Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine sent fairy-tale characters "into the woods" in their stylish musical of that name. Playwright Mark St. Germain used real-life people from history to do the same in his Camping with Henry and Tom with results alternately humorous, poignant, and thought-provoking. Based on an actual Maryland camping trip taken by President Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in 1921, St. Germain's play imagines conversations that might have occurred had the three movers and shakers slipped away from the "flash monkeys" at their media-swamped campsite and got lost in the forest after their Model T, with Ford driving, hit a deer and conked out.
Horse Cave Theater's thoroughly engaging production, directed by Robert F. Brock, glows with intelligence and wit in the hands of the four accomplished actors who make up the cast -- Ronald J. Aulgur as Harding, Alex Cherington as Ford, Horse Cave Theater's artistic/producing director Warren Hammack as Edison, and Scott Dixon as Colonel Edmund Starling, the Secret Service veteran (and Henderson, Kentucky, native) who guarded the lives of Harding and four other U.S. presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Together they fashioned a kind of verbal cyclorama in their pointed exchanges. Sharp contrasts between Harding's lack of ambition and Ford's ferocious power seeking (Ford openly coveted the Presidency, whereas Harding reluctantly got the office because, it is said, political kingmakers thought he looked Presidential) coexist with Edison's pomposity-puncturing observations and his attempts to shut out the others by losing himself in the book he brought along, "The World of the Supernatural" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Many parallels—none of them heavy-handed—to today's political scene make St. Germain's crackling dialogue doubly delicious. The White House, it appears, always had large closets. And even back in 1921 "greatness" was "a thing of the past...an illusion." People should be grateful for winding up with "the best of the second rate" for President.
