'The Originalist' Squared

[I posted a report on a television performance of The Originalist, John Strand’s 2015 play about Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, back last year.  I’ve now seen the play live, still starring Washington, D.C.’s Edward Gero as Scalia, and I’ve decided to write another report, this time focusing on Gero’s acting in the play (which, you’ll no doubt guess, I think is superb).  I also suggested to my friends Kirk Woodward and Diana that they see the performance, especially for Gero's stage work.  As a result, Kirk, who’s contributed many articles to Rick On Theater over the years, also composed a report of his own.  I’m posting both Kirk’s and my articles together so ROTters can see both our opinions side by side (figuratively speaking, of course—they’re really above and below).  Take note that my new report does not cover the same ground as my theater reports usually do since I took care of that last year.  (I have included a round-up of the New York reviews, however.)  Readers who want to see what I thought of the whole play and production should refer back to “The Originalist (PBS),” 17 July 2017.  ~Rick]

THE ORIGINALIST

by Kirk Woodward

When I attended the play The Originalist by John Strand, directed by Molly Smith, at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan, New York on August 1, 2018, all I knew about it was that it was based on the career of Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1986 to 2016, and that the performance of Edward Gero as Scalia had been highly praised. I had also read the entry about the play, as performed on PBS, in this blog on 17 July 2017, titled “The Originalist (PBS).” Having now seen the play on stage, I don’t want to fill in again the observations and the detail covered by that blog entry, with which I heartily agree, but only to reinforce some of its observations as I saw them.

Reading the program after I saw the play, I learned that Molly Smith is the Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and that The Originalist is one of a series of commissioned theater pieces under the umbrella title Power Plays, described by Molly Smith in her Director’s Notes as

an ambitious initiative to commission 25 new plays or musicals spanning the history of our nation from 1776 to the present decade . . . which explores stories of presidents, broken treaties, governmental secrets, lost parts of American history, and more. Learning and understanding American stories of politics and power makes us more informed as a democracy and sheds life on how we face personal and political adversaries. Sometimes the way we understand our lives is through stories about this moment in time, and sometimes through stories from an earlier era that underscore where we are in history. These plays will not fall along party lines – they will challenge all of us and I am eager to open these dialogues.

It makes sense that Arena Stage, as a preeminent theater in the nation’s center of government, would institute such a series of plays. It also makes sense that despite the best intentions, such plays might take on the character of assignments, rather than products of organic growth, and although I haven’t seen any of the others in the series, I do feel that such is the case with The Originalist, a result best seen in how the three characters in the play are presented.

About the portrayal of Justice Scalia by Edward Gero, no qualification is needed. He is brilliant in the role. He not only looks the part, he inhabits it. His performance left me convinced at the end of the evening that I now knew the Justice personally. Edward Gero deserves every bit of praise he receives for a really stunning performance. I was particularly taken with the way he ages his character by subtle shading over the course of what is supposed to be a year. Hats off to him.

But the play is not a monologue; it contains two other characters as well, and if Scalia as a character is convincing, the other two are not, in two different ways: the character of Cat, the black, liberal law clerk, has to represent too many things in the play, and the character of Brad, the conservative law researcher, has to represent too few.

Cat on the one hand is required to be both a top-rate law student and a fairly naïve idealist; a member of a racial minority and of a sexual minority as well; an independent woman and a girl searching for a father figure. That’s a lot of baggage for one character to carry, and the strain shows. Cat’s ways of approaching ScaIia often seem arbitrary – why for example after a particularly sensitive encounter with Scalia, does she in the next scene bait him aggressively as though she were determined to tear him apart?

And if she was so brilliant in law school, why are her legal jousts with Scalia often so flimsy? For example, there is an argument early in the play between Cat and Scalia about the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The text of the amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Cat argues the importance of the first two clauses of the Amendment, Scalia counters with the last two, and Cat retires defeated – never asking him why the first two clauses are in the Amendment at all, if they do not modify the last two. However, at that point the play needs Scalia to win a point, so the discussion is over.

