'Oslo'

At a few minutes after noon on a sunny Monday, 13 September 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, Yasser Arafat, reached across President Bill Clinton and shook hands at a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.  Seconds earlier, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the foreign policy aide for the PLO, (along with U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev of Russia), signed the ”Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements,” better known as the Oslo Accords, while three thousand spectators, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, watched in amazement. 

One year later, Arafat, Peres, and Rabin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.”  A year after that, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv at a peace rally by a right-wing Israeli militant who opposed the Oslo Accords. (Arafat died in 2004 at 75 of causes still clouded in uncertainty.)

But that very public signing ceremony has a twisty, tortuous back story, mostly cloaked in secrecy, that involved a number of less-familiar names, including a handful of Norwegian diplomats and international-affairs academics, PLO functionaries, and Israeli university professors.  The Oslo process, in fact, stretched back to April 1992, almost a year-and-a-half before the historic signing in Washington, and centered on the Borregaard Manor, a 19th-century wooden mansion 60 miles east of the Norwegian capital.  These secret back-channel meetings are the threads out of which J. T. Rogers wove his new play, Oslo, now having its world première at the Lincoln Center Theater.

Oslo began previews at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, LCT’s Off-Broadway house, on 16 June and opened on 11 July.  The current production will close on 28 August, but Lincoln Center Theater announced on 27 July that it will transfer with the same cast to the company’s Broadway venue, the Vivian Beaumont Theater.  The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews on 23 March 2017 and to open on 13 April, allowing it to compete for Tony Awards in the 2017-18 season (which officially ends around the end of April).  My frequent theater companion, Diana, and I saw the evening performance on Friday, 22 July. 

As the successor to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ original stage company, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center (1965-72), the Lincoln Center Theater was established in 1985 under the leadership of Chairman (and former New York City mayor) John V. Lindsay, Director Gregory Mosher, and Executive Producer Bernard Gersten.  (The theaters at Lincoln Center were run by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival—now known as the Joseph Papp Public Theater—from 1973 to 1977.  The theaters were either dark or rented to commercial producers for the ensuing three years, then for one year they were operated by the short-lived Lincoln Center Theater Company.  Renovation then closed the space until 1983.)  

Currently under the direction of Chairman J. Tomilson Hill and Producing Artistic Director André Bishop, LCT produces dozens of productions for millions of theatergoers at the 1060-seat Beaumont, the company’s Tony-eligible Broadway house; the 299-seat Newhouse, its Off-Broadway venue; the 112-seat Claire Tow Theater, the experimental and emerging theater site, and other spaces on and off Broadway.

In June 2012, LCT opened a new two-story addition on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont.  The expansion includes the Tow Theater, rehearsal rooms, office space, and a roof terrace.  It’s the home of LCT3, the company’s program devoted to producing the work of new playwrights, directors, and designers.  Through tours, telecasts, films, publications, recordings, and its website, Lincoln Center Theater reaches audiences around the country and the world.

In addition to its public productions, LCT also offers the Directors Lab, a developmental symposium for new and emerging artists; Open Stages, an arts-in-education program operated in cooperation with New York City public schools; Lincoln Center Theater Review, a literary journal available in the Theater's lobbies and distributed free-of-charge to schools and libraries, and the Platform Series of free conversations with LCT artists.

Rogers, 48, lives and writes in Brooklyn, but his plays frequently deal with matters of world import.  In the Guardian of London, Michael Billington described Rogers as “that rare creature: an American dramatist who writes about global issues.”  Before Oslo, examining the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he composed Blood and Gifts in 2012, a play which moves from Washington, D.C., back rooms to huts on the Afghan border during the Soviet occupation from 1981 to 1991.  Like Oslo, it was staged at LCT’s Newhouse Theater after a début at the Lyttelton Theatre of London’s Royal National Theatre.   His earlier plays include The Overwhelming (Roundabout Theater Company, 2007), set in early 1994 on the eve of the Rwandan genocide, and Madagascar (Salt Lake Acting Company, 2004; SPF Summer Play Festival, New York, 2005) takes place in a hotel room in Rome.  The playwright said in his 2008 Laura Pels Keynote address for A.R.T./New York (Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York), the organization of non-profit theaters in New York City, that his travels made him realize “that as a playwright I had to lift my eyes from my navel and look out into the world.” 

