This article deserves a longer and
more personal introduction than usual.
I’ve long since said that I feel
life is little more than a series of microaggressions. As I am on the spectrum
I may be more sensitive to the smaller ones that the average person but I don’t
think that makes my statement meritless. Anyone who has spent any extended time
on either the MTA or public transit in New York could be forgiven for thinking
it is a long, extended conspiracy to drive commuters insane.
That being said, perhaps because
I’m in my forties, perhaps because I’ve had a lot of therapy, I’ve come to
conclusion that if we as individuals take every single microaggression or
indeed a long series of them too personally, we as a society run the risk of
not being taken seriously when real problems become evident in our lives. I’m
familiar with those kinds of problems as well: as I’ve written occasionally in
a few articles over the years for a period of nearly two years I was the victim
of a prolonged campaign of verbal and physical harassment from a neighbor in my
apartment building who was suffering from both a mental illness accelerate by
dementia. Even after I was physically assaulted by this individual in full view
of my neighbors, this campaign didn’t end until the individual was moved to a
long-term facility a little less than two years ago. So I am more than aware of
the difference between PERCEIVED bad behavior and ACTUAL bad behavior.
I have come to believe that one
of the problems in today’s society is that too many people have a tendency to
conflate the two and apply them haphazardly to other individuals. Because this
happens this leads to the fact that so many things that should have the ability
to shock the conscious are mentioned with the same weight as relatively trivial
behavior and as a result this can make all of this background noise. And while
I will acknowledges both sides are guilty of it, in the world of entertainment which I have spent
so much time covering over the years there has been an overwhelming trend to
argue that the two are equal. By doing so we have fundamentally lost perspective
and frequently conflate say, the often horrible commentary of J.K. Rowling with
the genuinely criminal behavior of Neil Gaiman. One is saying bad things; one
is doing deviant and criminal things, but when you decide that you will not buy either of their work, you are
essentially putting both under the same brush, and that is dangerous by any rational
standard.
Similarly I find that ever since
the rise of Trump in 2015 so much of the entertainment industry has unofficially
christened itself part of the ‘Resistance’ against everything MAGA represents.
Considering that despite their efforts Trump won the Presidency in 2016 and won
reelection last year, it’s hard to see how much they’ve helped. It’s hard to
draw a direct line to the increasingly bad financial prospects every aspect of
the industry has been having over that same period but it’s hard not to think
that going out of your way to isolate at least half the country couldn’t have been
a factor. But like so many other aspects of the left – and I doubt I’d get much
debate when I said that every aspect of the entertainment industry is among the
most left wing community in America – they have never acknowledged that they
might be wrong. And like the aspects of the far right, they have become just as
unpleasant and nasty in their disdain for opposition and opposing viewpoints.
It's almost as if during the last
decade Hollywood has started to believe its own publicity and have gone to
ludicrous lengths to both virtue signal while maintaining their level of
elitism. This was best emphasized in the labor stoppage of 2023 when a group of
millionaires cosplayed as working class Americans while the rest of the
industry – including everyone associated with it who wasn’t part of a union –
suffered horrific financial losses. When they came back to the bargaining table
six months later, essentially getting close to exactly what the studios had
offered the first time, they framed it is a victory for labor even though I
remain baffled as to what was gained by it. I’ve had a very cynical view of the
industry’s politics ever since.
Not even the results of the
election in 2024 have done anything to convince them of their behavior; if
anything so much of 2025 so far represents that the industry is determined to
show the nastiest aspects of itself, and that includes many of their own
members. Karla Sofia Gascon was lifted up by the film industry as part of the
war against transphobia even though Emilia Perez was considered a
horrible film. But what bothered Hollywood was when they learned before they
lifted up Gascon she’d made tweets that would not have been uncommon on Truth Social
these days. Even her co-stars couldn’t wait to throw her under the bus. When Bill
Maher dared to have dinner at the White House, Larry David compared him to
having a dinner with Hitler and it was published in the Times. Maher had spent
the last decade being as anti-Trump as possible and has been immediately
afterwards. None of that mattered. Last month when SNL satirized the Trump
administration in a White Lotus parody Aimee Lou Wood posted on Instagram
that she didn’t think it was funny and the internet chose to ignore the context
and immediately attack SNL who was forced to apologize. (Walton Goggins,
who hosted the show later that year, thought it was hysterical.)
It's almost as if Hollywood has
been going out of its way to play into the narrative that conservatives have
been making about the left for years: that they are thin-skinned, virtue
signaling individuals who don’t want to offend anyone and will turn on their
own for being insufficiently leftist. This brings me, finally, to what’s going
on with Patti LuPone and the Tonys.
If you’re late this story (I just
heard about it today) here is what appears to have happened. Last fall, LuPone
and Mia Farrow were starring in The Roommate at the Booth Theater. This
theater is near to the Shubert Theatre where the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s
Kitchen plays. LuPone complained to the theater about the loud music that
could be heard through a shared wall during her play. The problem was correct
and LuPone sent flowers to the theater.
This should have been the end of
it. However, not long after, one of the stars, Kecia Lewis took to social media
and characterized LuPone’s complaints as ‘bullying. They’re offensive, they are
racially microaggresive, they’re rude, they’re rooted in privilege.” And furthermore
referring to ‘a predominantly Black Broadway show as loud can unintentionally
reinforce harmful stereotypes.”
Now I realize that being an
actress on Broadway makes you prone to diva like tendencies but it is
incredibly difficult to look at Lewis’s attitude and commentary as anything but
inflammatory. It really does seem that Lewis was determined to take what should
have been a private matter and turn it into a political statement. At the very
least, this is reading a lot into something and an extraordinary overreaction
to what happened.
Not long after LuPone was asked
about the incident. She responded with her characteristic candor and bluntness.
