thereby entitled to the approval of his progressive brethren. No one else matters.

That’s what Sam Shepard must have been thinking, consciously or not, when he wrote The God of Hell. After all, he knows how to write a good play, one that seizes an audience’s attention and holds it for two hours. He didn’t take that attention for granted when he wrote good plays like True West. Now, it seems, he does.

What makes political artists think they can get away with such shoddy work? In New York and other American cities of similar political disposition, the answer is plain to see. Look at the 2004 election returns: 82 percent of Manhattan residents voted for John Kerry. No doubt Bush did rather better in the suburbs, but there’s every reason to think that most art-loving New Yorkers are as unswervingly liberal as that statistic suggests.

Yet there is no less reason to think that a substantial number of these liberals expect more out of art, and refuse to accept less. In fact, I have the impression that a growing number of aesthetically sensitive Blue Staters are getting sick and tired of the various ways in which contemporary art has been hijacked by politics. It’s worth noting that Embedded, even though it was written and directed by a movie star, failed to transfer to a Broadway theater. Here’s another interesting fact: the two most stringently politicized musicals of last season, Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, failed to please a sufficiently large number of playgoers, and had their runs cut short as a result.

No less interesting, at least to me, has been the genuinely enthusiastic reception of a number of recent political plays that steered clear of rigid political reductionism. The best of these was Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, which won a Pulitzer Prize last year. It’s quite an interesting tale that Wright tells. Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he met Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a sixty-five-year-old male transvestite who owned an East Berlin museum of turn-of-the-century knickknacks. Now, Charlotte had survived the Nazis and the Communists, neither of whom--to put it mildly--were especially tolerant of homosexuality. At first glance, Wright saw Charlotte as a gay hero, and began to interview him in order to write an admiring play about his life. But he soon found out that his new hero was...no hero. To save his own skin, Charlotte had become an informer for the Stasi, the East German secret police, going so far as to denounce one of his closest gay friends, who subsequently died in prison.

So instead of producing an exercise in hagiography, Wright wrote an autobiographical play in which he concealed nothing about Charlotte from the audience, not even his still-powerful longing to idealize him. "I need to believe in her stories as much as she does," Wright admitted in I Am My Own Wife--yet he paid us the compliment of letting us make up our own minds about this strange creature, instead of telling us what we ought to think.

As I watched I Am My Own Wife, I thought of something that John Sayles once said. Sayles is a left-wing film director and screenwriter who makes movies whose underlying themes are often quite political. They’re good movies, too, smart and thoughtful--and scrupulously honest. An interviewer asked him why so few American directors make explicitly political movies. He said, "I think more than being political or not political, it’s often the problem of being complex: The characters aren’t heroic. Sometimes they do things you don’t like, even if you may like them, and it’s hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised."

I can’t think of a more concise way to sum up the difference between I Am My Own Wife and The God of Hell. The problem with playwrights like Sam Shepard, Tim Robbins, and Tony Kushner is not that they’re leftists, but that they coast on their leftism. Their plays are as self-satisfied as they are simple-minded--and self-satisfaction is the death of serious art.

The good news is that most of the art I see in New York, be it on stage, in a bookstore, or at a gallery, isn’t even implicitly political. What’s more, it’s actually become possible in the past few years for artists to get away with expressing impatience with the demands of political correctness, so long as they do it with a smile. One of the best new musicals to open on Broadway since I became a drama critic, for instance, is Avenue Q, a satire of life among the twentysomethings in which PC is mocked with unprintable verve. One of its songs is a catchy little ditty called "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist." The last verse goes like this:

Everyone’s a little bit racist--it’s true
But everyone is just about as racist--As you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit
And everyone stopped being so P.C.,
Maybe we could live in--harmony!

Whatever else that is, it’s definitely not a progressive editorial set to music. Yet Avenue Q has been the hottest ticket on Broadway ever since it opened two years ago, and I have yet to see any picket lines in front of the box office.

I’m not saying that American artists are becoming more diverse in their political views. I see no signs of that. But the political views of a good artist, if not necessarily irrelevant to the substance of his art, are far from the most important thing about it. In the end, I don’t care who the writers of Avenue Q voted for. What matters is whether they’re willing to tell us what the world really looks like to them, not what they think we ought to think it looks like.

And that brings us back full circle to Nine Parts of Desire. I know nothing of Heather Raffo’s political views, and the fact that I can’t deduce them with any certainty says something interesting about the pitfalls and the promise of political art. After the reelection of President Bush, the continued fighting in Iraq was the top news story of 2004, yet the mainstream media had little of interest to say about the everyday lives of the Iraqi people, and told us next to nothing about their feelings and fears. Heather Raffo’s play, by contrast, brought its audiences closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand TV reports, even though its author wasn’t a "professional" journalist, but merely an artist. The result was a prime example of political art at its most persuasive.

At the same time, Nine Parts of Desire, while it is based on interviews with real people, is also a full-fledged, beautifully shaped play--a product of the unfettered creative imagination. And therein lies the source of its power: it is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful. All art, political or not, must make everything more beautiful in order to fulfill its most essential function, that of seizing and holding the viewer’s attention.

And that’s my message to you for the evening. Any political artist who aspires to be more than just a cheerleader for the converted must learn this lesson, and learn it well: a boring work of art can’t convince anybody of anything, least of all that we should believe what the artist has to say about the world in which we live. And nothing is more boring--or less believable--than a story with only one side.