A satire of Laura Bush, with a dose of affection

The streets of this Democrat-dominated town are not unexpectedly filled with righteous anti-Republican rage right now. But just as common is humor. There seems to be no end of ways to parody President Bush on T-shirts and banners. Typical are the unprintable one-liners making fun of the president’s and vice president’s names. Business in the double-entendre is booming.

And then there is Tony Kushner.

The playwright of “Angels in America” and “Homebody/Kabul” has contributed a substantial, sophisticated, hilarious yet surprisingly affectionate satire of Laura Bush. The three scenes that Kushner has written for “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Happy” have had several previous readings, and the first, in which Mrs. Bush reads to the ghosts of Iraqi children, was published in the Nation last year. But Tuesday night, while the real Mrs. Bush addressed the Republican convention, there was an exceptional reading of Kushner’s scenes a couple of miles away at the New York Theatre Workshop, where Holly Hunter and Cynthia Nixon took turns impersonating the first lady.

Like many intellectuals, Kushner views Laura Bush, a former teacher and librarian, as an enigma. Her husband is not known to share her love of language and literature. If Dostoevsky is, as she claims, her favorite writer, how can a woman attracted to contemplating the great Russian novelist’s complex characters and moral issues accept the less ambiguous rhetoric that comes out of the White House?

For the surreal first scene, Hunter portrayed a wide-eyed Mrs. Bush addressing the dead Iraqi children, victims of American attacks or sanctions. Nixon was an angel, and since the actresses were simply reading from their scripts in street clothes, a third actress, comedian Lisa Kron, set the scene and read the stage directions.

All children, even dead ones, can learn to love books, Mrs. Bush tells her audience. She then goes on to describe why “The Brothers Karamazov” means so much to her. But as the suffering in Dostoevsky begins to touch tender spots in her own psyche, her defenses break down. She finally admits that she is a woman of subtlety stuck with a simpleton.

What in the world would Mrs. Bush herself think of this audacious fantasy? That’s Kushner’s even brasher next scene, in which the first lady confronts the playwright after having seen the first scene. Now played by Nixon, Mrs. Bush is elegantly poised, indignant and smart as she cuttingly jousts with Kush- ner, the role Hunter now assumes (wearing one of those anti-Bush T-shirts with unprintable slogans). Art, Mrs. Bush expounds, has nothing to do with politics, and Dostoevsky, in particular, was a visionary who transcended politics. Perhaps, she says, it is not the president who is simplistic -- he actually gets things done -- but rather the Democrats, who debate much and do little, and even the playwright.

This Laura Bush also refuses to cede the moral high ground about Iraq, accusing Kushner of wishing for more suffering in Iraq so that his position can be proved right. “You wouldn’t be happy if Iraq succeeded,” she insists. Kushner denies it but is rattled.

Mrs. Bush also doesn’t appreciate some two-bit comic like Kron reading sarcastic descriptions of her in the stage directions. At this point, Kron bursts in, tells off the first lady and then recounts an outrageous dream she had about President Bush at the United Nations.

Hunter, Nixon and Kron were terrific, stimulating the imagination in a way a full staging couldn’t possibly equal.

Meanwhile, Kushner has managed the brilliant trick of taking Mrs. Bush seriously while being wildly irreverent at the same time, the trick of humanizing her for a partisan audience.

Candidate for the subversive

Another goofy, yet artistically interesting, parody of the current administration is an exhibition on 57th Street, not far from some of the fancier hotels hosting Republican delegates, that is getting considerable attention.

The Luxe Gallery has been turned into “The Experimental Party Disinformation Center.” This room full of flashing television monitors and skewered political sloganeering is Abe Golan’s campaign headquarters. If elected president, he promises, he will “subvert the dominant paradigm.” If you want somebody “who is willing to gnaw into the body politic,” Abe is your man.

This multimedia show, designed to reveal what “representation through virtualization” might be like, has perhaps too little of Kush- ner’s nuance. But it does at least present the prospect that if the Department of Works, Mixologies and Transformations got its hands on us, Republicans and Democrats alike would all be pounded by a fractured, frantic, tantalizing beat.

And you were worried about the Patriot Act?