I did not feel that the acting of Tracy Ifeachor in the role of Cat overcame the limitations of the script. However, I am inclined to blame a good bit of this on Molly Smith, the director, who seems to have worked off the premise suggested in publicity for the play that it is a comedy, and to have directed the actors to perform accordingly.

The Originalist is not, as far as I can tell, a comedy; it is a play with humor in it, quite a different thing. I suspect that a calculation was made that a biography of a Supreme Court Justice might not appeal enough to the theatergoing public, and that the play was recalibrated accordingly.

So Ifeachor is required to put a spin on a great deal of what her character says, and I simply did not find that aspect of her role believable. The role of Brad, on the other hand, can barely be referred to as a character at all. He might as well wear a sign reading “Conservative Opponent.” He is of course male – boooo! He is of course a sycophant and an underminer. He of course knew Cat in law school and crossed swords with here there too as well. He knows a secret about Cat – of course. He is, I suggest, a walking dramatic contrivance, and the actor, Brett Mack, has quite a thankless job with the role, because there is really nothing in it.

Such are the dangers of writing plays about preexisting material or ideas. They tend to seem designed to prove an already settled point, or to make sure the audience finds drama in events that were dramatic already without the playwright’s contributions. Certainly a playwright can transcend such limitations; Shakespeare did, but then he was Shakespeare. John Strand is not Shakespeare (and neither are any of us), but I don’t mean to suggest that his play is by any means valueless, only that he has taken on a difficult assignment. In this case a remarkable performance makes of the material a great deal more than that.

*  *  *  *

THE ORIGINALIST (59E59)

by RICK

There are certainly scores of reasons for going to see a play—especially if you’re a theater enthusiast like I am.  (My friend Kirk Woodward and my frequent theater companion Diana are as well, each for their own objectives.)  Aside from having a subscription to the producing theater or the series, or following the hype and buzz, I might be interested in the playwright or, for musicals, the composer; I might be curious about the play if it’s one I don’t know (I’ll be doing that later this month when I see Lillian Hellman’s forgotten 1936 Days to Come).  The director’s work can be the impetus for going to a production, or the acting ensemble’s (often the draw for me with the Acting Company).  Probably the most powerful attraction, however, especially in the current theater in the United States, is the appearance of a particular actor whose work I admire.

Such was the case when I decided to see John Strand’s The Originalist, his sort of bio-play about Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), the late Supreme Court Justice—for the second time at 59E59 Theaters, between Park and Madison Avenues on Manhattan’s East 59th Street.  (To be precise, this was the second time I saw the play, but only the first I saw it live.  On 13 March 2017, I watched The Originalist on Theater Close-Up on WNET-Channel 13, the Public Broadcasting System outlet in New York City.  I reported on the viewing on Rick On Theater on 17 July 2017.)  I encouraged Kirk and Diana to come along, too—all for the purpose of seeing Edward Gero’s performance in the title role, irrespective of how they might end up feeling about the play itself.  (Kirk has written his own report, posted above, on his response to The Originalist.) 

My opinion of the play, as I expressed it in the 2017 report, hasn’t changed.  In fact, I confirmed that I hadn’t misjudged the script, and may have even overlooked some possible criticisms.  (Kirk’s assessment, I’m gratified to see, agrees in large part with mine.)  Well, I don’t see any reason to reiterate my report on Strand’s play or the Arena Stage production, which has been doing a stint here in New York City since mid-July.  (Gero’s fellow cast members are different from the actors I saw on PBS, but the rest of the production—Molly Smith’s staging, Misha Kachman’s sets, Joseph P. Salasovich’s costumes, Colin K. Bills’s lights, and Eric Shimelonis’s sound—is as close to identical to what was presented at Arena’s Kogod Cradle as 59E59’s Theater A can manage.  Tracy Ifeachor has taken over the role of Cat, Scalia’s “flaming” liberal clerk, from Kerry Warren and Brett Mack is now playing Brad, a conservative legal researcher, originally portrayed by Harlan Work.)