Rogers’s work has won him considerable recognition, including multiple awards for his plays and his writing.  In 2009, Rogers was the only U.S. playwright among 11 British dramatists to contribute to The Great Game: Afghanistan for London’s Tricycle Theatre, out of which came Blood and Gifts.  In 2004, Rogers served as artist-in-residence at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.  He’s also been guest artist at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri; and lectured at the schools of drama at Columbia University in New York City, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; and the Claremont McKenna College School of Economics, Claremont, California.  Rogers has a 1990 BFA in acting from  the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem, which awarded the playwright an honorary doctorate in 2009; he’s also lectured at UNCSA’s theater program.

According to Rogers’s own account, Oslo, which was workshopped at the New Play Development Conference at Drexel University in Philadelphia, part of PlayPenn, a new-play development program, in July 2015, began over drinks one evening in December 2012.  Bartlett Sher, the director of Blood and Gifts, which was on stage at LCT at the time (and is the director of Oslo), invited a friend who’s a sociologist from Norway to see a performance.  Sher’s friend turned out to be Terje Rød-Larsen, director of an Oslo think tank devoted to applied social sciences.  After the show, Rød-Larsen, the central figure in Rogers’s yet-to-be-written play, approached the playwright and “said that he had been waiting years for someone to tell a story that involved him and his wife [Mona Juul, a Norwegian diplomat and another main character in Oslo] and the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israel and the PLO.  And he had decided that I was that person.”​  At a restaurant near Lincoln Center, Rød-Larsen spoke of his involvement as Rogers asked questions.  The playwright explained, “I had watched the Rose Garden ceremony on TV that had President Clinton, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat.  But I didn’t remember anything Norwegian about it.”  Engaging in extensive research, “I learned the full story of how the Oslo Accords came to be—a story that is documented, yet almost completely unknown.” 

“I had been wanting to write about the Israelis and Palestinians for years,” admitted Rogers, who’d retained a memory of that historic handshake 23 years on.  “But I hadn’t found the right story.”  Rød-Larsen and Juul’s tale seemed like the right one through which  to examine “the meaning and legitimacy of” the Oslo process “that led to that handshake.”  As he acknowledged, “Both as a dramatist and a citizen, I remain gripped by the unimaginable political will it took for those on both sides to create the opportunity for that handshake, and by the courage it took to stand face to face with the enemy as they struggled to find a way forward—together.” 

Rogers cautions that while the play is “the story of a hidden history that lies behind a public history,” it’s his “version of this history.”  The events Rogers recounts all occurred, but not necessarily in the order or in the time span laid out in the script.  (The playwright insists, however, that “the lively, sometimes even crazy stuff in the play is mostly true.”)  Each of the characters is “named for a real person,” Rogers affirmed, but some actual players in the real-life drama were eliminated and others have been reconceived “through my sensibility” from their historical counterparts.  The words the characters say in the play are Rogers’s words. 

Though it essentially follows the arc of the historical outline, the plot of Oslo revolves around Terje Rød-Larsen (Jefferson Mays), director of the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences, and his wife Mona Juul (Jennifer Ehle), an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.  In early 1992, the couple propose the novel idea of initiating and facilitating secret back-channel talks between representatives of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that became known as the Oslo Channel.  Rød-Larsen and Juul first have to convince the Norwegian foreign minister, Johan Jorgen Holst (T. Ryder Smith) and his deputy, Jan Egeland (Daniel Jenkins), to take the enormous risk they propose.  Multilateral negotiations sponsored by the U.S. are already in progress in Madrid since 1991 (without the PLO, which had been labeled a terrorist organization), an attempt to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but they hadn’t been getting anywhere.  What the two Norwegians are putting forward was a secret, under-the-radar negotiation without the interference of a major world power and the spotlight that goes with that.  They’ve gone to great lengths to keep the Oslo Channel unknown to both the Norwegians’ foreign ministry superiors and the Americans.

