THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2010
Time to keep the party going
chairmen from C1
that would “excite” Democrats. (It turned out to be a newly designed Web site and a logo that resembles a bull’s-eye with an up- percase “D” in the middle.) Steele’s people sought to rev engines by rolling out a bus emblazoned with the takes-a-minute-to- get-it quip: “Need a Job? Fire Pelosi!” (Steele’s new ride features a mirrored bed- room and carpet still swaddled in plastic wrap.)
At times, the RNC’s Web site has fea- tured an image of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the object of Steele’s animus, super- imposed on a background of flames. After unveiling his new party logo Wednesday, Kaine said in a brief interview that the Pe- losi image made him think “there is no adult supervision over there.” Both Kaine and Steele find themselves in uh-oh territory. Kaine must figure out a way to stop the anti-incumbent avalanche that threatens to topple Democratic con- trol of the House of Representatives and weaken or wrench away their hold on the Senate. Steele must figure out how to mend a party shredded along its right flank by uber-conservative tea-party candi- date victories — Christine O’Donnell’s shocker in Delaware most prominent among them — over establishment Repub- lican candidates who party regulars be- lieve would have a better chance in the general election. Accordingly, part of the morning-after routine involves aligning oneself with the hot hand, and Steele — though he officially heads the Republican Party, which to many would be synony- mous with “the establishment” — posi- tioned himself as a critic of the powers- that-be. “The establishment in this town is so clueless and so out of touch with what real people are going through every day,” he said at his magic-bus unveiling. “We’ve heard the clarion call from states all across this Union, including [Tuesday] night, that a different kind of change is coming.” The morning-after rituals extend well
beyond the official party apparatus and into the permanent power structure of Washington opinion-shapers, dealmakers and gravitas-totemswho ponder meanings and map out game plans. “The first thing I thought this morning when I woke up was: The wave is coming,” longtime Republican strategist Terry Holt said. “We’ve all been trying to measure how high it would be and what impact it would have. Now we know. The message is: Politicians beware. The wave is coming.” O’Donnell wasn’t making it easy on Steele to ride said wave. On CNN, even be- fore Steele set off on the first leg of a 47-day bus tour, O’Donnell reported, “We’ve heard from other bigwigs, but haven’t heard from Michael Steele, haven’t heard from [Re-
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MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES NEXT STOP?Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota was on hand for the rollout of a Republican campaign bus emblazoned with an anti-Pelosi message.
publican Senatorial Committee Chairman] John Cornyn. I had my cellphone on me all night.” Pointedly, for much of the morning, the Republican National Committee’s Web site had no message from Steele congratulating O’Donnell, whom many top Republicans — including vaunted strategist Karl Rove and Delaware’s state party chairman — give lit- tle chance of winning in the November election. But, with O’Donnell-mania sweeping cable TV and donations pouring into her coffers, by the afternoon Steele got around to paying homage on the RNC site to the new Republican It Girl. At his bus-side show, Steele got thumped with an O’Donnell question shouted by a television reporter, one with pipes strong enough to be heard over the applause: What about remarks by Delaware’s GOP state party chairman that O’Donnell “could not be elected dogcatcher”? “I look forward to electing Christine the
next senator from the state of Delaware,” Steele responded, generating even more applause. Then the chairman returned to the lec- tern and added, “The Republican National Committee supports all of our nominees across the board, without hesitation or doubt.” “Amen!” someone in the crowd ex- claimed.
And within minutes, Steele’s bus was pulling away from Republican National Committee headquarters, headed out of Washington. Not long afterward, across town — a route, as the crow flies, that encompasses the buildings both parties covet: the White House and the Capitol — Kaine tried to
generate a little excitement of his own. Holding forth in front of a standing-room- only crowd at George Washington Univer- sity’s Jack Morton Auditorium, he called out “Hello, G-Dub,” omitting the last part of “Dubya” lest anyone be reminded of the previous, and decidedly Republican, presi- dent.
Kaine had spent the morning sounding
like a man who’d just been handed a huge gift in the race for Vice President Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware. He even ven- tured onto Fox News — forbidden terrain for some Democrats — to sing hallelujah. “Six months ago we were — we really thought this Delaware race would be in-
Instead, Kaine emphasized a history les- CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES LOOK AT US:DNC Chairman Tim Kaine was excited to unveil a new party logo.
credibly difficult to win,” he said on “Fox & Friends.” Now, he said, “we have a good shot at winning it.”
