Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics

Renowned actress Jane Alexander had attended her share of protest marches in the 1960s and 1970s, but she had never been involved in mainstream politics and was happily engaged in her acting career when she was asked to consider becoming head of the ever-embattled National Endowment for the Arts. This witty, entertaining account of her tenure there brings a Washington outsider's perspective and an actor's eye for the telling human detail to the often stultifying subject of bureaucratic politics.

Alexander's NEA tenure coincided with the ascent of the Gingrich Congress and its attempt to sabotage arts funding. In Command Performance she offers a sharp and sometimes hilarious take on those sometimes surreal days, and a gimlet-eyed portrait of Washington at work, play, and cocktail reception. Whether she is listening to Gingrich suggest to Melanie Griffith that there's apart for her in the movie version of his novel, trying without much success actually to talk to the president who hired her, traveling the inspiring landscape of the American arts scene, gracefully skewering the poseurs and politicos who crossed her path, or documenting her own uncomfortable adjustment to political reality and brutality, Alexander is charming, disarmingly honest, and convincingly passionate on why we need art, and why the government should be in the business of supporting it.

A Tony and Emmy Award-winner and four-time Oscar nominee, Jane Alexander has starred in dozens of movies, including The Great White Hope, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Eleanor and Franklin, and Testament. Her stage credits include The Great White Hope, Shadowlands, and The Sisters Rosensweig. She was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1993-1997. She is married to director and producer Ed Sherin, and lives in the country north of New York City.