The Dead and Dostoyevsky, in a War With Bush (Laura played by a man)

[Khephra]

It might not have swayed many swing voters: a playlet in which a man portrays Laura Bush, talking passionately about Dostoyevsky and moral relativity to the ghosts of Iraqi children, cursing occasionally and revealing at one point that she sometimes calls her husband "the Chimp." ("You know, those ears," the character of the first lady says, smiling impishly.)

But at a benefit performance Monday night at the American Airlines Theater, this extended scene by the playwright Tony Kushner served as the backdrop for a kind of joyous cultural pep rally for those who want to see Mr. Bush turned out of office.

The scene, from a planned longer work to be called "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," was also part of a continuing effort by the liberal activist online group MoveOn.org to try to harness the arts more firmly to its political cause and to mend what the group sees as a rift between populist politics and popular culture.

Whether Mr. Kushner's work could be considered popular culture, of course, was open to debate. An unapologetic screed against Mr. Bush and his foreign policy, using Dostoyevsky as a vehicle to examine the vagaries of political morality, it drew a crowd of New York performers who have become regulars at such events, like the actors Edie Falco, Kristen Johnston and Philip Seymour Hoffman and the electronica artist Moby.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/theater/04KUSH.html?pagewanted=all