We went to hear Frank Rich speak in San Francisco on election eve. He’s on a book tour for his The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Steve Winn of the SF Chronicle was the interviewer, and a pretty decent one. Frank himself is not a great speaker; I’d rather read him than hear him. That’s not to say he isn’t as smart and widely informed as you’d think from just his NY Times Sunday essays — not to mention his earlier theatre and film work– just that the polish and acuteness of the writing is missing from his speaking.
I did learn some interesting things.
One of the first reporting assignments he had was a profile of Dan Ellsburg for Esquire. Then it was all theatre all the time — until he lost interest in being a drama critic in the mid to late 1990s.
The fulcrum for his movement from drama criticism to political criticism was the AIDS crisis. When he was beginning his theatre criticism in New York he knew nothing, in his own words, about gays, homosexuals. AIDS was not yet a word. Friends, colleagues, subjects of his reviews, began to die. They began to die so often that the plays he was reporting on were changed: actors, designers, directors went missing. He began reporting on the deaths, as part of the reviews. The deaths became political news as activists would no longer keep quiet; he began to report on the politics.
He was not new to politics. He had, after all, grown up in Washington DC. And, politics and theatre had from an early age, been sort of fraternal twins.
I was always a theater fanatic; the theater and politics fused in my mind because if you are interested in the theater you always know that what you’re seeing on stage is a bunch of scenery and actors playing roles in what is essentially fiction. But as you learn more about it, you know there are stagehands, there are things going on in the wings. I think that informed my view of Washington.
On one hand, you’re presented with this official view of Washington as this cradle of democracy and this fantastic egalitarian place where all the principles in the constitution and the bill of rights are being upheld. On the other hand, I could see every day, these incredible inequities—the way black people were treated, the way the city was run. That discrepancy in the theater between onstage and off to this day has affected my view of politics: I’m always curious about what’s happening in the wings.
He wasn’t predicting anything for election day and thought that win or lose for the Dems there would still be a viciously divided congress. If the Dems win, the most important thing is not some theatrical game of impeach the President but of getting some sober, smart, urgent people to start dealing with the very serious situation the US is now in.
I learned that Rich gets a week to write his Sunday pieces, that he didn’t like doing the twice a week 750 word columns but that this longer form suits him. He tries to have the theme ready by Tuesday, does the heavy lifting on Wednesday, writes most of Thursday, hands it in by noon Friday. It is copy edited and fact checked before midnight Friday and goes to final type. (Sounds like a model I wish I had!)
I learned (again) that when presenting a speaker, one should never hand out microphones to the audience. Too many questioners decorate their little moment of fame with lots of baroque handiwork and the question gets lost, both to us and to the featured speaker. Questions written and sorted through by the moderator are much more succinct and more likely to return interesting answers.