Aside from the secrecy, though, there were other potential problems.  For one, it was against Israeli law for an official of the country to meet with a member of the PLO, so the organizers select a couple of economics professors from the University of Haifa, Yair Hirschfeld (Daniel Oreskes) and Ron Pundak (Jenkins) who have no official link to the Israeli government.  The New York Times’ Ben Brantley refers to them as “Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-ish”—whether Shakespearean or Stoppardian isn’t specified.  For another, no high-ranking PLO official would risk his position in the organization and even his life by meeting openly with Israelis, even with tacit approval by Chairman Arafat, so the Norwegians invite Ahmed Qurie, also known as Abu Ala (Anthony Azizi), the Finance Minister of the PLO, and Hassan Asfour (Dariush Kashani), the official PLO liaison with the Palestinian Delegation at the talks in Madrid.  The matter of secrecy and avoiding the spotlight is accomplished by holding the sessions at the Borregaard Manor outside Oslo where the negotiators can pass themselves off as academics holed up in this remote mansion to write a book.

The initial meetings between the PLO officials and the Israelis are prickly, but they soon begin to make progress, lending support to Larsen’s theory that private, personal, incremental negotiations might succeed where public, impersonal, comprehensive talks have failed.  The Israeli professors are eventually joined and then sidelined by Uri Savir (Michael Aronov) Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Joel Singer (Joseph Siravo), a Washington, D.C., attorney with ties to the Israeli government.  Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin (Adam Dannheiser) and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (Oreskes) also make periodic appearances. 

Oslo, which runs two hours and 55 minutes with two intermissions, has a cast of 14 actors who play 21 roles.  Though it unfolds mostly in the salon of the Borregaard Manor where the participants gather after negotiating sessions, which take place behind closed doors, for drinks, snacks, and banter, Oslo also ranges from Middle Eastern sites like Tel Aviv and Tunis (Arafat’s home base at the time), to European cities, to, finally, Washington, D.C.  The play covers April 1992 to September ’93—a year and five months—with a coda that extends 11 years into the future after the historic White House signing.

                                                   

I found Oslo less theatrically exciting than the Shakespeare’s Globe production of The Merchant of Venice I saw two nights later (see my ROT report on 18 August), also three hours long, though Diana really liked it.  It’s all talk, which for three hours is enervating enough, but there’s a lot of narration delivered by Ehle’s Mona Juul—the oral equivalent of Brechtian labels: short (sometimes no more than a few words) identifications of new characters (there are a lot—requiring a good deal of double- and even triple-casting) or filling a gap in time.  Furthermore, the negotiations themselves take place off stage, so we get after-action reports and down-time interaction.  The final scene is at the White House that momentous September day (though it’s “back stage”), but the play ends with the characters doing that familiar epilogue where they stand in formation and tell us what happened to everyone after the signing.  I find all that anti-theatrical.  Furthermore, the back-story of the accords isn’t a) all that surprising or b) all that exciting.  (I’m a foreign-service brat, so the intricacies of diplomacy aren’t a revelation to me.  I grew up around it.  I was also an intelligence officer in the army, so the mechanisms of secrecy are familiar to me as well: accommodation addresses, cover identities and code names, vehicles registered in false names, covert telecommunications.)

The “big” dramatic hook is that it all had to take place in secret and off the official level—but that’s hardly much of a playable action and after about an hour, it stops being much of a discernible focus on stage; we forget about it until Rogers sees fit to remind us with a line or, once or twice, a potential breach of the secrecy.  (It does make clear why diplomacy can’t always be conducted transparently and why communications shouldn’t always be made public—take note, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden!)