For the record, The Originalist premièred at Arena’s Mead Center for American Theater in Washington, D.C., on 6 March 2015.  It was subsequently produced by the Asolo Repertory Theatre of Sarasota, Florida, from 18 January to 7 March 2017 (it opened on Inauguration Day).  Productions from coast to coast followed from Southern California’s Pasadena Playhouse (11 April-7 May 2017), to a return stint at Arena (7 July to 6 August 2017), to Chicago’s Court Theatre (10 May-10 June 2018).  (Scalia died at 79 on 13 February 2016, shortly after the first run at Arena closed.)  Oddly, the text of Strand’s play still has not been published, but an audio book, a recording of a performance with Gero, Harlan, and Work, is available from LA Theatre Works (2016).  (As far as I can tell, there’s so far been only one staging of The Originalist with an entirely different cast and unconnected to Arena Stage: Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis staged the play 17 October-19 November 2017 with Henry Woronicz as Scalia under the direction of James Still.)

Previews of The Originalist, which runs an hour and three quarters with no intermission, began at 59E59 on 14 July 2018 and the production opened on 19 July; the production is scheduled to close on 19 August.  (The New York presentation is a co-production with Middle Finger Productions, LLC, a company formed by Arena trustee Beth Neuberger for the purpose of effecting this commercial transfer.)  My friends and I saw the show on Wednesday, 2 August, at the 7 p.m. performance.  59E59’s Theater A, on the ground floor of the three-story complex, is the venue’s largest house, seating 195 patrons. 

Theater A has a proscenium stage, which for the first scene of the play represents a law school lecture hall, and the raked house (the play’s spectators are the law students attending Scalia’s lecture) has a single aisle down the center and a transverse aisle about a third of the way up from the stage; Cat makes her entrance in the first scene, guided by an “usher,” half-way across the transverse and then down the center aisle to take a seat at the far left of the first row just as the performance begins.  (This entrance, which is made to look like a late audience member arriving—unless you already know how the play opens—didn’t occur in the TV version of The Originalist.)

Since I wrote a report on the PBS broadcast a year ago, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to write a different report now, even though two members of the three-member cast are different.  I’ve said all I can about the play itself.  (Those who want a description of Strand’s play, read—or reread—my 2017 report at https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-originalist-pbs.html.)  I certainly don’t want to debate an absent Scalia on originalism--even though I think the whole concept is absurd and impossible.  (I did make a few comments about this theory in the earlier report, however.) 

The only idea that came to me is to write something about Gero’s acting here.  I think it’s gotten better since the version I saw on TV—with one exception; he’s gotten more comfortable and less “actorly” in the portrayal.  As Kirk says, he “inhabits” the role.  To be honest, I was afraid that after all this time—Gero estimated in July 2017 that he’d played Scalia “over 100” times by then; another year later, he may have doubled that—he might have become technical and mechanical, but he hasn’t.  It may have something to do with the fact that he’s working with a different supporting cast—but considering how much those roles are ciphers to start with, I wonder how much influence they ever had.  In the end, I suspect that it’s simply a matter of Gero’s high level of professionalism and artistic integrity.

I can’t add any information about John Strand’s background to the small bio I provided in my 2017 report.  (It’s amazing how much he’s stayed off the grid!)  Edward Gero also had little personal information on the ’Net.  He was born in 1954 and grew up in Madison, New Jersey, a town of about 16,000 inhabitants 26 miles west of New York City.  (Note that Antonin Scalia was also born in small-town New Jersey before his family moved to Queens, New York.)  Gero attended Catholic schools for elementary and then public Madison High School before going to Montclair State University in suburban Essex County, New Jersey, where he studied theater (and roomed with fellow student Bruce Willis—with whom he would later appear in 1990’s Die Hard 2 and Striking Distance in 1993, two of Gero’s few film or TV performances). 

Though he’d contemplated studying for the priesthood, he became attracted to acting while in high school after seeing Stacy Keach play Hamlet in “the greatest American” staging of the play “in the 20th century” at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park in the simmer of 1972.  (Directed by Gerald Freedman, the rest of the cast included Colleen Dewhurst as Gertrude, Barnard Hughes as Polonius, James Earl Jones as Claudius, and Sam Waterston as Laertes; Raul Julia played Osric, Charles Durning was a gravedigger, Linda Hunt was the Player Queen, and Christine Baranski was a lady of the court.)  “When I saw it the first time,” proclaimed the actor years later, “I knew I had to come back and see it again and again, and I did."