During his remarks at GW, though, Kaine had precisely nothing to say about any individual candidates in the November election. He didn’t pound the lectern for Chris Coons, who will face O’Donnell in the suddenly all-important Delaware contest, or for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is in a tough reelection fight against tea party memeSharron Angle. (There was no such Reid reticence at Steele’s event, where aides happily distributed “Retire Harry Reid” signs to those who weren’t al- ready waving “Fire Pelosi” signs.)
son — extolling Democrats as the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy — and promised a tech-savvy future with the par- ty using “every single tool in the toolbox.” Beaming, Kaine watched as a couple of dozen students and volunteers came bop- ping into the darkened auditorium, throw- ing folded T-shirts printed with the new party logo high into the air. One shirt lodged itself in the roof, filling Kaine with a sense that this was A Moment. Half a century from now, he said, this hallowed T-shirt might be discovered and “they’ll know we were here this day.” Kaine also spoke of his party’s new “ac- tion-oriented” Web site, which will auto- matically generate a list of local candidates when voters pull it up on their computers. But the reporters who massed around him afterward were more interested in Dela- ware and what it all means. Kaine, looking like a party chairman
starting to feel his mojo, declared that “the tea party is now the Republican Party. . . . We’re going to win elections in November because of the extremist views of some of the candidates.” And he was particularly amused that Rove — far from being his political twin — was now trashing O’Donnell, the Repub- lican candidate in Delaware, saying she was unimpressive and utters “nutty things.” “Isn’t that something?” Kaine asked, with a grin.
An aide tried to pull him away, but he had one more thing he wanted to say: “We gotta win.”
roigfranzia@washpost.com horowitzj@washpost.com
Dramas from U.K. humanize centuries of conflict theater from C1 “The Great Game,” which surveysWest-
ern involvement in Afghanistan from the early 19th century through the Soviet in- vasion in the 1980s and this decade’s war, is stitched together by verbatim material that evolves with the headlines. This sum- mer’s London revival of the show even in- cluded an exclusive interview with U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal conducted just four days before his firing in June. The majority of “The Great Game,” though — the title refers to the 19th- century jostling between Russia and the British for control of the region — is the collection of roughly half-hour plays. They have been molded into a trilogy: Part I is “Invasions and Independence,” covering 1842 through the 1920s, Part II is “Com- munism, The Mujahideen & The Taliban,” 1979-1996, and Part III is “Enduring Free- dom,” from before Sept. 11, 2001, to the present day. Each evening can be viewed on its own, though audiences can take in the whole sequence on marathon days the next two weekends. The dramatists behind this unusual
theatrical chronicle largely worked in iso- lation from one another. “We met in the bar after the first preview,” cracks Ron Hutchinson, an Irish-born writer who has lived in Los Angeles for three decades. Lee Blessing — the lone American rep- resented in the version of “The Great Game” touring the United States (another play was also swapped out, and the verba- tim material changes all the time) — didn’t even enjoy that much contact. When interest arose in producing U.S. writer J.T. Rogers’s contribution, “Blood and Gifts,” on its own at London’s National Theatre (where it’s now playing), Blessing was brought in to write a replacement for Rogers’s 1980s CIA-Mujahideen piece. Blessing, speaking last week from Brook- lyn, hasn’t seen “The Great Game” yet, and won’t until the tour reaches the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis next month. “Ironically,” says Blessing, who joined the team last February, “the only writer I
onetime right-hand man of Ahmed Shah Massoud (“Hero of the war against the So- viets, implacable foe of the Taliban,” jour- nalist Sebastian Junger wrote in 2001), who was assassinated two days before the attacks on the United States. Khalili, who is a key figure in Ockrent’s play, “drove us around and talked to us” for a long day, says Kent, who is in Washington this week to tune up the show for its local engage- ment. Hutchinson says he submitted a pair of
JOHN HAYNES/SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY
END ‘GAME’: Daniel Betts in Abi Morgan’s “The Night Is Darkest Before the Dawn,” a play in the last part of the U.K. trilogy being staged through Sept. 26.
knew was J.T.”