The performances are fine, and one or two of the actors actually manages to channel a recognizable world figure (Peres, Kissinger), but since most of the characters, while real people, aren’t famous, the cast is free to create figures in a play rather than political celebrities on TV.  The big problem for me was that even good acting can’t enliven what’s basically a Weltpolitik role-play.  Diana kept insisting that Oslo ought to be televised so that everyone, especially young people, can see what happened in this backstage story of history. 

Actually, a TV production might make Oslo more interesting to watch.  (Now that it’s going to Broadway, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it on HBO or Showtime.  Both Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill and All the Way were televised after Broadway runs recently.)  The camera can make the illusion of action where there is none and close-ups, wide-shots, and two-shots can vary the visuals in ways that stage pictures can’t.  It also might make the play shorter, since the production almost became a play about moving furniture!  The cast has to rearrange the set pieces—furniture on casters—between every one of the 53  scenes.  (The minimalist scenic design is by Michael Yeargan and the props are supervised by Faye Armon-Troncoso.)  Without that, with which a TV version would dispense, the three hours would probably be closer to 2½!  And all those narrative inserts and the concluding speeches would probably be replaced by screen titles and a crawl at the end.  Down to 2¼ hours maybe.

Sher handles the sweeping range of the play and the large cast very well, guiding each of the actors into distinctive characterizations for their often multiple roles.  (Ben Furey, by the way, was the dialect coach who helped the cast master accents from Norwegian to Arabic to Hebrew—and German for Michael Aronov as Uri Savir when he impersonates Henry Kissinger as well as a couple of out-of-place tourists.)  I wish he and Rogers had come up with a way to stage Oslo without the narration and the constantly-moving furniture, but given that distraction, he kept the three-hour, darkly comic drama flowing, with enough humor and passion to add variety and emotional fluctuations to the performance to allay the potential impression that Oslo’s just a static reenactment of history. 

Yeargan, a multiple-Drama Desk- (The Light in the Piazza, 2005; Awake and Sing!, 2006; South Pacific, 2008) and -Tony-winning (The Light in the Piazza, 2005; South Pacific, 2008) vet, created a fragmentary, representation of the Borregaard salon (based on photos taken by Rogers on a visit to the negotiation site) with a single, soothingly neutral, bluish-gray wall, symbolic of the atmosphere intended to keep the parties calm and focused, with a single, prominent, somewhat-ornate door—the visual symbol of the play’s focus—up center on the Newhouse’s thrust stage.  Otherwise, the space is fairly barren aside from Armon-Troncoso’s props, giving the impression of a dreamscape, slightly surreal.  (The single set stands in for all the locations of the play, with projections, by 59 Productions, for distant locales and news events that are recounted in Mona Juul’s narration.)  Donald Holder’s lighting, which subtly conveys the passing of time, and Peter John Still’s sound add to the vaguely disembodied reality of the setting. 

Once again, the cast here is an excellent example of an ensemble.  Even though Rød-Larsen and Juul are the threads that stitch the group together by their near-constant stage presence, particularly Mays’s Rød-Larsen, and the play couldn’t happen (any more than could the Oslo Channel itself) were it not for the Norwegian duo, they are only the first and second among equals when it comes to the performance.  Nonetheless, as I asserted earlier, the actors each carve out a well-defined individual character—or characters, in many instances.  Mays’s Rød-Larsen is a dynamic, charming, raconteur who revels in managing the near-chaos—a perfect MC for the mercurial negotiations.  (It should be noted that Mays, a 2004 Tony recipient for I Am My Own Wife, was the object of some astonished praise in my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, posted on ROT on 16 October 2014.)  As his wife, Mona Juul, Ehle is an elegant, controlled calming influence, a woman who knows how to soothe the savage breast (of which there are quite a few here), so to speak.  She has a strong will—her husband’s complement—but also a sharp wit, which, as one of only two woman in the manor, she needs and is unshy at displaying.  (Ehle is also a Tony-winner, one for The Real Thing in 2000, and—wait for it!—three for The Coast of Utopia in 2007, one for each part!  That has to be some kind of record.)

