Beating the Bushes
- Publisher
- Talonbooks
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2010
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889226470
- Publish Date
- Oct 2010
- List Price
- $18.95
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
Steven Bush is a man on a mission—to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins rule a country that, even today, after electing its “rst African American president, still seems bent on world domination? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” (so the story goes), do to end the madness and redeem the family name?
Ever since the bloodless coup that felled the Republic (the controversial American election of 2000), Steven Bush has been hard at work to prove—or disprove—his blood ties to those bad Bushes in the White House. Drawing on documents related to the Iran Contra scandal and other drugs, money, guns and oil shenanigans of the CIA, as well as bizarre stories from Bush ancestral lore, he presents the American Empire created by George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. as a clear and present danger to us all.
Steven Bush’s one-man stand-up comedy, rant, political protest and call for the war-crimes trials of both George H.W. and George W. Bush is a brash theatrical tour de force that dares his audiences to accompany him on a personal quest for evidence of honesty, decency and complicity in a world of damning facts and murky conspiracy theories.
Meticulously researched, including two pages of bibliography and twenty pages of footnotes to substantiate every wild allegation made during the show, and with a Postscript to the Reader that asks some sticky questions of America’s newest president, Barack Obama, this may well not be an attempt to “ush the “Bushes” from their cover at all, but rather what Bembo Davies calls in his Afterword “an installation of self ” in a world gone mad—an installation that asks what “we the people” are going to do about regaining our collective sanity.
About the author
Steven Bush
Steven Bush has over 40 years experience in professional theatre, as an actor on stage and radio, director, teacher, co-founder of Mixed Company Theatre and former Artistic Director of Great Canadian Theatre Company. He is the co-author of Available Targets, Life on the Line. He has directed The Trojan Women and Mad Forest for UC Drama and also teaches Directing at the University of Guelph.
Editorial Reviews
“Spalding Gray meets Noam Chomsky, this is less satire than entertaining polemic, leavened by memoir … Bush’s broadside does have its lighter moments.”
—Globe & Mail
“The breadth of Steven’s talent as a theatre practitioner is quite simply remarkable. He has the uncommon gift of artistry and intellect … What is most exciting is that his work appears to come from a different place than that of most other theatre artists.”
—Djanet Sears