A few months ago a parent at my kids’ school asked me if I wanted to contribute to a piece of Communist propaganda. Well, sort of. Ari directs the theater program at the Jewish Community Center in downtown Washington, and he said he was reviving Waiting for Lefty, the famous agitprop play Clifford Odets wrote in 1935 while a member of the Communist party. Ari said he was adding some new scenes, to be called Still Waiting, and he wanted some ” discordant material.” He really wanted to present all sides of the issues, he emphasized, to question the leftist drumbeat of the original.
I was an easy mark for this pitch because in college I went through an intensive Odets phase. I read all I could about the Group Theater, in New York, where Odets made his creative home, and about Mordecai Gorelik, one of the intellectual forces behind the radical theater. So I had lunch with Ari at a downtown restaurant. The idea was that I’d talk to him and he’d write my views into the script.
Before our lunch I reread Waiting for Lefty, and this time I was disturbed by it. I’ve learned a lot about communism since college, and I covered the fall of the Soviet Union, and now I found the party line an impregnable barrier between me and the play (just as few of us could stomach an early Nazi-party play, even if it had nothing to do with the Holocaust). I tried to explain all this to Ari at lunch. I also gave him an introductory tour through conservative economic thought — of which he was blissfully ignorant. I must have mentioned Joseph Schumpeter at some point, because a few weeks later he told me he’d gone out and gotten a book by Schumpeter and was reading it. If he finished that book, he’s a better man than I.
On opening night I went to the theater. The modern stuff Ari added made Odets look subtle. Ari’s workers were even more victimized and noble, and his bosses were at least as villainous as Odets’s. And in the middle of the first act there was a scene in which an editor at a conservative magazine is having lunch at a downtown restaurant with his girlfriend. He’s a loud, overbearing jerk. He steals other people’s water. He insults the busboy and the waiter. He is cruel and insensitive toward his girlfriend. And he delivers an unceasing stream of obnoxious comments about the world — two-thirds of which were vulgarized versions of things I had told Ari.
The actor who played me was charismatic, and the audience loved it. I can tell you it’s weird to be in the middle of 250 people who are all laughing at a version of you. At one point the character says that members of the Hollywood 10 had supported the Hitler-Stalin pact (at lunch I had mentioned this in regard to a conversation Odets had years later with another former Communist, Elia Kazan). Far from slowing down the general hilarity, this prompted the audience to yelp louder.
My problem came when Ari started leaving friendly messages on my voice mail asking how I liked the play. All his assurances that my ideas would be fairly presented had been false, and it was clear from his depiction that he was at least mildly contemptuous of me. So probably I should have screamed at him. On the other hand, there were good reasons to be civil. Our daughters remain friends. I felt a little sorry for him because the Washington Post savaged his play as a work of well-meaning incompetence — the review was too harsh, even by my standards. Besides, Ari’s depiction, while vicious, didn’t actually hit me at my vulnerable spots (except the water-stealing business — I am a recovering aquaholic, and I did not abuse water during our lunch).
What I think I resent most is the way Ari violated Washington’s code of ethics. The first rule is you don’t screw people you know through your kids. The polemical combat zone is not supposed to come near the children. Second, there is the code of superficial civility, which he violated. As a conservative in a D.C. neighborhood that is massively liberal, I know that a certain percentage of the people I meet (about 20 percent, I estimate) are disgusted by me on purely partisan grounds. But the rule is they are not supposed to say so. And if they do, as Ari effectively did, they’re not supposed to come back and want to be friends again.
In the end I tried to register my complaints to Ari in a tone of calm civility. And I hated myself afterwards. In the midst of my self-loathing, I even contemplated taking my kids out of the high-priced private school they now attend and enrolling them in a public school. At least there the parents wouldn’t have such heavy proletarian consciousness.
DAVID BROOKS
