The Accidental President

If the test of an historical drama requires an audience on the edge of their seats, then Robert Schenkkan’s new play “All the Way” earns an A. 

Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson

The play is about LBJ and the American way, dirty politics and blackmail, illegal wiretaps and racial prejudice, hatred and fear and joy and hope.  It was developed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with some of the Broadway cast and its excellent creative team, including director Bill Rauch, the Festival’s Artistic Director.  This production stars not only the superb Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Baines Johnson, but also its clever minimal scenic design (fit for traveling the continental U.S.) by Christopher Acebo, “period” costuming by Deborah M. Dryden, and great hair and wig design by Paul Huntley. 

Shawn Sagady’s evocative projection design served to transform the single set into indoor and outdoor spaces in Washington DC, Mississippi, Atlantic City, and Georgia so that every aspect of the production had multiple parts to play.  Also projected were names of the politicians speaking onstage, but that might have been augmented: With twenty actors playing over forty roles, knowing who was who was occasionally confounding, as were all the acronyms of the government and political groups (defined in the program, but who reads that during a performance).  The cast list numbers less than half that of the characters, and the excellent actors do themselves proud playing multiple roles, but we weren’t always certain of the part they played in history.

That’s it for constructive criticism from me.  Most of what I felt about this play and production was “wow.”  One does not expect to be on tenterhooks wondering if LBJ will win the Democratic nomination for the presidential election.  “All the Way” is meant to evoke the campaign slogan, “All the way with LBJ!” and it does so by the second act as the political stakes rise for Johnson.

Bryan Cranston in the American Repertory Theatre production.  Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva.

About some of those actors: 

• Betsy Aidem was a fine Lady Bird Johnson (et.al.)
• Susannah Schulman switched gears with ease between a put-upon secretary, Mrs. Hubert Humphrey and Mrs. Lurleen Wallace
• Robert Petkoff’s portrayal of Hubert Humphrey was astute and sympathetic
• Rob Campbell was unapologetically greasy and egotistical as George Wallace
• Christopher Gurr was a testy Strom Thurmond
• Michael McKean was smarmy as J. Edgar Hoover
• James Eckhouse played several politicians then was totally unrecognizable as Robert McNamara
• Roslyn Ruff was heartbreaking and powerful as Fannie Lou Hamer and Coretta Scott King
• Christopher Liam Moore was sweet and tireless as LBJ’s aide Walter Jenkins, then heartbreaking
• Peter Jay Fernandez switched between a stately Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and an angry MFDP* delegate
• J. Bernard Calloway was passionate as Reverend Ralph Abernathy (SCLC*)
• William Jackson Harper was angry and reasoning as Stokely Carmichael and James Harrison,  SNCC* and SCLC, respectively

Calloway, Dirden, and Harper in the A.R.T. production.  Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva

John McMartin, snippy and sharp as Senator Richard Russell, was one of only three actors playing just one role each, along with Mr. Cranston and Brandon J. Dirden as Dr. Martin Luther King.  While Mr. Dirden did not resemble Dr. King physically, he got the voice and inflections and — most importantly — the heart right.  The wrangling and placating of differing opinions in both Johnson’s and King’s cadres mirrored one another in a fascinating manner.

The play covers one year from November 1963 through the following November when Johnson fought tooth and nail for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Bryan Cranston as LBJ was driven, an indefatigable powerhouse demanding that we come along for the ride.  He becomes the LBJ who pushed through advanced bills that were too little for some and too far for many, doing whatever it took to get them done, even disemboweling the Civil Rights Act to get it passed.  He was appalling and infuriating and oddly endearing.  Bryan Cranston made us abhor him while we admired him for his single-minded pursuit of certain inalienable rights for people like and unlike himself.  Were all his motives good?  Doubtless not.  He was vile and he was great, achieving courageous and amazing things.  And Bryan Cranston made us love him. 

This is one of those shows where the collaborative nature of theatre becomes clear.  Twenty actors are on stage, offstage, entering, leaving, hovering in the background to overhear, manipulating the set to be different places, changing their behaviors toward one another as they change persona.  All this is beautifully tempered and flows seamlessly as director Rauch orchestrated it.  The play is fast-paced and challenging, inspiring the audience to pay attention to the goals and the characters and the hope for LBJ’s Great Society (Mr. Schenkkan’s next play).  All the Way makes the audience laugh, think, wonder, question, and laugh some more.  At ourselves, of course. 

It’s a limited run at the Neil Simon Theatre, so get your tickets now.

*NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; MFDP: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference; SNCC:  Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read some American history she lived through.

Argo, the Science Fiction Film That Wasn't

Argo is the third Ben Affleck-directed film I’ve seen, and I’m impressed.  I’m not a fan of Ben Affleck the actor.  He’s there and not there; my eye and ear pass him by.  But as a director and writer (don't forget Good Will Hunting) he’s getting my attention.  I’m interested in watching what he’s done, learning his point of view.  Affleck has found his place, behind the camera, and so many wonderful actors are in this film that I think Hollywood and its actors have figured it out.  From the screenplay he wrote and directed based on Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone to The Town to Argo, Affleck has become an actor’s director to watch.

Argo is loosely based on the very real, front-page news of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.  While the Iranian revolutionaries took hostage everyone in the embassy, six Americans slipped out of the compound and found refuge in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor (a reserved and realistic performance by the always thoughtful Victor Garber), where they lived (sometimes under the floorboards) for three months.  CIA operative Tony Mendez, a.k.a. Kevin Harkness (played with quiet intensity by the director Ben Affleck) came up with a hare-brained scheme to smuggle them out of the country as a Canadian film crew working on a Hollywood science fiction movie.  This highly unlikely scenario worked — that truth is so often stranger than fiction may be the best part of a good story.

The six hidden escapees became known in the halls of the U.S. government as the “Houseguests.”  Their story is an engrossing one in which the audience can give a damn about everybody. Argo is a riveting two hours.  This level of tension is extraordinary in light of the fact that we already know how it turned out. 

“Harkness” calls on friends in Hollywood to help him set up the background for his plan. Alan Arkin is seriously hilarious as Hollywood producer Lester Siegel, who’s still got at the least chutzpah.  John Goodman reminds us what a fine straight man he is as the great make-up artist John Chambers.  These two men use their usually more frivolous professions to fabricate a false reality to cover the CIA story.  The Hollywood scenes of this conspiracy tickle us as the old pros set the P.R. wheels in motion to make the science fiction film “Argo” appear to be a real Hollywood movie.  That the Press believed — and therefore published — that this film within the film was a real movie was essential to the escape plan.  These efforts include a fashion show of a “table reading” of the absurd script with actors in costume and alien make-up to promote the film that would never be made.  A highlight of this was the appearance of Adrienne Barbeau as an oversexed Hollywood has-been cast as a galactic witch.  Inside jokes, yes, but it’s still great stuff.

Goodman as Chambers, Arkin as Siegel, and Affleck as Mendez/Harkness  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures

In contrast, the scenes in Washington, DC, are frustrating and infuriating, showing us men who all look alike repeating tired old ideas, plans that were used thirty years before.  The “suits” were as we expected them to be:  short sighted bureaucrats that almost derail the mission.  Bryan Cranston is Affleck’s supportive boss Jack O’Donnell.  He growls, he reins himself in to play the politics, until he cannot stop himself from blasting the desk jockeys when they make the wrong call.  All the DC characters are played by experienced and recognizable actors, from a tired-looking Kyle Chandler, to Bob Gunton and Philip Baker Hall, Keith Szarabajka and Zeljko Ivanek, and more.  While each one has only snippets of scenes to play — Mr. Affleck may have expected the American public to remember who those politicos were, which is a naive error — the actors are good enough to be spot on without any background provided for the audience.

Bryan Cranston as Jack O'Donnell  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures.

In the nail-biting scenes set in Iran, the actors cast as the Houseguests appeared remarkably similar to the actual people, only partly due to the ministrations of an expert hair and make-up crew.  Even better, the acting was so intense and realistic they could have been those people.  With straightforward characterizations, they created living people in a crisis situation — warts and all.  Kudos to (clockwise from the bottom front): 

-         Christopher Denham as Mark Lijek

-         Kerry Bishé as Kathy Stafford 

-         Scoot McNairy as Joe Stafford

-         Tate Donovan as Bob Anders

-         Rory Cochrane as Lee Schatz

-         Clea DuVall as Cora Lijek

The Houseguests.  (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Pictures.

 As Ambassador Taylor’s courageous and gracious wife Pat, Page Leong allowed us to see her fear of discovery under a graceful diplomatic facade.  As the ambassador’s maid, Sahar, Sheila Vand showed quiet strength and compassion.

Editor William Goldenberg and director Affleck kept the screenplay by Chris Terrio (based on an article by Joshuah Bearman) terse and tight. Every objection of the “houseguests” themselves, each procrastination, every hold-up in Washington or the airport, induced an internal scream.  I’d long since finished my popcorn before the last 15 minutes and found myself twisting and crushing the bag that had held it. By the end I bit onto the crumpled paper bag as if to keep from crying out when…well I wouldn’t want to throw in a spoiler.

