On a recent Seattle weekend, fighting back the urge to sit home and watch Tony Soprano ice another goombah on DVD for the umpteenth time, I went to see three performances over three nights: Ubu Roi, a turn-of-the-century farce at the Empty Space Theatre, queer performance art legend Peggy Shaw’s To My Chagrin at On The Boards and a late-night cabaret at Seattle’s venerable New City Theatre.All three seemed to be telling me the same thing: There’s no better way to get a quick rise out of your audience than with a cheap shot at our president. It’s a trend I first noticed a few months back while attending the premiere of Errol Morris’ dynamite documentary, The Fog of War. When Bob McNamara, speaking of Vietnam, reminds us that unilateral wars rarely succeed, the audience burst into applause. (Seattle is a town where lawns are decorated with U.N. logos.)While I’m thrilled that artists are choosing to use the stage as a forum to engage the global debate, I’m less than thrilled with the results to date. The vibrant tradition of political protest in the arts, which dates back at least as far as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, has been reduced to a tossed-off, cheap one-liner. This is disappointing. We can do better.

So, after watching some less-than-insightful Bush-bashing get greeted with riotous applause, it occurred to me that we might expand the audience for the arts by going beyond Bush-bashing and playing directly and intelligently to the political fever that’s gripped our communities this election year. Instead of throwing red meat to the faithful, let’s work on raising the debate so that art becomes the legitimate medium for enlightened political dialogue.

To accomplish this, we must channel this newfound obsession with all things red and blue into the public spaces that we’ve built precisely to re-enact these great debates. We in the arts community rarely try to actively market to politically active citizens in the way that we bring politics into our art. Put another way, we often bring politics to the arts consumer (as these shows I attended made clear), but rarely do we bring art directly to the political consumer, nee the citizen.

This is changing. The beautiful, bizarre puppets and street theater that have become part and parcel of the modern protest movement are great examples. They’re also instances of the move from spectator-driven to participant-driven art, a trend that’s becoming inexorable as the video game industry surpasses the film industry in annual revenue. It’s time to bring this kind of thinking into the halls of our art galleries, theaters and symphony halls, where the potential for a compelling dialogue is far greater.

Our great temples of art, from Seattle Center to Lincoln Center, are ultimately civic institutions, and their ability to contribute to the public debate is what justifies their existence. Having an artist tell me “Bush hates trees” is of questionable artistic merit and even less political value. By bringing in new forms of participation and truly turning art spaces into a genuine forum for discourse, we can begin to realize their value and attract new and diverse audiences. We must think of these spaces as functioning, 24-hour town halls, hives that buzz long after the afternoon matinee has ended. Only then will these spaces have regained their charter as keepers of the body politic.

What’s lacking is a public appreciation for how the arts can help us understand our world. We need a new civic mindset that sees the arts as a chance to continue and enhance our great debates in ways that the talking heads on MSNBC can’t possibly imagine. So I’ll politely disagree with Samuel Goldwyn when he says, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Rather, I’ll take a cue from that other giant of 1930s art, Bertolt Brecht, who wrote, “Theatre remains theatre even when it is instructive theatre, and in so far as it is good theatre it will amuse.”

It’s worth remembering that Western theater began 3,000 years ago around the campfires of Ancient Greece. As Election Day approaches, and the political flames burn, we should rediscover the influence of those early rituals.