High Society

I bemoaned in an earlier post that I was upset with myself for letting this blog lie dormant for a few Ashland seasons. Never was that more relevant than today when I realized that I had failed to record my impressions of the stunning world premiere of Robert Schenkkan's "All the Way" two years ago. I may re-read that play - which has since won two Tony awards - and sit down to log my thoughts one day, but for now I will have to settle for lauding the equally impressive sequel to that memorable show, which I had the privilege of seeing this afternoon.

"The Great Society" is the conclusion of Schenkkan's brilliant examination of the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  It covers the years 1965 to '68 following LBJ's landslide re-election and focusing primarily on his efforts to pass a slate of ground-breaking social programs. However, the slippery slope of an escalating crisis in Vietnam which he inherited from the late President John F. Kennedy is slowly but surely consuming more and more precious funding and media "oxygen" from his efforts on the domestic front: fighting poverty, establishing Medicare, and passing a Voting Rights Act.

The delicate balances he struck with his political acumen in his first term begin to fall apart under the economic and political pressures of this new storm front. His tenuous alliance with Martin Luther King begins to crumble as LBJ tries to keep his federal programs alive in Congress; King can't wait for Johnson at the cost of the lives being lost daily in protest marches in the Deep South. And enemies in Washington and beyond the beltway begin to sharpen their knives as they sense a chance to gain ground in midterm elections and unwind the president's beloved Great Society.

The weight of all this falls squarely on the shoulders of Jack Willis, who masterfully brings Johnson's larger-than-life presence to the Bowmer stage.  When he walked in at the top of the show and started telling a prescient tale about bull riders and the short window of joy they experience before they inevitably get bucked off (and stomped on), it was like seeing an old friend. Willis simply owns this role. It fits him like an old glove, and the two-year interval between "All the Way" and now just melted away when he started jawing.  Willis has the brass, the wit, the warmth - and the fear - of this giant of a man nailed. And this play is not the chronicle of an inspiring rise to power, as in the first part of this saga; it is a tale which descends into tragedy and loss. At a post-show discussion, the great actor Richard Elmore (who plays FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to a T) said what we were all thinking while watching this drama -- namely that it is truly Shakespearean.  It has a king in decline, plotting advisers, ghosts ... all the elements that make a Bard-ian tragedy. My astute friends Rick Williams and Judy Epstein - who saw the show with me - both observed that the LBJ saga has essentially taken the mantle of the Shakespeare history play this season.

Bill Rauch's direction was impressive, mixing projected media from the era with a set that slowly becomes deconstructed and chaotic as the country comes apart socially.  Particularly jarring was an excerpt from Walter Cronkeit's seminal takedown of the government's efforts in Vietnam on the CBS Evening News, prompting LBJ to say "Well, if I've lost Cronkite I've lost the country." Also bringing emotions to the fore were moving depictions of civil rights violence from Selma, to Chicago, to Los Angeles - and a running tally of dead and wounded in Southeast Asia. The task for Rauch was to infuse what could have been a sterile historical pageant with drama, character, wit and compassion. In this he succeeded.

Also notable in the cast were Kenajuan Bently as a vulnerable MLK; Peter Frechette as a compelling Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Richard Elmore as the Iago-like J. Edgar Hoover; Jonathan Haugen as the villain of the piece, George Wallace (and in a Daily Double of sorts, an oily Richard Nixon later in the play); Mark Murphey as the ultimately flawed strategist Robert MacNamara; Terri McMahon as a warm but firm Lady Bird Johnson; and Danforth Comins as the contentious Sen. Robert Kennedy.  There was not a false note in any of these and many other performances.

In the final analysis, this is a worthy successor to "All the Way" and a thrilling entry in Ashland's ever-growing stable of compelling world premieres. LBJ's story is now over, but his legacy as evinced in this pair of supremely worthy plays will indeed continue.