Lewis had referred to LuPone as a fellow theater veteran. LuPone said. “She’s
done seven Broadway shows. I’ve done 31. (It’s actually 10 for Lewis to LuPone’s
28 but the point is the same.) Don’t call yourself a vet, bitch.”
Now of all the insults that
LuPone could have used ‘bitch’ is mild and practically a term of endearment in
the theater. LuPone also spoke harshly, against Trump and Sarah Palin, along
with Kevin Kline and Glenn Close. She also referred to Close as a bitch.
Nevertheless this led to an open
letter circulating on social media calling on the Broadway League, the American
Theatre wing and ‘the greater theatre community’ to demand accountability,
justice and respect. This group comes from Theatre for Change and has been
signed by over 500 people, among them performers and Tony Winners:
“Recently, Patti LuPone made
deeply inappropriate and unacceptable public comments about two of Broadway’s
most respected and beloved artist: Kecia Lewis and Audra MacDonald. “In a
published interview she referred to Kecia Lewis – a black woman and a forty
year veteran of the American stage – as a b----. This language is
not only degrading and misogynistic – it is a blatant act of disrespect. It
constitutes bullying. It constitutes harassment. It is emblematic of the microaggressions
and abuse that people in this industry have endured for far too long, too often
without consequences.”
“Individuals, including Patti LuPone
who use their platform to publicly demean, harass or disparage fellow artists –
particularly with racial, gendered and otherwise violent language – should not
be welcomed at industry events, including the Tony Awards, fundraisers and
public programs.”
It fair takes your breath away. It
completely ignores Lewis’s role in the conflagration and puts the onus on LuPone
for expressing – what I would argue to be a mild reaction - to the words that
Lewis used in her own post which were far more inflammatory. And consider that
it takes place in an industry that loves to point out that the expression of
the arts is an arm in the fight against oppression, the fact that they are choosing
to tear down a woman who went out of her way to comment harshly about who
you’d think would be their common enemy shows yet again the left’s decision
to never see the forest for the trees and to engage in in-fighting when they
feel they personally have been offended. Throw in the fact that the left is
yelling so much about how the current administration is going after both the
arts and free speech and it doesn’t shock me that no single person or individual
is taking credit for organizing it.
Every time I read of these
stories I wonder if whoever does this wants to give networks like Fox
News a story where they have the moral high ground. Are they trying to convince
more people that the left is out of touch with real America when they wage
battles like this? Are they trying to prove that they can be just as unpleasant
and nasty as the conservatives when it comes to their own? Or do they really
believe that LuPone’s calling someone a bitch in an interview in the New Yorker
is just as offensive as the kind of things that come out of cable news or the
White house on a daily basis?
As for the tie to Audra McDonald, McDonald
just liked the post. LuPone then said: “That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a
friend.” Even if your acknowledging that her remarks to Lewis are derogatory (a
big if) trying to equate these offenses is impossible to understand. Is there a
rule that every Broadway Actress must be friends with each other? It’s clearly
not true with Lewis and LuPone, so why it should be true with LuPone and McDonald?
I really think that the writers of this letter knew that it was going to be a
hard sell to get support for this with just Lewis so they put McDonald’s name
in just to get more signatures.
And I reject the idea that LuPone’s
remarks are controversial as that bastion of leftism the Huffington Post says. Is
it now controversial to say you don’t like a fellow actress and call them names?
No one, I should add, demanded she apologize to Glenn Close for calling her a
bitch, so it’s okay to call a white woman a bitch but not an African-American
woman? I suppose that everything would have been okay if Trump called LuPone
nasty and then they would have united against a common enemy. No one, for the
record, seemed bothered by the fact she said bad things about Trump or Sarah
Palin. I’ll let that speak for itself.
LuPone, of course, made a public
apology. Of course she did. She knows the game better than anyone. She’s no
doubt been called a bitch to her face more often than most of the people
on Broadway and she knows that a woman isn’t allowed the luxury of having a
principles the same way a white man is. I suspect she knows that many of the
people who take this is as extreme offense would not have survived when she was
coming up on Broadway nearly half a century ago.
She also no doubt had to undergo real
aggression when she was coming up that so many of these people who choose to turn
on her couldn’t have endured and that she didn’t have the benefit of social
media or the same kind of mindset that exists today. She had to suck it up and put
on a public face that was no doubt very much as staged as the one that made her
such a brilliant actress for generations. She knows more about double standards
then so many could ever dream of.
So of course she apologized. And I
have no doubt she will spend the rest of her life simmering at the thin-skinned
members of her community who take the attitude of burn-it-all-down to every
industry and have no problem using double standards when it works to their
advantage. That this was an example of a woman attacking another woman in the
same profession in the same community has basically been forgotten in the world
of a left-leaning industry that would never dare ask for context.
To be clear, there was no
bullying by LuPone. A less successful actress saw a chance to virtue signal and
tear down an industry icon because she could. That the target was another woman
should have given her pause given the climate of America today but it didn’t. Her
brand mattered more than LuPone’s. Her aggressive and inflammatory response was
met with a dismissive one by her target and Broadway chose to ignore the
context of it and see white privilege. There’s nothing horrible about what
LuPone said or did but she has to apologize for it anyway.
I will say one thing. Why did everybody focus
on Audra McDonald’s part in this but no one chose to focus on LuPone’s attitude
to Glenn Close? Why is no one asking for a reaction from here? She was called a
bitch too, so she has more of a right to be offended than McDonald was who was
barely mentioned. And she’s more of an icon than McDonald – or for that matter,
LuPone – will ever be. Honestly they might have gotten more signatures that
way.
I guess I’ll have to wait until
they interview Close in The New Yorker. Don’t watch your language,
Glenn.
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