Broadway, Politics and Marlo Thomas

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.