(Gero later played the Duke of Clarence in a 1990 Richard III opposite Keach—and with other Washington stage luminaries-to-be, Floyd King as Edward IV and Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Queen Elizabeth—and then Gloucester to Keach’s Lear in 2009, both at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington.  Gloucester garnered one of Gero’s 13 Helen Hayes nominations.)

Even before graduating from Montclair State in 1976, he went to New York City, 10 miles across the Hudson River, to ply his new trade as an actor, doing a summer season of small roles at the Classic Stage Company (CSC) in Manhattan’s East Village.  Gero lived the peripatetic life of a tyro actor, while taking gigs at theaters anywhere in the country and returning to New York between jobs.  He was doing a play at the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1981 (the famous Barter Theatre was in residence at the school) when John Neville-Andrews, the director of Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre Group, saw him in Shaw’s Arms and the Man and asked him to join the rep company.  Gero immediately said yes and soon found himself living and toiling in the Nation’s Capital’s burgeoning theater scene. 

Since then, the actor has won four Hayes Awards, Washington’s acknowledgement of excellence in theater, the regional equivalent of the Tonys and OBIES (named for native Washingtonian Helen Hayes, known as the First Lady of the American Theater).  (In the interest of full disclosure, my late father was a member of the Folger board for several years under Neville-Andrews and was also a Hayes voter.  In 1986, the Folger Theatre Group became the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger under artistic director Michael Kahn, and then in 1992 was renamed the Shakespeare Theatre Company.)  Gero is an associate professor of drama at George Mason and also teaches at the University of Maryland and George Washington University in the District.  He lives in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Marijke Ebbinge, an elementary school and special ed teacher;  their son, Christian, 30, is an award-winning sound designer and audio engineer.

Gero is an experienced Shakespearean actor, having played Macduff in Macbeth (1989), Bolingbroke in Richard II (1994), and King Henry in both parts of Henry IV (1995), all for the Shakespeare Theatre Company and all Helen Hayes Award winners.  (He was nominated for The Originalist; his fourth award was for Skylight at the Studio Theatre in 1997.)  He’s also played other larger-than-life figures, such as the title roles in Sweeney Todd (2010, Signature Theatre, Arlington, Virginia) and Nixon’s Nixon (2000 & 2008, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland; Helen Hayes nomination).  I’ve personally seen him as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (2011, Round House; ROT report: 6 July 2011) and Mark Rothko in Red (2012, Arena Stage; ROT report: 4 March 2012).  In that sense, playing Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Antonin Scalia is business as usual for the actor.

An odd thing about the acting in The Originalist, both on PBS and at 59E59 (and, I gather from reviews, all the other presentations of Arena’s production), is that Gero’s performance is realer, more natural than those of either supporting actor—Ifeachor and Mack in this staging.  That’s odd because, since both the clerk and the researcher are fictional characters, they can speak and behave in any way Strand wants them to, while Scalia’s dialogue is made up of quotations or paraphrases from his writings and speeches or language based on what the playwright believes the justice would say on the basis of his public pronouncements.  That ought to free up Cat and Brad to be more like ordinary people, since a writing artist can invent what they say and do, while Scalia suffers from the same problems a character in a documentary play does.  (See my essay “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009.)

But that’s not what happened in The Originalist.  I don’t blame Ifeachor and Mack, and only partly fault director Smith; it’s largely the responsibility of writer Strand for devising such stiff and bloodless characters whose inhumanity the actors had little chance to escape.  To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit from 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit: They’re not cardboard.  They’re just written that way.  Gero, however, avoided or defeated the potential for artificiality that Ifeachor and Mack (and the other actors who played those roles) couldn’t. 