Oreskes’s Yair Hirschfeld, the senior Israeli professor, is a bit shy and a bit out of his depth, but earnest and passionate about his responsibility and willing to take a risk to make it work.  (His Shimon Peres is a spot-on impersonation.)  As Hirschfeld’s junior colleague, Ron Pundak, Jenkins is more social than his comrade, livelier, perhaps even a little too much so.  Azizi is a formidable and committed politician as the chief Palestinian negoiator, Ahmed Qurie, a man who believes he’s important—he has Arafat’s ear—and isn’t afraid to show it.  He has strong feelings about his role in history, but he’s also a consummate actor and can play a role when it serves him.  He’s a practical man, not an intellectual, and something of a hedonist—and a would-be ladies’ man.  Qurie’s partner, Hassan Asfour, is a colder, less flexible figure in Kashani’s hands than his senior negotiator, and he’s an unreconstructed, slogan-spouting, Patrice Lumumba University-educated Marxist.  Angry and unforgiving, Kashani’s Asfour is a dour and stiff-backed character.

Of the less-central figures, Smith’s Norwegian Foreign Minister, Johan Jorgen Holst; Aronov’s Uri Savir, Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry; Adam Dannheisser’s Yossi Beilin, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister; and Joseph Siravo’s Israeli lawyer, Joel Singer, also stood out for strong characterizations.  And I must take special note of the work of Henny Russell as Toril Grandal, the housekeeper and cook at Borregaard Manor, who, with her husband Finn (played, between appearances as Holst, by Smith), seemed to keep the place up and running and all the temporary inhabitants (relatively) happy despite the tension and weighty responsibilities.

The press coverage for Oslo, still an Off-Broadway production until its change in venue next spring, was extensive.  Aside from several features and interviews in both the print and on-line media (and the entire summer issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review), the website Show-Score surveyed 29 reviews.  (I use my own list, admittedly with considerable overlap, so the tally is different.)  Reporting that Oslo received 100% positive notices (that’s right: not a single negative or even mixed review!), Show-Score posted an average rating for the consensus of 86.  (This reception might in part explain the move to Broadway.  As late as a month before this posting, there were no plans for that transfer, according to the show’s press representative.)

The U.S. edition of the Financial Times’ Max McGuinness asserted that Rogers’s “engaging new play” may be the only thing remaining of the Oslo Peace Process; “It all seems very long ago,” he said.  Though “we know it is all destined to end in failure,” noted McGuinness, “[t]he play itself succeeds in drawing us into the minutiae of now dimly remembered diplomatic brawling.”  He warned, however, “It’s a dramatically conventional and occasionally heavy-handed work lacking the intellectual zing” of similarly-themed work by other writers, “[b]ut the many frustrations and occasional triumphs of the year-long negotiations are scrupulously conveyed.”  Sher’s directing, “in keeping with the gravity of the subject,” is “by-the-book.”  McGuinness expressed particular praise for the Joel Singer of Joseph Siravo and Mays’s Rød-Larsen.

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley, dubbing Oslo “absorbing drama,” characterized the play as “long and dense enough to make you wonder if you should have packed an overnight bag.”  The Timesman added, however, “Yet what Mr. Rogers and the director, Bartlett Sher, have created is a streamlined time machine, comfortably appointed enough to forestall jet lag.”  Further, “‘Oslo’ affectingly elicits the all-too-human factor” and “it’s a vivid, thoughtful and astonishingly lucid account” in which Rogers doesn’t take sides.  “Only occasionally does the script resort to the telegraphic shorthand of cute, defining quirks,” reported Brantley, and he praised the entire cast of negotiators and disputants, with special notice for Mays and, most enthusiastically, Ehle.  The result of the cast and creative team’s efforts, Brantley declared, is “the stuff of crackling theater.”

