Where Dukakis, Bush Stand on the Stage

What we want to know from George Bush and Michael Dukakis is where they stand on theater. Actors’ Equity recently asked this year’s presidential candidates their positions on four specific issues: (1) the National Endowment for the Arts budget; (2) foreign actors competing for American jobs; (3) tax averaging for actors, and (4) an American national theater.

Their answers appear in the October issue of Equity News. Dukakis answers each question point by point. He will:

--”End the annual assault on the NEA budget” and recommend “a program of multi-year support for artists similar to the Presidential Investigators program for young scientists.”

--Oppose American employment of alien performers unless their work is absolutely unique.

--Keep the tax code as it is.

--Not establish one centralized national theater, but “make a strong commitment to our regional theaters.”

Bush keeps to generalities (“the arts tell us who we are and what we can be”) but does promise to:

--”Maintain the recent growth of support for the arts,” including partnerships between the public and private sector.

--Encourage the arts endowment’s campaign for better arts programs in the schools--with the proviso that curriculums are most appropriately decided on the local level.

--Continue bringing “our finest artists” to the White House.

--Continue the National Medal of the Arts program.

That’s a relief.

The reviews are in on the Denver Center Theatre’s all-female “Waiting for Godot.”

Alan Stern of the Denver Post (male) liked it. Jackie Campbell of the Rocky Mountain News (female) didn’t.

Stern thought that Ann Guilbert (Estragon) and Kathleen Brady-Garvin (Vladimir) made a cheery Laurel and Hardy-type duo whose gender “hardly seems to matter.” The important thing was that director Randall Mylar had taken “the fear and loathing out of Beckett.”

Campbell: “What abomination is at work here that someone thought it clever to transform Beckett’s Gogo and Didi into Valley girls? I didn’t forget for a moment that these two men were women.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Producer Don Simpson (“Top Gun”) in the October issue of “Take One”: “Movies are not about old movies, they are about life.”