Reports on this secret mission (declassified in 1997) are doubtless thousands of pages long.  It takes skill to tell the story as briskly as Argo does in less than two hours.  For all that, it is a movie, not a documentary.  Those who point out shortcuts and inaccuracies are missing the point.  I recommend this film for its sharp story-telling, its fine acting (including by those who never speak a word) and editing. Though home screens these days are two or three times the size of those sets on which some of us watched “Nightline” reports about the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, the truly big screens remain the best place to see this one.  Go to the movies and have a good time. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off to plan my next escape ….

Hanks and Roberts Do Not Do It Again

Tom Hanks’ latest foray into the hearts of America is “Larry Crowne.” There’s no resemblance to Thomas Crown. There’s no affair. There’s no heist. There’s no heat. There’s no excitement, no anticipation, no worries.

Hanks plays Larry Crowne, a popular and jolly team-leader type in a familiar chain store called “U-Mart.” He walks into a meeting with management expecting to be named Employee of the Month again, only to be fired. The excuse for downsizing this 50-something guy is that he can’t go any higher in the company because he never went to college (having spent twenty years in the Navy prior to his years serving this employer). I don’t believe that for a moment, it’s clearly ageism, and this film just as clearly wants to show that anyone practicing ageism is a fool. Larry Crowne will reinvent himself. He looks unsuccessfully for a new job. He does get unemployment insurance, but that’s not enough to pay the second mortgage he took on his house in order to buy out his ex-wife. Things are not going well for Larry, a swell guy who’s having a mid-life crisis not of his own devising. The world is sticking it to him.

But Larry doesn’t take things lying down. He chats with his yard-sale addicted neighbor Lamar played boisterously yet sincerely by Cedric the Entertainer. Lamar and his wife (Taraji P. Henson) are sweet and supportive of Larry, but have no more depth than any other character in the film. Larry goes to the local community college and is encouraged to take a public speaking class, and he goes for it. He pumps endless gallons of gasoline into his gas-guzzling SUV until he sees someone else putting a pop bottle worth of gasoline into a cute little motor scooter, so he adventurously buys one second hand. He scoots into a parking place at school and meets a pretty girl young enough to be his daughter, who clearly thinks he’s cute – for an old coot – and befriends him, teaching him to dress, among other things. Don’t worry, she’s got a boyfriend.

Valderrama and Mbatha-Raw (Universal Pictures)

Feel like you’ve already heard this story? You have, it’s in the television commercials and the trailers. And like many a perfectly pleasant film, everything you ever needed to know about it is in the commercials, so when you come out of the theatre, you’re still hungry. It’s nice. Hanks is nice. Julia Roberts is nice -- she has some fun playing a grumpy gus, Mercedes the cynical, disillusioned, college professor, married to a pretty skeavy guy played sleazily by Bryan Cranston, before she slowly grows into her usual gorgeous grinning self when she finds the hope of happiness. In Larry Crowne, of course.

Wilmer Valderrama reverts to the 1950s as Dell Gordo, the leader of the motorscooter ‘gang,’ Rita Wilson is barely amusing as a caricature of a bank loan officer; Pam Grier is sultry yet oddly believable as Mercedes’ buddy and co-worker, Frances. In fact, Grier and Roberts have the most believable relationship in the film. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is cute and sassy as “Talia,” who takes Larry Crowne under her cool wing. Particularly sweet is George Takei as Dr. Matsutani, apparently a terrific economics teacher.

Do I sound grumpy? It’s a sweet movie, really. But there’s no suspense. There’s no drama. The comedy is slight. The ending is precisely obvious from about 12 minutes in. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself for 98 minutes. It’s just that there’s not much of a there there.

I feel bad not liking this feel-good film. It’s just bland. Mr. Hanks directs his actors well enough. It’s the script by Hanks and Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) that, while well structured, relies too heavily on the actors to create characters from the lifeless forms on the page. Every character performs a purpose to further the plot – the development of Larry Crowne just when he thought he was done – but none of them are particularly real or interesting, despite the charm of the actors. So if you want a few giggles, some smiles along with your air conditioning, and an assured (I mean, really, have you seen the poster?) happy, hopeful ending, go ahead, see Larry Crowne. But eat beforehand and make reservations for afterward.

~ Molly Matera, craving a fulfilling film.