Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics (review)

Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics. By Jane Alexander. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000; pp. 335. $25.00 cloth.

Jane Alexander's political memoir of her four years as Director of the National Endowment for the Arts (1993-1997) should be required reading for theatre scholars, professional artistic directors, and others working in the hothouse of American culture and the arts. Alexander's accomplishment in Command Performance is her willingness to discuss openly her most painful experiences at the NEA. In the spirit of a bildungsroman, Alexander takes the reader on a journey from naïveté to hard-won experience. But unlike the most satisfying novels of maturation, this one ultimately leaves the reader with a sense that Alexander never caught up with the learning curve. Rather, as the book draws to a close, she is reduced to hand-wringing phrases like "life was too short to be playing these idiotic games about the value of art" (297) and "I was in a very long run of a bad play in Washington" (317).

The seeds of her burnout are apparent in the book's opening vignette in which Senator Strom Thurmond asks Alexander point-blank, "You gonna fund pornography?" (xi). Alexander reports that she "rose weakly to the challenge" and informed him that "The National Endowment for the Arts did not fund obscenity, that obscenity was considered unprotected speech." Thurmond replied that "he didn't care what the Endowment did, he wanted to know what [Alexander] thought" (xi). Alexander tells us that she was too knocked off balance by Thurmond's question to offer him a substantial reply, but she informs the reader that this episode came to crystallize her understanding of the battle waged for the NEA. "Hadn't all the battles been fought already by the Continental Congress when they hammered out their brilliant document on the nature of democracy and a civil society? I knew the answer in my heart [and] I knew these precepts had to be defended over and over again with each generation" (xii). These precepts translate into the discourse of First Amendment rights. Unfortunately for the NEA under the Clinton administration, Alexander's legalistic demonization of Southern and Midwestern conservatives as simply "barbarians" (232) and "troglodytes" (295) set the stage not for a theatre of politics but for a Manichean struggle between defenders of the faith on both sides of the aisle. The result of this exchange, for both the NEA and Alexander's narrative, is a kind of algorithm that reiterates itself every congressional budget battle and every forty pages: opposition to avant-garde and controversial NEA-supported art is censorious and effectively illegal, and Congress should defer to the NEA's decisions about what constitutes the best art. Direly, "a country that fails to encourage this loses its genius and its soul" (192). One may agree with Alexander's sentiments, but as a model of effective political communication, it clearly leaves much to be desired.

Consider her chapter on the Walker Art Center's controversial sponsorship of Ron Athey in 1994. Senators Jesse Helms and Robert Byrd strongly objected to Athey's performance art piece in which he carved designs on the back of a fellow performer, dabbed the blood-infused designs on paper towels, and pulleyed the individual sheets above the heads of his audience. What the senators (and newspaper editorials around the country) strongly objected to was the erroneous belief that the paper towels contained HIV-positive blood—a fear inspired by Athey's frank discussion of his HIV-positive status during the performance. Since the NEA had given a block grant to support the Walker Art Center's season, Athey's performance was indirectly funded by the agency. Alexander writes that "the White House was getting nervous," and that she was encouraged by some to "find something to disavow" (178). Her response? "I stubbornly refused. No. Period. We had done nothing wrong, nor had...