Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

Was it mere synchronicity that Catherine and I stayed up late a few nights ago watching the last half of All the President's Men again for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time? Of course, but I think it may also have affected our experience a bit at the New York Theatre Workshop's production of Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers. Not that the play isn't enjoyable—it is; but the text here, by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons, doesn't have the sense of immediacy that make Alan J. Pakula's film so timeless. While the personal stakes for the staff of The Washington Post and owner Katherine Graham in their publication of the Pentagon Papers were incredibly high and the history is absolutely fascinating—I knew The New York Times' role in the events but almost nothing about the Post's—the two-dimensional quality to this production keep it from being entirely successful.

To be fair, this lack of dimension is entirely intentional: Top Secret is a radio play performed live, with actors onstage creating foley sound effects. And a very good radio play it is, too: the original sound design by Lindsay Jones serves the conceit exceptionally well. But this device also allows us to distance ourselves from the characters and events that we are watching: we're supposed to see the actors as actors, reading into microphones from scripts they hold in their hands (although, to everyone's credit, a lot of the key dialogue is clearly memorized). No matter how strong the performances—and the performances are all uniformly strong—there is an inherent disconnect that makes the piece more like a documentary than events that we are witnessing unfold before us.

The script may also suffer from so much of it having been taken from personal memoirs, or at least frequently sounding as though it was. Some of Katherine Graham's narrations, especially, do little more than provide a writer-ly device to bridge the gaps between dialogue scenes. It's a shame, to0, because we get occasional hints at her personal "coming of age in the newspaper industry" story that might have been a wonderful framing device for the piece; instead, she merely offers us a "looking back on it all now" perspective that is less powerful and reinforces our detachment from what we are watching. I must say, however, that Kathryn Meisle has created a fully-realized and incredibly engaging character, in spite of these limitations.

Peter Strauss gives an excellent performance as Post editor Ben Bradlee, completely and naturally capturing Bradlee's mannerisms, style of speaking and humor. Larry Bryggman, James Gleason and Matt McGrath have a wonderful scene as the three reporters who are given less than a day to pour through the 4,000 pages of reports to find a story for the Post to publish (the Times had 3 months to come up with their series). And Jack Gilpin does a very nice job as the paper's defense attorney, Bryan Kelly. Director John Rubinstein keeps the pace moving pretty well; I wish it could have been a 90-minute, no intermission production (in fact, I wish every production I see could be that), but I think that would require text editing more than anything else.

The play is at it's most engaging in the trial scene that dominates Act II. The authors have done a very good job of editing down the transcripts from the hearing where Kelly defends the Post against the government's charges that publishing the texts runs counter to our national security interests into a series of swiftly moving and tightly constructed scenes. If the rest of the piece matched that energy and tension, it might have been a powerful drama. Instead, it's a really nice, big spoonful of sugar that helps the history lesson go down.

Now You See It...

I read today that the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London may close this spring. Obviously, since I don't live in London (or even visit it more than once a decade), the direct impact of this news on me personally isn't all that dramatic. But both times we were in London, the ICA gave Catherine and me two of our best theater experiences on those trips.

We discovered the ICA by accident. On our honeymoon, in 1993, we poured over Time Out and What's On (which seems to be defunct now) to find as many different kinds of theatre experiences as we could cram into 7 days. One production that was highly recommended in both publications was by a company out of Sheffield, Forced Entertainment, performing at the ICA. The minute we arrived, we could tell that the ICA was our kind of arts venue: it had galleries, spaces for performances, film screening rooms, extensive arts education programs, and a nice big bar that was absolutely packed the night we attended (which I think was a Wednesday—not an evening that most joints are jumpin'). On top of that, the production we saw, Club of No Regrets, was absolutely fantastic: an incredibly savage and brutal play in which a kidnapper forces her captives to perform for her enjoyment. The acting was so simple and yet so raw—sometimes forcing me to lean forward to try to understand the almost mumbled poetry before exploding again in vicious attack after vicious attack; the imagery that the director, Tim Etchells, and the ensemble created was so original, so vivid, so beautifully horrible: it still ranks among my all-time favorite theater experiences.

