I eagerly waited several years for Robert Schenkkan's follow-up to its Tony-Award-winning Broadway sensation "All the Way", but after I saw the result at the (Regional-Tony-Award-winning Dallas Theater Center) I wished Schenkkan had taken a few extra years to fix his play. Maybe that's why we had to wait so long. Maybe he was already trying to fix it, and perhaps the best course of action would have been to throw everything out and start from scratch.
Now, I have to admit that I saw "All the Way" on Broadway (with Bryan Cranston overplaying LBJ but at least his name on the marquee sold tickets) and so in comparison what I saw at the Wyly Theatre in Dallas was a rather pedestrian, second-tier production with a couple of great ideas - alright, perhaps just one: the black-and-white photographs projected on the white columns and on the ground of the set. (Why pedestrian? When LBJ calls people on his phone on the Oval Office, they show up on stage with a phone receiver that is missing its cord. On Broadway different parts of the stage would get lit up to show the conversation between LBJ and the person he was calling. And I understand that the stage at the Wyly doesn't quite lend itself to that sort of light-and-shadow work, but that's not a reason to make the production look like something high schoolers came up with.)
But it'd be unfair to blame this specific production for "The Great Society"'s failings as a play. While "All the Way" had incredibly powerful elements, especially regarding the June 1964 murders of three civil right activists in Mississippi and passionate, breathtaking monologues-as-bravura-performances by the actors playing African-American civil rights activists (I don't remember from the top of my head if that was Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael), "The Great Society" is a succession of LBJ-centered moments that aren't developed enough to make the viewer care. It is the checklist approach to biographical playmaking, when the author makes a list of all the facts he needs to cover in the short time he has and marches us through them at full speed.
There is no emotional involvement from the audience at any time except, very fleetingly, when the son of LBJ's personal assistant is killed in action in Vietnam as a Marine. The most fascinating part of that is that LBJ's personal assistant was African-American (her name was Geraldine "Gerri" Whittington) and in fact she was the first African-American to serve as personal assistant to a President in the White House. (I learned online that LBJ, always quite satisfied with himself, wanted to publicize that she was African-American without being too obvious about it so he sent her to the game show "What's Your Line?" I wish that had made it into Schenkkan's play.) So in that regard, Schenkkan tried to reprise ideas that made "All the Way" successful, which was to have African-American supporting characters. But we never connect with Whittington's son - I think we may see him in the background in a wordless scene showing a soldier in the jungle, but we're never told of his aspirations, his opinions of LBJ, how he felt going abroad to fight for his country while he wasn't respected at home. We don't even really see the relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King, Jr in any sort of depth. The play should be an opportunity to reflect on the role of some incredible leaders in the civil rights movement, the state of race relations to this day, and how people aiming at greatness commit terrible mistakes in their leadership that destroy their legacy.
Of course, Dallas is a small city culturally, and the theater "critics" have praised the play ("Powerful new play about LBJ should go all the way," what a joke), whether out of deference for director Kevin Moriarty (it's not his fault he has to deal with a play that was DOA, at least Schenkkan's reputation brought people to the Wyly) or out of sheer inability to identify good theater - I've seen amazing students productions at SMU, which has one of the top performing arts programs in the country, but those tend not to get reviewed in the local papers, and besides those, yes Dallas is a second-tier city when it comes to theater, which is better than being a third-tier city or a no-tier city.
Here is the WaPo review of the Arena Stage production of "The Great Society", a review that is more aligned with my views about the play. This DC Metro Arts review tells us Schenkkan slimmed down the play from three acts to two. Three acts of this would have been hard to bear, indeed. But only the LA Times dares tell it like it is in its review headline: the play lacks the full LBJ picture. What a missed opportunity.
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