How the arts challenge Trumpism

The human spirit is sustained by exposure to the arts. That's not good for would-be autocrats.

Coming soon to the theater Donald Trump runs, a story about resistance to repression. Who could object?

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Once you break it, you own it, they say, so as the self-appointed impresario of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts, Donald Trump had better get used to critics and ordinary folks alike second-guessing his choice of shows. It’s his palace now, you know: First he proclaimed himself chair of the center’s Board of Trustees and installed an ex-ambassador crony as its executive director, and then this week he announced not only that he would emcee this year’s Kennedy Center Honors but also that he had personally vetted the honorees after rejecting some “wokesters” who had gone through the usual selection process.¹

Fine — give an award to Sylvester Stallone; DeNiro and Pacino already got theirs. But what could Trump be thinking in allowing The Sound of Music to return to the Kennedy Center stage? On Sept. 9, fresh from two shows in Utica — the one in Upstate New York, not its namesake in Tunisia — the classic musical’s new road company will open in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, which a House committee, incidentally, has voted to rename for Melania Trump, the boss’s third wife. A promotional mailing that arrived at our home this week touted the 32-day run of “the iconic tale of a spirited nun who chooses not to live behind closed doors — and, by following her heart, learns to climb every mountain.”

True enough, except that Maria was a postulant, not yet a nun. But beyond the part of the plot line that would surely appeal to Trump — that is, a chaste young woman finding a much older man too attractive to resist — there’s more that an astute board chair should have recalled: There are right-wing authoritarians in the show, and they are not reflected favorably. Plus, the show’s leading man emerges as a hero only after he listens to both his heart and his conscience. All that sounds more like the impulses of wokesters than of Rocky Balboa, wouldn’t you say?

As for the audiences in Washington, they may well leave the theater with a heightened sense that resistance to repression is laudable, and the antics of autocrats laughable, which is just the sort of reaction to the arts that people in power often find intolerable.

Sure, Trump has been distracted by a lot of other stuff going on. He had to take time to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska to bolster his campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he was busy sending National Guard troops into cities to change the topic on Fox News to anything but the Jeffrey Epstein case, and he is always alert to ways he can shut down the fight against climate change, since nothing speaks of a bright American future quite as clearly as the revival of the coal industry.

But the showman-in-chief needs to recognize a challenge facing his campaign to turn America away from its idealistic and imaginative core, and restore the hegemony of rich white men over an increasingly diverse society. That is, he seems to be not fully accounting for the power of the arts to elevate the human spirit.

Truth be told, I love The Sound of Music. I missed the original Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but I saw the movie on my first visit to New York City, in 1967, at Radio City Music Hall. My big brother Ken, who was attending graduate school near the city, had insisted that my parents and I see it, but I remember our dad wincing when he learned that Ken had already seen it and paid five dollars for a ticket. “Honestly,” I remember my brother saying, “I’d pay twenty-five bucks just to watch your faces when you see the opening scene.” Pop just shook his head; I think he came to believe that his sons got careless with money, one after the other, by both going off to college in Texas, where oil money was obviously flowing.

The musical had opened on Broadway in 1959, winning five Tony awards, then became a movie starring Julie Andrews and Christoper Plummer, winning five 1965 Oscars. After we saw the show, I was hooked. Later, like all teenagers who play the lead in their high school musical, I figured I would someday get a chance to take on the role of Captain von Trapp. That didn’t happen: I became a journalist instead.

It's true that it’s a feel-good show, with such beloved songs as “Do-Re-Mi,” “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “Edelweiss” (the one that would’ve been mine). But the story is set against the dark reality of the rising power of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, even if the horrors of Nazism remain out of the audience’s view. The script of both the musical and the movie took a lot of liberties with facts, but there really was a von Trapp family; they lived outside Salzburg, and they escaped to the West after Hitler took over Austria in 1938.

