This from Doug Moe via HNN:
Stanley Kutler, the esteemed U.S. historian who lives in Madison, was sipping tea on the far west side Monday afternoon and thinking about something his late, great colleague in the UW history department, George Mosse, used to say about being a professor.
"We don't teach," Mosse said. "We perform."
Recalling his friend, Kutler chuckled and said, "Good teaching is like good theater in a way. I mean, you don't want to take your clothes off. They'd throw things at us. But we're performing. Of course we are.
"Warming to the subject, Kutler said, "Richard Nixon was an actor in high school. He claimed to have been a very good actor. 'Better than Ronald Reagan,' he said." Kutler chuckled again. "He always had to one-up everybody."
Next week, at the Washington Stage Guild theater in Washington, D.C., history, academia, politics - and, yes, show business - will come together when for the first time a public reading of Kutler's long-germinating play, "I, Nixon," will be performed.
The reading at the Stage Guild - highly regarded for its staging of the works of George Bernard Shaw and for discovering new plays of merit - is scheduled for Monday. Later in December, in Chicago, there will be a second reading of Kutler's Nixon play. That one is slated for the Victory Gardens Theater, which is housed in the newly renovated Biograph Theatre.
For more, go here.
The original post was 11/28, so Kutler's work goes on stage this week! Break a leg!