Our second ICA experience, in 2004, was ATC's production, Jeff Koons. Rainald Goetz's play is not about the artist: it's about the art... or at least the process involved in making the art. Using very koosely-connected vignettes, he offers brief glimpses into the creative process from inspiration to execution. It was an ambitious project that wasn't always successful—the threads between the storylines were occasionally too strained—but Gordon Anderson and designer Becs Andrew created a stunning environment for the work that visually complemented the script. Nevertheless, Catherine and I both thoroughly enjoyed the production and, to this day, we can't go into a New York deli without being reminded of one of the primary images: an enormous Koonsian recreation of a Kinder Surprise.

Needless to say, I don't want to see any arts venue disappear forever. I've got a special fondness for the ICA; I'd hate it if, on our next visit, it was no longer there.

Shameless Plugs for Theatre in NYC

So mark your calendars: March is going to be a busy month, theatre-wise: 

March 12 & 15: Dennis Blackwell's cabaret with Jason Hart, directed by ModFab.

March 27,28 & 30: My company, Peculiar Works Project, is doing a 3-performance production at the Gershwin Hotel in Chelsea.

March 27 - April 6: Catherine is doing a two-weekend production of The Importance of Being Earnest with Aisling Arts.

through March 22: Rus(h) by James Scruggs, directed by Kristin Marting at 3LD. I saw a workshop of this piece last year and I'm looking forward to seeing where James and Kirstin have taken the piece.

through April: Hourglass Group's The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, which Catherine and I saw last fall and loved.

In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan...

I don't go to Broadway shows often. There's the cost, of course: Catherine and I see a lot of plays every week, but probably 95% of the tickets we buy are the $15-20 Off Off Broadway variety. There's also the fact that, usually, there's not that much on Broadway that interests me. Oddly enough, there are several productions now or coming up soon that I think we will lay out the scratch to see: we already have tickets to see Tom Stoppard's Rock and Roll; we want to see The 39 Steps (partly because we love the Hitchcock film and partly because it sounds like the kind of meta-theatrical production we really like); and Sunday in the Park with George (while I'm not a big fan of musicals, I've always loved Sondheim).

Last night, we had tickets to see Xanadu.

I wasn't expecting much. I never saw the movie. I began my senior year in high school in 1980, so every song in the score was played ad infinitum on KVIL in Fort Worth/Dallas (which was always the ladies' radio station of choice when I went parking in my mom's '77 LTD—unlike my '72 Gremlin, that car had FM stereo). I think the last time I went roller skating, they were still playing Grand Funk Railroad's cover of "The Locomotion".  And I never really liked Olivia Newton-John—ever.

I can't say I loved the show, but overall I had a good time. Douglas Carter Beane's book was by far my favorite part of the evening: tightly written, integrated the songs nicely, and funny in the self-referential way I expected it to be. I told Catherine that I thought the joke about it being a show for 40-year old gay men was probably the most dead-on—you don't have to be a gay man, but there were several times when I thought the 60-year-old guy sitting next to us or the under-30-somethings in the audience probably didn't get what I thought were some of the funnier lines.

As for the rest of the show, the music is well-performed, both by the band and the cast... although, with the exception of "Evil Woman" and "Strange Magic," I could happily live the rest of my life and never hearing any of the songs again (and those two very rarely, really). I thought the pace was good until the last half hour, when it started to drag a bit; but the whole thing is only 90 minutes without an intermission—the PERFECT length for any play. It's not much of a role for him but Tony Roberts is a first-rate actor and he does a good job; he pushed for laughs less than anyone else in the cast (it's not funnier if you mug, gang—it just telegraphs to the audience that you don't trust the material).

The big thing I came away with at the end of the evening was how difficult it is to write comedy, especially in a commercial situation. I thought Beane allowed his own sensibilities came out in the book and, while it's not my sense of humor, it worked in this case. I don't mean this in a nasty way, but it made me think of good sitcom writing—it doesn't have an edge and the jokes aren't very challenging, but they usually land. Even as a devotee of more edgy, experimental work, I've seen plenty of productions downtown that were less successful.

And, for the record, Catherine and I were joking before the show that we wouldn't be hearing any Coleridge during the show... and we were wrong!