You may see the show as a love story, which it is — and so much more. More broadly, it underscores the choices that people make in their lives to be true to themselves. The Mother Abbess tells Maria that she shouldn’t hesitate if it seems that a life other than in abbey is better for her, since “you have to find the life that you were born to live.” And then the aging nun sings the musical’s most powerful aria, declaring that Maria must “climb ev’ry mountain… till you find your dream.” Ultimately, the von Trapps left behind status, home and wealth rather than submit to repression.²

There are identifiable characters in the show who choose otherwise: the young Rolf, romantic interest of the eldest daughter, who signs up with the Nazi youth corps, and the stage producer Max, who urges von Trapp to be practical and follow the Nazi line: “What’s going to happen is going to happen,” he says. “Just be sure it doesn’t happen to you.”

Ultimately, Max helps the family escape; in the stage show (not the movie), Rolf doesn’t blow the whistle on the family. That is, there are levels of compliance and resistance that people adopt, reflecting their own adherence to conscience or their comfort with collusion.

Is there any doubt that this discussion is relevant today? No wonder a new road company is bringing this back to audiences now, 65 years after it was a Broadway sensation. Yet it could provoke some uncomfortable moments if the Kennedy Center board chair and his lackeys decide to make use of the presidential box to see the show. Nor is it the only work scheduled for that stage that might prompt audiences to think harder about what’s going on in the castle of the impresario a mile to the east.³

There will be eight performances of Chicago, a jazzy musical that shows how public opinion can be manipulated and the justice system corrupted. Might that weigh on people watching federal troops being deployed on city streets and workers and students snatched away by masked agents?

Next summer, a new version of Mrs. Doubtfire will appear on the stage of what may be known by then as the Melania Trump Theatre. This could indeed unsettle the MAGA crowd: a man dressed up as a woman, and interacting with children. Surely the people who have picketed Drag Queen Story Hours will insist that the leadership of the Kennedy Center shut down this outrage.

And then audiences will be able to see Moulin Rouge! The Musical, in which the financial and sexual aspirations of an unscrupulous and powerful man are confounded by people who remain true to their conscience and their love. Imagine the echoes that may be heard in an arts center led by a man convicted of 34 felony counts for concealing payoffs that a jury concluded he had made to a pornographic movie star to keep her quiet about their relationship, the same man who another jury concluded had sexually abused a magazine columnist. If that man had sought to further his show business career after the success of his reality TV show, you might even imagine a role for him in this particular show. They would call that type-casting.

This is what art does best: It illuminates life, challenges assumptions, opens our minds and hearts. It gives us insight into other cultures and historical periods, showing how we are similar or different. It expresses emotion and communicates ideas, and helps us to understand the world. It elevates the human spirit. Theater, music, dance, film; painting, sculpture, photography; poetry, novels, creative nonfiction and plays: They all present truths that we may try to shirk recognizing in another form, but that confront us in both subtle and powerful ways when we run up against them in an art form — yes, in places like the Kennedy Center.

No wonder Trump has displayed such hostility to the arts: He has proposed zeroing out federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s unsurprising that he is trying to take over the Smithsonian Institution, which under a congressional charter has since 1846 sought to preserve the heritage of the nation and expand our understanding of who and what we are.

I write of this today from a position of personal privilege: I am grateful to claim the mantle of a musician — not by profession, but by passion. This week I had an experience of a lifetime, singing Giuseppe Verdi’s immortal Requiem as part of an extraordinary chorus, Albany Pro Musica, with the truly great Philadelphia Orchestra, under the direction of one of today’s deservedly most-honored conductors, Yannick Nézet-Seguin. I’ve had similar experiences over the decades, cumulatively persuading me that you can’t experience the arts fully and not be changed for the better, and blessed.

Because they confront us with reality, the arts tend to make us more honest, more empathetic, more fully human. That’s exactly why the arts present a challenge to this administration: They reveal uncomfortable truths to the MAGA world and beyond, including many people who wish to resist those truths. At the same time, experience in the arts present to each of us opportunities for resistance that we might not even imagine in their absence.

So the new management of the Kennedy Center may feel some discomfort in its role as presenter of the arts. That’s fine. And the rest of us may feel compelled by our encounters with the truth revealed in the arts to resist the deadening tide washing over our society, and to then do all we can to sustain artistic expression in our society.

That would be very good for us, and for America, indeed.

1. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-kennedy-center-honors-host-ceremony-stallone-rcna224819

2. https://www.ashleywagnerarts.com/academic/social-messages-in-the-sound-of-music

3. https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/season-announcement/

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