Matt Windman of am New York characterized Oslo as a “long-winded . . . but smart, occasionally humorous and objectively-observed ensemble drama” with “excellent” performances and “spare,” “seamless,” “video-enhanced staging.”   The amNY reviewer concluded, “The play may be dense and choppy, but a more narrow and delicate treatment probably could not have captured the scale and intensity of the political process.”  Newsday’s Linda Winer, whose “Bottom Line” was “Unknown Middle-East history, grippingly told,” dubbed the play an “ambitious three-hour, fact-based fiction” that’s “lovingly, painstakingly staged” and which will “probably” fascinate you.  The play’s “pretty talky,” warned Winer, but added that “Rogers, Sher and their generous, marvelous cast do much to lighten the agonizing back-and-forth . . . with convivial unlikely scenes of eating, joking and drinking among fierce adversaries.”  Although Oslo has a “cinematic quality,” the Newsday reviewer found that it “feels naturally theatrical” in Yeargan’s “spare” set. 

Christopher Kelly of the Newark ­Star-Ledger and NJ.com pronounced that the “story of process, patience and the painstaking art of negotiation . . . manages a seemingly impossible feat: It transforms three hours of talk about the Oslo Accords into gripping and urgent entertainment.”  Still, “never once does any of [Oslo] feel confusing or bloated” as the production is “[c]risply directed” by Sher.  Rogers makes [the] process thrilling to witness”—and “[f]unny, too.”   Kelly lauds the “exceptional” cast, “with particular props to Mays and Ehle.”  Bergen County, New Jersey, Record reviewer Robert Feldberg warned on NorthJersey.com that Oslo is “overlong” but “well-acted” and “surprisingly lively and involving.”  Feldberg also reported that Rogers “injects crowd-pleasing humor and sentimentality, but in reasonable doses.”  As the Record reviewer noted, even after the historic signing at the White House, “peace didn’t follow,” so Oslo “concludes with a glass-half-full sentiment.” 

Miriam Felton-Dansky dubbed Oslo a “good-hearted, occasionally frustrating, three-hour epic” in the Village Voice, “at heart, a friendship saga.”  Although Felton-Dansky felt that “the tension slowly mounts” over the course of the play, in the end, she found, “Theatrically, Oslo falls somewhat flat” because “Rogers supplements his dialogue with repetitive direct-address narration, and between scenes, projected newsreel footage.”  The Voice reviewer continued, “Most disappointingly, Oslo lends little depth to the Norwegian diplomats themselves.”  “Still,” she concluded, “Oslo contains a form of thoughtful hope that is welcome” in today’s world. 

In the New Yorker, Hilton Als, calling Oslo a “good, if overlong, piece of journalism-theatre—you know, a play that’s been ‘ripped from the headlines’ or the history books, presumably to add heat and immediacy to the proceedings,” reported that “it has moments of strangeness that suggest what might have been had the playwright, J. T. Rogers, and his director, Bartlett Sher, been more interested in taking risks.”  During one early scene, Als got the notion that “Rogers and Sher might be on their way to making something that was more reflective of the times than the ‘truth,’ a dissonant opera of talk and movement, lies and evasions and beliefs: the stuff of politics.”  But, the New Yorker review-writer realized, though Rogers “mixes fact and fiction . . ., he uses reality not to buoy his imagination but to shore up a ‘Family of Man’-type plea to end war and hate.”  Als sang the praises of Mays and Ehle, “both of whom are killer in their roles,” but concluded, “Sher and Rogers drive home ‘Oslo’ ’s ultimately banal point: that tolerance sometimes, just sometimes, begins with the nicest people.”

Jesse Green opened his New York magazine review with a surprising statement: “It’s not often I think a three-hour play could profitably be longer, but J. T. Rogers’s gripping, big-boned Oslo . . . needs all the meat and muscle it can pack on its frame.”  Green “detected the hallmarks of overhasty surgery on the play; what were once longer scenes, perhaps, are now in effect vestigial tails or title cards.”  And though they started as central figures, “Juul and Larsen are too frequently reduced to interstitial narrators” even as Sher keeps them “hovering around the edge of the action.”  Sher’s staging is “remarkably swift and entertaining,” however, and the “gallery of types makes for exciting scene work” by the “exacting actors.”  Though their roles are “a bit underwritten,” Mays and Ehle “manage to make something solid out of dialogue that is sometimes a hilarious kaleidoscope of evasive diplomatic phrases.” 