How’d he manage that when his castmates couldn’t?  Let’s start with the main reason so we can get on to some particulars: Gero’s just a far better actor than the rest of the company.  Ifeachor and Mack are probably excellent actors (I don’t know their other work, but Arena has its pick of the casting pool); if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have come as close to making their characters as alive and warm as they occasionally did.  But they are far overmatched against Gero—who might very well be able to make a reading of the phone book (assuming someone can still find one these days) seem warm-blooded.  Both his Salieri and Rothko, neither of whom are innately sympathetic figures, came off as pitiable (Salieri) or searching (Rothko) and worthy of concern.

One reason for this ability, I think, is provided by Gero’s own words.  A self-described “utility infielder,” an actor who seems to be able to do any kind of part and is an invaluable member of any repertory company, Gero thinks “there are two kinds of actors: actors who don’t want to disappear into a role and actors who do. And I like to think of myself as the second ilk.  To disappear into the role and to serve the play.”  That pertains, as far as Gero is concerned, to supporting roles and lead parts.  The Post’s Scott W. Berg, a freelancer, characterized the actor’s reputation among the Capital area’s theater leaders as a “Shakespearean actor who knows in his bones how to parse a dramatic text and perfectly capture a character’s emotional arc.”  In my own observation, that nails it pretty accurately.

I can’t really parse native talent.  It’s a God- (or nature-) given gift and pretty much a mystery as far as I’m concerned.  Either you’re born with it or you’re not—and Edward Gero was.  But raw talent isn’t enough to carry an actor through a performance, especially a challenging one.  (That’s the rationale for acting teachers when outsiders ask, ‘Can you really teach acting?’  As Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Barefoot Contessa told Ava Gardner’s character: “If you can act, I can help you.  If you can’t, nobody can teach you.”)  So we can look at what Gero did with that talent, on and off stage, that might have made a difference.

First (only because it comes first chronologically), Gero does homework.  Not every actor does, but Gero does conscientiously.  When he prepared to do Mark Rothko in Red—a role and a play that aren’t unlike Antonin Scalia in The Originalist in scope, stature, and structure—he not only read the biography of the painter that playwright John Logan consulted when he composed the play, James E. B. Breslin’s Mark Rothko: A Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1993), but visited the Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington where he spent “a few hours” to experience Rothko’s paintings as the artist, who designed the special gallery for this purpose, had intended.  Gero read other published material on Rothko and also corresponded with Rothko scholars.  In one reply to a researcher who shared his findings with Gero, the actor wrote: “I strive to find connections, as is my wont, with the characters I create to make comprehensible, or rather, recognizable, the struggles we share in the journey of being human.” 

Gero did the same thing to prepare for The Originalist, except there was much more to read: all of Scalia’s opinions, dissents, and law articles, and so on.  He read Joan Biskupic’s American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and watched countless videos on YouTube and other sources.  He even went further, which wasn’t possible for Rothko: Gero went to listen to Scalia on the bench in a Supreme Court hearing and met with him several times to learn his mannerisms and spent time with the justice in his chambers. 

The actor also went to lunch with the justice and even went hunting and skeet shooting with him.  Gero told Scalia, “Mr. Justice, this is my entry into the way you think, not what you think, but how you think.”  For one thing, the actor explained, he discovered that “Scalia’s textual interpretations of the constitution [were similar] to how [Gero] . . . parses through Shakespeare scripts.”  To get a different perspective on the man, Gero also sought out “court watchers, other attorneys, friends, colleagues” to talk to about Scalia.

All of this was aimed at analyzing Scalia’s behavior and his way of thinking.  It wasn’t in pursuit of prurience or titillation.  The two men talked about Italy—both their families came from the same region of the old country, about 10 miles apart—and families, and fathers.  They never talked about politics, specific cases, or the play.  (Justice Scalia never saw The Originalist, but he told Gero he was “glad they got a good actor to do it so I won’t be embarrassed.”)  The same was true of conversations with other court people; it was all about building a character.  Gero had extraordinary access, and he took advantage of where he was living and his subject’s openness and generosity—which no other actor assaying the role will be able to do.

