IF POLITICS IS show business for ugly people, New York City's Aug. 2 MoveOn.org benefit reading of Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy proved show business can be politics for beautiful people.

The B.P.s did show up for the event – including San Francisco's Marc Huestis, who associate-produced the follow-up to his own staging of the Kushner scene at the Castro Theatre last July. The sight of Edie Falco, Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman (soon-to-retire Kiki and Herb), and Philip Seymour Hoffman helped dull any headaches caused by Tom Ridge's grim Code Orange mug on Times Square's Jumbotron. John Cameron Mitchell played a pious Laura Bush, speaking to dead Iraqi children about the beauty of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Patricia Clarkson played the explanatory angel, still in America. But Kushner provided a bonus track. After seeing the rehearsal, he went home the night before the show and wrote a scene in which the first lady confronts him about his impropriety. A gravel-voiced Clarkson was the feisty version of Bush in this round-two preemptory strike on Kushner's already foam-mouthed critics, and host Kristen Johnston, sporting a pink T-shirt of the vice president with the word "dick" on it, was Kushner.

"I was awed – but not awestruck – by Kushner," Huestis said last week, amazed at the scene II coup. I guess not: he called out "bitch" instead of "say cheese" to get his snapshot of Mitchell and Kushner together, and only Mitchell responded well to the banter. When we caught up with Huestis, he was recovering nicely, checking the advancement of red states and blue states on his computer screen. If John Kerry does get elected, it only seems right he should thank Huestis, who sparked the marriage of Kushner's text with Mitchell's insouciance as the opening act of a bound-to-be-tawdry Republican National Convention in NYC. "That's what I love about my life," he said. "After John Cameron Mitchell played 'Hedwigged-Out Xmas' at the Castro last year, I suggested he play Laura Bush for this. That's why the event was so attractive. He's so great at sculpting text." And he wore the same outfit as he did at the Castro show, his "lucky" one, he told Huestis and friend Lulu.

The event packed the 800-seat house and raised $18,000, but that clearly wasn't quite enough in these raging final days of summer – Huestis felt compelled to do some rabble-rousing. "I'm the 'man from San Francisco' in the Salon article," he admitted. The way Salon reported it, comedian Reno produced her own one-woman show in the question-and-answer portion of the evening, responding to the suggestion that protests were to be avoided during the RNC with a vehement call to action, and after her, another person piped up, "I'm from San Francisco – and we need to do something to counterbalance that convention!" For Huestis, it was just a lively discussion, but for the press, it was close to a riot – quelled in the nick of time by a trip upstairs to the bar.

Prepared for more art and more war, Huestis has already purchased his ticket to NYC for RNC-related commotions: first a night with Margaret Cho at the Apollo Theater Aug. 28 – produced by Josh Wood, who put on the MoveOn.org Kushner benefit – and then what he and Reno at least are hoping to be the best street theater of the year.

Susan Gerhard