Star F***ing
De Niro Takes Over the Tony Stage and Makes it All About Himself
You’ve probably heard that Robert De Niro, an actor not known as a creature of the theatre but as a creature of film, walked onto the stage at the Tony Awards — the only event that guarantees theatre some national attention — last Sunday and had some choice words about President Trump. Words he likes a lot.
In case you missed them, here are said choice words (NSF kids):
“I’m going to say this: FUCK TRUMP. It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump’; it’s FUCK TRUMP.’”
Theatre folk, as they often do, stood as one to applaud the movie star messiah for his brave! courageous! stunning! denunciation of the President to an audience he knew wholeheartedly agreed with him.
Of course, in their haste to applaud De Niro’s rigorous and well-considered condemnation of the current administration (Fact Check: False) so eloquently summed up in the words “F*** Trump!”, the Radio City audience did the winners of the Tony Awards a grave disservice while simultaneously diminishing the art form they were celebrating, one which can be bracingly political in the best sense.
Stepping on Theater’s Lines
Theatre gives its audience food for thought, whatever their politics may be, in a way that “F*** Trump!” somehow does not.
Tony Kushner, with whom I agree on precisely nothing unless he too likes Klondike Bars, wrote what is inarguably one of the major political plays of the last fifty years in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (we can argue about its companion piece, Perestroika, which I think is a vastly inferior work). Angels won Best Revival last Sunday.
You probably didn’t hear that on the news. Because Robert De Niro, whose sole Broadway acting credit came in Cuba and his Teddy Bear back in 1986, said “F*** Trump.”
The Band’s Visit is another play with a political message, this one more subtle than Kushner’s in Angels with its story of an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town and the interpersonal relationships that grow among the band members and the townspeople in their brief interaction. The Band’s Visit, which hasn’t exactly set the box office on fire, won ten of the eleven awards for which it was nominated. It could desperately use some attention to goose its sales.
But you probably didn’t hear about The Band’s Visit last Monday, either. You heard that Robert De Niro, whose only Broadway credit in this millennium is co-directing the musical version of A Bronx Tale, said “F*** Trump!” Again.
You also probably didn’t hear about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child winning Best Play, but you didn’t need to, because tickets cost a gazillion dollars, it is sold out forever, and it’s also a TERRIBLE play that destroys everything good and noble about the characters of Harry and Ron while turning Hermione into the queen of the universe. It’s vomitously post-modern, nihilistic, not worth your time or money, and I’ll write about it soon.
But, anyway, you didn’t hear about Harry Potter (read another book, see another play) because De Niro said what he said.
The general reaction of the theatre industry to De Niro’s bleepage is the dumb and blatantly obvious statement that “some things are more important that theatre.” Sure. MOST things are more important than theatre. But one thing that is definitely not more important than theatre is an actor who would not even be invited to the Tony Awards based on his theatre credentials deciding that the appropriate use of theatre’s only national audience is to bark curses about the President, which he had to know would be bleeped, and which he also had to know would swallow up all 30 seconds of coverage that the Tony’s get on that national news the next day.
De Niro went out on that stage, hurt theatre and the valuable work theatre sometimes does, and theatre applauded.
Badly done.