So, Gero was well primed to develop the stage role of Antonin Scalia.  He’d gathered a great deal of valuable and useful information about the man, plenty to project a portrait of him to an audience that probably knows—or thinks they know—who Scalia is.  That’s not like playing Mark Rothko or Antonio Salieri.  So, what did the actor do with all his raw data?  That’s the rub, of course.  That’s what separates the actor sheep from the actor goats.

Well, first he worked to turn his observations and info-gathering into actions—that is, stage behavior.  If you’re a mystic, you see Gero “channeling” Scalia, becoming a medium for the justice’s persona to communicate with the audience.  What the actor’s actually doing, of course, is taking control of his body and voice—what many actors call their “instrument”—to train it in rehearsal to do what he wants it to do, in this case, to conform to the physical and vocal image of Antonin Scalia that Gero had assembled from his study of the model for the character Strand wrote.  The same way a dancer learns steps and a singer learns notes, an actor learns movements and speech patterns and timbres.  Gero learned to stand, gesture, and speak like the man he’d been meeting and watching on recordings.  Indeed, the actor has superb control over his physical instrument: the Washington Post  once pointed out that Gero’s eyebrows, for instance, are “capable of any manner of gymnastics.”

With repetition—and that’s what rehearsal is for—the assumed behavior becomes natural; it no longer requires conscience attention and takes on the appearance of ordinary behavior.  (Uta Hagen, in her invaluable book on acting technique, Respect for Acting (Macmillan Publishing, 1973), points out that the French word for ‘rehearsal’ is la répétition, which means exactly what it looks like, and the German is die Probe, which also means ‘test’ or ‘trial.’)  Little by little—and I’m assuming here that Gero didn’t get it all right instantly just because he looks so much like his model (Scalia called the actor his “doppelgänger,” a German work that means ‘lookalike’ with overtones of mysteriousness)—the learned behavior becomes second nature to the actor, something he puts on when he comes into the theater like his costume and make-up.

One example, because it’s clearly not Gero’s natural behavior, is the way his Scalia stands with his arms folded in front of his abdomen, each hand grasping the opposite upper forearm.  The first time I saw Gero do this role, on the Theater Close-Up broadcast, I found it studied and artificial.  It was the sole bit of physical or vocal business Gero did that didn’t seem natural to me—and it still was at 59E59.  Nonetheless, it was obvious that the actor never stopped and thought about taking this pose before doing it, so, appearances aside for the moment, Gero’d certainly made the gesture part of his stage behavior for his Scalia.  Now, I don’t recall ever having seen the late justice take that stance, so maybe he looked awkward doing it as well, and Gero’s appearance was true to life.  But what I saw on stage was one bit of behavior that was automatic, even second nature—because Gero didn’t have to think about doing it—but still not organic, if that distinction makes sense.  As I determined in my first Originalist report, this is a minor glitch in an overall remarkable performance.

The study of how Scalia thought is a little different for an actor.  The physical characterization is somewhat independent of the script, or even the director’s staging.  An actor can move, pose, and speak in pretty much any way he wants and still be doing exactly what the playwright and director want.  Indeed, it’s part of what an actor brings to the part, what he contributes to the production.  But the work Gero did on how his character’s mind works, how he approaches ideas and subjects intellectually—that’s directly applicable to Strand’s text, the words he wrote for Scalia to say (and the ones other characters say to which Scalia reacts). 

What Gero did was try to understand, from the real justice’s writings and speeches, not what Scalia thought about given topics, but how his mind got to that decision.  If the actor could suss that out, then he can apply the same reasoning to the lines Strand wrote and speak them with the same emotional and psychological content, the correct subtext, that Scalia might have given the words.  That’s what makes stage dialogue come alive in an actor’s mouth, that’s why one actor’s Hamlet or Hedda Gabler lives and breathes and we say, ‘Yes!  That’s it exactly.  That’s so right!’ and another’s just sounds like someone dressed up declaiming famous lines and speeches we’ve heard many times before.  (That’s what Stanislavsky was all about, incidentally.)  It looks to me like all Gero’s homework paid off like gangbusters.

