[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.”