Matching era with talent Certain writers seemed natural for par-
ticular slots, so Kent matched available talent with appropriate periods. “I think Nick kind of sliced the salami,” Hutchin- son says from L.A. of the assignment proc- ess. “ ‘Who wants to deal with the Russian invasion, put your hand up? American do- gooder NGOs getting in over their heads?’” Hutchinson, whose “Durand’s Line” chronicles the 1893 border agree- ment between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, says, “I got late to the party.” Stephen Jeffreys, writer of the play (and
the 2005 Johnny Depp film) “The Liber- tine,” has a reputation for historical work. “He’s famous for it,” offers fellow play- wright Joy Wilkinson. Thus Jeffreys was logical to write the opener, set in 1842 and dealing with the end of what the British refer to as the First Afghan War. Wilkinson and Ben Ockrent, speaking
on different days from London, said they felt like less inevitable candidates, in part because of their comparative youth. “I did feel slightly out of my league in terms of experience,” the 27-year-old Ockrent says. Wilkinson uses the term “daunting” to de- scribe the mission. Wilkinson’s script, “Now Is the Time,” comes in the second part of the trilogy and deals with modernization led by a pro- gressive Afghan king in the 1920s that eventually “just all came unstuck.” Ockrent came to Kent’s attention thanks to a pair of short films on Iraq he made for British television. Ockrent’s task was to write about events leading up to 9/ 11, which he acknowledges was both a plum gig and intimidating. “I’m really anxious, to be honest,” Ock-
rent says, “being a British playwright.” Ockrent got an advanced education in recent history when he and Kent were put in touch with Masood Khalili, the current Afghan ambassador to Turkey and the
plays before pleasing the demanding Kent with “Durand’s Line.” (“I still have those two at a special knockdown price,” he notes cheerfully.) But while certain epochs in Afghanistan’s conflicts with various su- perpowers clearly needed to be addressed, the writers say they were largely left to create as they liked. “That was the key,” says Jeffreys, speak- ing from London. “He [Kent] didn’t say to people, ‘Try to write this.’ He just gave peo- ple a rough area. I think consequently the plays fall into place. If you tried, it may seem a little labored.” “You were begged not to write a mono-
logue,” Wilkinson reports. (In fact, brief monologues were being supplied by Siba Shakib, the Iranian-born author of the book “Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep.”) Wilkinson adds that the writers “were given a sense that it should spring out of research. It’s not a total po- etic piece that’s detached from history.”
‘Don’t be afraid to fictionalize’ Blessing, who cites Steve Coll’s “Ghost
Wars” among his sources, echoes that, but says, “Most of the notes I got were to make it more theatrical; don’t be afraid to fic- tionalize; give yourself more freedom. They didn’t want 12 essays. That was an eye-opening and wonderful set of notes to get.” As for a party line, the playwrights state
that none existed, though, Wilkinson says, “it was okay to come down where you felt, having done the research.” Staged on the cheap, because the Tricy- cle seats a little over 200 and has an an-
nual budget of just over 2.5 million pounds, “The Great Game” hardly figures to be a windfall gig for the writers. There can’t be much cash to divide when roy- alties are cut 12 ways, not even counting the contributions of British journalists Lyse Doucet, David Loyn and Richard Norton-Taylor. Blessing labels “The Great Game” as a “prestige” project, though, and Jeffreys says, “At some point it became the cool thing to be doing.” Rogers found it so inspiring that he wrote an article for the British press ex- ploring why, in his opinion, such ambi- tious political work is scarce in the United States. Blessing agrees: “The not-for-profit theater acts like a commercial theater,” he asserts. “There aren’t many theaters that feel brave enough to make that [politics] a mission for themselves.” Hutchinson, who has experience on both sides of the Atlantic, says: “I think you do have this aversion to political thea- ter and political film. It’s not bred in you the way it’s bred in us over there.” He teaches writing to students at the Amer- ican Film Institute, and, he says, “it’s strik- ing how uninterested they are in public is- sues as opposed to the minutiae of biogra- phy.”
Such cultural gaps between the tradi- tional allies have the Brits wondering how “The Great Game” will be received by the Yanks. “I hope not like ‘Enron,’ ” Hutchin- son says, referring to the show about the U.S. energy-company scandal that was a sensation last year in London but a quick flop this year on Broadway. Wilkinson acknowledges that “it’s a big ask” of audiences to commit to a trilogy, and in fact tickets haven’t sold out yet for the run (through Sept. 26) at the Harman Center. But Hutchinson says, “People want to learn something about it, to im- merse themselves in that deep history of Afghanistan and to get us away from just ‘We should have nothing to do with it.’ It is a grievous wound, that place.”
style@washpost.com
Pressley is a freelance writer.
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