When I
learned of the cast of “The Best Man” a while back, I recalled a thought I’d
had many years ago. When I retire, if I
want to go see a couple plays on Broadway, I’m just going to fly there and see
them. Well, I retired January 1 and
decided to do just that. Besides, one of
the plays I wanted to see, in addition to the Gore Vidal revival, was “The
Columnist,” with John Lithgow. The
third play was “Other Desert Cities.”
All three
had great elements of the media and journalism, as well as celebrated
actors. The “Best Man” cast John Larroqukette
as a traditional liberal running in the primary against an opportunistic,
ambitious, young pragmatic conservative opponent. Their wives are fittingly appropriately,
flawed, to match their husbands. The
young wife is vulgar and scheming, in a role parallel to her hubby, played by Eric
McCormack of “Will and Grace” fame. And
a delightful Candice Bergan is the long suffering, estranged wife of our
liberal, who loses in the end (sorry to give away the plot to a 1960 play but
you knew the liberal had to lose in this era of Romney and the Tea Party). But, since Gore Vidal is the author (and, he
is still alive), the conservative loses too, thankfully. Given the results of the Wisconsin recently
and the Walker win this week, the fiction result was still welcome. James Earl Jones presides over this
delightful, witty exchange as a sage enjoying his last hurrah. And it’s all played for the media in the
1960s. Loved the play, and the small but
marvelous performance of Angela Lansbury, whose casting as the aging (Angela is
in her 80s) politico with a feel for the traditional women’s vote is
delightful.
That was a
nice antidote to the Wisconsin Tea Party win, but the next day I saw “The
Columnist,” based on the life of Joe Alsop, whose column I recall reading as a
young journalist in college in the 1960s.
I was probably a bit more conservative then, but I didn’t know the full
story of Alsop, a closeted gay man compromised by communists while visiting
Moscow who almost idolized John Kennedy and wielded considerable clout and
power in administrations up to Johnson as he beat the drums for the Vietnam
War. I lived through this era, so I knew
the cast of characters and key events well: the escalation of the war, the U.S.
sponsored Diem coup, the Cold War fear of dominos falling—a concept the play
says Alsop coined, The Kennedy assassination, and student protests into the
Nixon era. John Lithgow is excellent, as
expected, but the rest of the cast was fine as well. The changing views of gays and the complex
personality of Alsop were nicely done.
Then we come
to politics of the 1980s and 1990s, and a different war, in the Middle
East. I have wanted to see Stockard
Channing since seeing her in “The House of Blue Leaves.” She was outstanding in a strong cast. I didn’t know this story, cast in Palm
Springs, where the long-depressed daughter and younger son are visiting their
conservative, ex-actor, ex-screen writer parents and their alcoholic loser
aunt. The setting, which the lady
sitting next to me said was just like those in Palm Springs, was a southwest
living room cast in white. Each cast
member has at least a couple opportunities to “explode” with strength and
power, even if it unveils vulnerability at times. The daughter has written a book, a six-year
project that proves she had a second book in her and was emerging from her time
in depression. Not long into the play we
learn the book is not fiction but a story of the family, keying in on the lost
son who died, committed suicide after being involved in a war-protest bombing
which inadvertently killed a homeless veteran.
Eventually Stockard reads the manuscript and they beg, threaten, urge,
try to convince the daughter that the publicity will destroy the family (if
anybody remembers them from the era of Ronny and Nancy) when it appears in a
magazine excerpt and later book form.
And it will destroy the trust they’ve long granted their daughter. Loved the liberal-conservative exchange on
politics, even if the terms seem a bit dated in our “Tea Party” extreme
right-wing shift of Republicans era (no attempt to be objective in this blog,
folks). Eventually, the living-room
drama explodes as Stacy Keach (the father who refuses to read the manuscript at
all) says he cannot hold a secret any longer. Now, stop reading if you intend to see the
play, as the provisos usually say.
Rather than turn away her son when he comes to them for help, as the
daughter charges, Stockard actually cleaned him up and whist him away to some
safe place from which he then went on to continue life in hiding, never again
seeing his parents, though calling now and then for a moment of silence on the
phone. I wasn’t expecting this ending,
and it provided quite a dramatic end to the play. Loved the acting, and I stayed afterwards to
get an autograph of Stockard Channing.
What’s Marlo
Thomas have to do with this? As it turns
out, she was the lady sitting next to me in the play. I thought it was her but never said anything
because they deserve privacy, and I wasn’t 100% sure. Then a young lady also waiting for an
autograph outside confirmed it and started talking about “That Girl.” The play did involve
an old medium, the book, which also figured nicely in my only other “academic“pursuit”
on the trip to NYC, visiting the Morgan Library, where I saw (behind glass) a
Gutenberg Bible, an original score in Mozart’s hand writing, an early
dictionary, and more, all in a setting fit for a robber baron. They knew how to live, that’s for sure, even
if the contrast with Palm Springs was visually dramatic.
