POSTSCRIPT

I know that all of us in theater are greatly affected by the ongoing shrinking of the National Endowment for the Arts. And back during the Mapplethorpe-Jesse Helms hoopla, I was very energized by the need to keep the NEA. (The Mapplethorpe-Helms debates, by the way, were identical to the state arts debates that happened years earlier in St. Louis, triggered by my play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, where the topic, however, was religion rather than sex.)

But I think we have already lost the NEA war. I think to re-win it, one has to work to make valuable again the philosophy that underlined the creation of the NEA. The NEA was created by a belief that culture was important, and that the arts both reflected and nurtured our sense of soul; of what makes life valuable and worth living.

I think during the Reagan years, with the loony amounts of money made combining corporations and shrinking companies and firing people without any sense of morality or fairness, the materialism that was already fairly dominant in our culture—remember the “keep up with the Joneses” phrase of the ‘50s?— this materialism went crazy and took over, and our country’s soul has become more and more ignored and starved. 

That’s why on some strange level the conservatives often seem right decrying lack of values— if people feel hopeless and are taking drugs at the beginning of their lives, when they should be most hopeful; or if people are living only for the external symbols of success—money and big cars and famous friends – then something has indeed been lost.

My solutions as to how to address that problem are different from the conservatives, who seem to want to control these problems with punishments and admonishments to just say no. Try telling Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night to “just say no” and see how far you get. Indeed I don’t have a clear solution, because I don't think there is a clear one.

But to my surprise, even though as the author of Sister Mary Ignatius you might assume I have mostly negative feelings about religion, in my later years I find that the words “spirituality” and “soul” do have positive connotations for me; and indeed, soul, and the nurturing of soul, seems to me what brings happiness and peace to human life. This theme, by the way, is in my last play somewhat, although none of the critics remarked on it, because... well, because they weren’t listening.

But I think that valuing the arts comes from valuing the non-materialistic, emotional, philosophical, spiritual side of human beings. And we won’t really be able to win the fight to keep the NEA, or ever increase its funding, until we can get our fellow citizens to value that aspect of humanity again, that feeling about life that Thornton Wilder referred to—I keep bringing up Thornton Wilder—in Our Town when the Stage Manager says “everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal…”

Well, I apologize that I’m starting to sound like Norman Vincent Peale. There is some part of me that remains a choirboy at heart. But underneath my anger at what I view as the religious right’s trying to legally bully those of us who don't share their identical values, underneath that anger is a belief that we do need to nourish our souls, our inner beings. We need to find ways to convince other people that this is a valuable thing to do. And I keep wondering if there's a way to make genuine connections with conservative people on this kind of issue though I don't know what that would be.

But that, to me, is the core problem we need to address in trying to make our fellow citizens value the NEA—the need to reconvince them that art and theater and museums and dance all matter, that they help us know who we are, and help us at least contemplate how and why we got here, and what we're supposed to be doing while we’re here.

And I think that any artwork that tries to nurture the soul — whatever I may mean by that—will add to that collective, unconscious “critical mass” thing I mentioned; and will help us all to continue on in what I hope is a moral evolution.

And so on that somewhat fuzzy, but sincerely offered thought, I end my comments.