Finally, there’s the unquantifiable part: the talent, the art.  What I’ve been talking about up to now had been technique—the application of skill, craft, and training to the work of preparing a performance.  What Gero applies all that to is his innate talent.  He’s a consummate professional, so he doesn’t just rely on his gift, even though by now, he must know he has a prodigious one.  He still does all that homework—and probably more that he doesn’t discuss—even after over 40 years of stage work, but at some point in the rehearsal process, art takes over.  Undeniably, this is where Gero excels, because I have never seen him give a false or actorly—that is, where the craft and effort show though in performance—acting job.  He doesn’t in The Originalist, either (even though his castmates often do).  In fact, one theatergoer, a constitutional law professor, confessed that “the depiction of Scalia feels very accurate.  In fact,  the resemblance is so on point that I found myself forgetting that it was not the real deal.”

As for keeping the character fresh after three years and however-many performances, Gero gives his key.  “It goes back to being a priest,” he declared—a profession for which he contemplated studying before the acting bug bit him in high school.  

You have to say that Mass every day.  I remember when I was an altar boy, Father Callaghan was saying the Mass at 6:30 and barely staying awake, and I thought if you just did it like you believed it, everybody else would.

The the actor continued: “How do you make it fresh?  Well you have to listen to the play.”

As there were no reviews of the TV broadcast of The Originalist, I went back to the original stage production at Arena in 2015, of which the Theater Close-Up presentation was a clone, for a critical summary in my 2017 report.  When Strand’s play hit New York City, as you might imagine, the cyber press all came out.  Show-Score included reviews of the Chicago run and the return engagement at Washington’s Arena in its tally, so I have recalculated Show-Score’s average based on the 13 reviews of the 59E59 production alone.  With a top score of 92 (TheaterScene.net), followed up by one 90 (Broadway World), and a low rating of 45 (Lighting & Sound America), backed by a 65 (TheaterMania), the average score of the New York notices was 80; 85% of the reviews were positive, 8% were mixed, and 8% were negative.  My survey will cover nine published reviews.

No newspapers covered the current mounting of The Originalist, not even the New York Times, which ran a review the of Washington première (summarized in my PBS report), or the Village Voice.  Among the rest of the print press, there were two notices.  David Kortava wrote of the play in the New Yorker, “The setup strains credulity, but the ensuing debates and outings to the rifle range are amusing,” and of the title performance, he reported, “Edward Gero’s hammy portrayal, with those energetic eyebrows, is no conceit.”  The National Review’s Kyle Smith labeled The Originalist “a smart, challenging, heterodox, and delightful look at Antonin Scalia.”  The politically conservative editorial magazine, which doesn’t regularly review plays (though it also ran a notice of the Washington première), reported, “Befitting its placement in the left-wing milieu of New York’s theater scene, the piece is shrewdly constructed by playwright John Strand to give considerable airtime and a sympathetic hearing to the progressive viewpoint.”  In the title role, Smith felt Gero “is a force of nature, by turns funny, exasperating, and exuberant.”  The NR critic-at-large affirmed that “one imagines [the real-life Justice Scalia] had as much fun vivisecting their arguments as Gero’s Scalia does here.”

On TheaterScene.net, Victor Gluck described the play as “part courtroom drama, part debate and partly a portrait of a man who never compromised on his convictions” and Molly Smith’s production as “both riveting and enlightening” under her “swift and powerful”  direction.  In it, reported Gluck in Show-Score’s 92-rated notice, “Edward Gero gives a bravura performance.”  “Gero’s portrayal is a towering achievement in a difficult role which could easily have been one-sided or totally callous and repugnant,” asserted the cyber reviewer, making “Scalia into a colorfully pugnacious and three-dimensional character.”  A “robust and impressive performance,” it “will likely be one of the 2018-2019 season’s very best.”  In conclusion, Gluck asserted that “The Originalist is provocative, stimulating theater” that’s a “surprisingly deep play for summer theatergoing.”