Marilyn Stasio of Variety declared Oslo “unequivocally fascinating” and a “compelling drama” presented by LCT in a “striking production” featuring a “flawlessly cast ensemble.”  Describing “Rogers’ . . . clever dialogue” as “witty,” delivering the facts “with intelligence and humor by this dream of a cast,” Stasio affirmed, “It’s the petty stuff . . . that makes these intimidating characters so human.  And so funny.”  She asserted that the play’s three acts, “constructed very much as a suspense drama,” “fly by like hours spent at the circus.”  Sher makes the LCT production, with “impeccable casting of these superbly drawn characters,” “compulsively watchable” and Stasio declared in her final assessment, “This is what we call drama, and it’s what we live for.  So, go, already—live!”  Adam Feldman wrote in Time Out New York that Oslo is “informative and even-handed” and that despite its length, Sher’s “seamless cast of 14 keeps it from seeming dry, even when Rogers’s writing . . . slips into overt exposition.” 

Recognizing, “The best historical plays are the ones that send you into a Google spiral immediately following the curtain call” because they make you want to know more, Entertainment Weekly’s Melissa Rose Bernardo continued, “You’ll find your curiosity similarly piqued after J. T. Rogers’ intense, intellectual Oslo.”  Calling the play a “deep dive,” Bernardo acknowledged, “Rogers has a bit of a gift for transforming contentious, complex historical subjects into digestible, but not dumbed-down, entertainment,” which is, despite its running time, “by no means a slog.”  The EW reviewer further reported, “There’s even plenty of profane humor packed in” and “enough backstory . . . to fill in the necessary blanks.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” was “A riveting humanized history lesson.”  He described Oslo as a “terrific new political thriller” in a “very fine production, directed with unerringly precise attention to detail.”  But while Sher emphasizes the play’s “mechanics as a theatrical presentation . . . from the start, they enhance rather than impede our involvement in a fascinating true story.”  In Rooney’s opinion, it’s a play that’s “alive with tension, intrigue, humor, bristling intelligence and emotional peaks that are subdued yet intensely moving, which concludes unexpectedly on a poignant note of hope.”  The HR reviewer reported that “Rogers’ drama artfully locates the human story in a delicate account of political diplomacy.  This is a richly insightful play about culturally diverse people.”  Rooney expanded that “without dumbing anything down, Rogers, Sher and their faultless cast deliver maximum clarity as well as urgency, drawing out the distinct personalities with great nuance and a considerable amount of wit.”  Greatly praising the acting ensemble, the HR writer noted that “it’s virtually impossible to single out any one performance, since the ensemble works with an uncanny combination of cohesion, sensitivity and efficiency.” 

