Public Forum is a podcast that presents a “theater of ideas: a series of conversations and performances that bring together leading voices in our politics and culture.” It features one episodes of its Drama Club, in which Elizabeth Marvel, Denis O'Hare, and Rachel Maddow read Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, a play by Tony Kushner about First Lady Laura Bush and the Iraq War.
Laura Bush once told an interviewer that her favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov. In 2003, with America in the throes of the Iraq War, Tony Kushner wrote a short play inspired by this news. It depicts the First Lady reading the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoevsky’s novel to an unlikely audience: Iraqi children wearing pajamas in heaven.