Marina Kennedy declared on Broadway World that The Originalist “is a vital story for our times” and “a thought provoking, insider's view of our American judicial system.”  Kennedy characterized the production (in the review Show-Score rated at 90) as an “enthralling theatrical piece [which] features the finest staging and stellar acting,” and advised her readers, “See it while you can.”  Lauding Gero, who “masters the demanding role of the controversial judge,” the BWW review-writer felt, “The cast’s excellent character portrayals and the well-crafted dialogue makes you feel as though you have entered Scalia’s Supreme Court Chambers.”  CurtainUp’s Elizabeth Ahlfors proclaimed that “John Strand's The Originalist rings with relevancy, highlighted by vibrant encounters of quick-witted minds in dazzling interaction.”  Ahlfors reported that the production is “[d]irected with a sure hand by Molly Smith” and that Gero “paints the larger-than-life Scalia with a love-hate spirit.”

“John Strand’s play is a brave and talented work,” asserted Hazen Cuyler on Theater Pizzazz, and Smith’s staging is “[d]ignified, simple.”  “As Scalia,” Cuyler affirmed, Gero “is effortlessly charming, distinctly cultured and frustratingly dogmatic. . . .  A compelling duality, this emotional and intellectual life revealed by Mr. Gero is a major reason why you may wish to see this divisive production.”  On New York Stage Review, David Finkle warned that “The Originalist is little more than a thinly disguised debate [which] does have its drawbacks.”  Finkle explained: “As the confrontations mount . . ., the question looms as to whether any intern, no matter how comfortable she or he is with a justice, would become quite so vehement.”  The reviewer noted that the play makes frequent mention of Scalia’s reputation as “a monster,” of which the justice even boasts, and Finkle remarked, “As directed by Molly Smith, Gero surely gets that aspect across.” 

Zachary Stewart described The Originalist as a “thought-provoking (and equally contrived) play” which is also “saccharine and affected” on TheaterMania.  The sparring between Scalia and Cat, contended Stewart, makes “The Originalist feel a lot like a Norman Lear sitcom featuring Scalia as Archie Bunker with a Harvard Law degree.”  As a consequence, the TM review-writer, in the notice Show-Score gave a rating of 65, found, “This results in a certain amount of sitcom acting from Gero” and his sparring partner “who commit to the more ludicrous exchanges in Strand's script . . . with forced gusto.”  Stewart complained about “Gero . . . arming himself with bulging eyes and sarcastic one-liners.”  Of the production, the TM writer reported that “director Molly Smith wisely spotlights the text with an uncluttered and highly focused staging.” 

“Theatre companies can be tripped up by the exigencies of scheduling, especially when topical works are involved,” warned David Barbour, whose review on Lighting & Sound America was awarded a rating of 45, Show-Score’s lowest for this show.  “Some months ago, the idea of presenting a cuddly comedy about the rabidly conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have seemed like a good, even daring, idea,” Barbour noted, but circumstances have changed, he pointed out, listing the abortive nomination of Merrick Garland, the subsequent appointment of Neil Gorsuch, and the coming “savage battle over Brett Kavanaugh.”  The LSA reviewer asks, somewhat testily to my ear, “[D]oes anyone think that a healthy chunk of the New York theatre audience wants to see a play in which Scalia rants and raves for over an hour, only to be revealed as a teddy bear under the black robes?”  Turning to Strand’s script, Barbour declared, “The premise of The Originalist is pure sitcom,” and contended, “It's a setup designed to yield all sorts of crackling confrontations; trouble is, Strand struggles to make it minimally believable.”  He further complained, “Strand undermines his plot with tired television-comedy tropes.” 

As for the performance of the title character, Barbour found, “The role of Scalia is designed to be a rich dish for an actor to feast upon, and Edward Gero tucks into it with gusto—perhaps too much so.”  The review-writer added, “He has been playing the role on and off since 2015 and if it ever was more astringent it is now being delivered with a wink and a nudge that only makes the character more irritating.”  Barbour lamented that “one wishes the director, Molly Smith, had exercised a little more judicial oversight on her cast.”  In conclusion, Barbour felt, “Too much of the time . . ., The Originalist settles for easy, odd-couple comedy at the expense of character and real conflict. . . .  That we are supposed to find such an outcome both adorable and emotionally satisfying only demonstrates how out of touch with our current political reality this play is.”