Seemingly designed only to coincide with this year's presidential race, this untouched revival of Gore Vidal's ahead-of-its time 1960 ode to political backbiting and scandal hasn't dated necessarily but still has the feel of being warmed-over. To be fair, the play has its share of acute exchanges and some very sharp performances. However, watching it, you get the feeling that even if you existed in 1960 (I didn't), the play would still feel stilted and vaguely forgettable. Vidal's structure holds up, but this production has a serious lack of actual urgency. It's like watching a theater version of Mike Nichols' toothless film version of Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," only cast a little older, sometimes to great success, sometimes not.
As the play opens, we are introduced to Secretary William Russell (Spalding Gray), a presidential hopeful holed up in a swanky hotel room with his plain, sensible wife Alice (Michael Learned) and his tireless campaign manager (Mark Blum). Early on, we learn that while being generally charming and bon-mot spouting, Mr. Russell is a flawed man. Rumors of his infidelities pop up, as he and his wife carry on the facade of an actual loving marriage. Also in the midst are reports of Russell's mental instability, conjured up by smooth opponent Sen. Joseph Cantwell (Chris Noth, of HBO's "Sex And The City"). Cantwell is handsome, ruthless and a great talker; he poses an immediate threat to Russell, and his wife, Mabel (Christine Ebersole) is every bit the First Lady-in-waiting, a gum-flapping Southern belle as removed from Alice's judicious character as anybody.
Echoes of JFK and Richard Nixon abound; the play is more or less a morality tale and an examination of how far one should take the public versus the personal. Of course, the play has a bomb to drop before the end of the first act, and while sensitively revealed, it compounds this production's unsteadiness. We never quite buy the revelation, whether true or not, because there is a lack of insight into how these people talk and think. Well, some of the time anyway. In a rare non-monologue performance, Gray is surprisingly terrific as the consumed Russell . Usually known for botching his appearances outside solo shows (his one-man piece Monster In A Box devoted much time to this fact), Gray's a great fit for the role. His nervous energy and unassuredness gives Russell a core of fallibility that is unmistakably believable.
Michael Learned is even better as his ultra-patient, forgiving wife. With quiet exactitude, she becomes our emotional focal point and puts a human face on the women who must idly stand by and watch their husbands steer themselves into unenviable situations. But the rest of the actors seem much less at home. Noth is correctly cast, but his portrayal lacks magnetism, if he had played this more like his Mr. Big character on "Sex And The City," it would actually have been more dramatically satisfying. And Christine Ebersole disappoints as his supercilious wife, especially after her endearing turn in Manhattan Theater Club's unfairly dismissed Current Events earlier this year. We just don't connect with these two the way we do the Gray-Learned characters, giving an unfair advantage to certain principals.
Also featured in the cast are two old pros with relatively smaller stage time: Elizabeth Ashley, playing a swaggering chairwoman in her usual broad, audience-pleasing style, and Charles Durning, uncharacteristically dull as a dying, crusty ex-President who offers sage advice to the two hopefuls. Durning's line readings are so hushed and sometimes indecipherable that the energy level seems to dissipate whenever he appears, very unlike his typical persona.
This is the first Broadway effort for director Ethan McSweeny (who scored with the successful off-Broadway Leopold and Loeb play, Never The Sinner in 1998), and his novice take on the material calls out for much more flair. Much of it is composed of standard, two-person dialogues, but McSweeny fails to find the electricity in the exchanges. John Arnone's seriously unimaginative set design is also a large debit. Using the hotel rooms of both the Cantwells and the Russells as a backdrop for virtually the entire play, [John] Arnone has designed the play with a lack of concrete artifices, with implied partitions that prove very puzzling. At several points, you're unclear as to whether a certain character is supposed to hear what another is saying, because it is never clearly established what the boundaries are. Less may be more, but when the actors seem equally uncertain, it points to trouble.