Among the cyber reviews, Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp received a Show-Score rating of 100, the highest for this show and the only max score I’ve seen since starting to use the site.  Sommer labeled Oslo “a fact-based but highly original drama that’s as entertaining and suspenseful as it is informative and thought provoking.”  She acknowledged that the play’s “talky and probably could have been trimmed a bit,” but also “staged with dynamic simplicity” so that the “fourteen top drawer actors [were able] to bring twenty-one historic characters to vivid life.”  The CU reviewer admitted that she “couldn’t wait for the two intermissions to end and all that very witty talk to continue”; she added that Oslo is “the best play I’ve seen all year” (and, hence, the 100 score for this notice).  Sommer characterized the production as “riveting” and “a thriller” with “ever escalating tension.”  Jonathan Mandell called the play “fascinating” on New York Theater and singled out Anthony Azizi’s Ahmed Qurie and Daniel Oreskes’s economics professor Yair Hirschfeld and Shimon Peres as “stand-outs.”  In his final analysis, the NYT reviewer judged that Oslo “gives us not only a lucid refresher course on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and provides us entertainment that is both surprisingly funny and suspenseful.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale characterized Oslo as “fascinating, entertaining and realistically funny drama” in a “swift and tense production” which “never sags” over its three-hour length.  “The play is abundantly talky,” observed Dale, “but it’s the kind of crisp, clever talk that continually stimulates.”  Tulis McCall of New York Theatre Guide declared that Oslo “is the kind of brilliant production that will leave you a teensie bit worse off than it found you.  It will leave you a bit rattled.  It will leave you with new skin and and refined eyesight.  You will look at political events . . . with a more critical eye.  When one hand is waving to you, you will wonder what the other hand is doing.”  McCall blamed this condition on “three very extraordinary hours listening to a team of excellent actors spin the tale of the funny thing that happened on the way to the Oslo Accord.”  With an “extraordinary cast,” the “verbal and incident packed obstacle course” of the play becomes “not only comprehendible, [but] urgent and arresting.  We not only understand, we feel,” continued McCall.  The on-line reviewer concluded, “Oslo will bring you back around to where you do not want to be: thinking of these people as your family.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed this play,” declared Michele Willens on Theatre Reviews Limited, after listing all the drawbacks and apparent problems the play presented (its length, its talkiness, and so on).  “‘Oslo’ is pretty much what it sounds like,” reported Willens: “a lot of heady conversation and human fireworks.  But there is also a good deal of humor.”  The script is made up of “excellent and timely dialogue” and “the acting is . . . superb”—with special mention for Mays, Ehle, and Aronov.  The production, said Willens, is “lovely” and Sher’s staging “keeps things moving with little distraction,” though she added, “Some of the narration along the way could probably be excised, but it is handled with speed and precision.”  Willens ended by warning that “this is obviously not a play for everyone,” but noted that “it is serving a purpose in at least humanizing the people behind all that passion.”  On NY Theatre Guide (different from the earlier-cited New York Theatre Guide), Elizabeth Glasure felt that Oslo “was riveting; it was wonderfully impossible to relax from curtain to close.”  Glasure thanked Sher “for for the multitude of seamless transitions” and asserted that he “manages to evade any single monotonous moment.”  The cast, from which Glasure singled out Mays, Ehle, and Azzizi, “are simple and direct.”  In conclusion, the cyber reviewer declared, “Oslo is a must-see, a truly important and beautifully poignant political drama that stirs a deep inner justice.” 

“The art of writing may be inherently undramatic,” observed Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray, “but that doesn’t mean it contains no possibility of vitality.”   Murray makes a comparison to the 1969 musical 1776, another successful play about politicians creating a historic document, to demonstrate that the process can be “riveting, rewarding entertainment.” The playwright, said Murray, “mines every occurrence, no matter how minor, for new forms of tension and release,” though the director “has provided a staging that is perhaps drier than ideal, imparting a stiff atmosphere.”  Nonetheless, Sher focuses “on the matters at hand, and keeps things thoroughly followable and digestible,” with help from the “dynamite cast.”  Because of the “catastrophic problem” of the ultimate failure of the peace overtures between the parties, however, Murray pronounced Oslo “ultimately unsatisfying.”  Anyone who has even the remotest familiarity with the history of the Middle East will see this, Murray contended, and be disappointed with the play’s conclusion.  “[I]t’s the playwriting equivalent of throwing up one’s hands,” asserted Murray.  Carol Rocamora of Theater Pizzazz labeled Oslo “a riveting political play” whose “scope is ambitious.”  The production, said Rocamora, is “[s]eamlessly directed” and the “ensemble offers superb performances,” with special praise for Mays, Ehle, Aronov, and Kashani. 

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart called Oslo an “excellent new play,” and then asked, “Who would have thought that bilateral diplomacy could be this thrilling?”  A “massively complicated tale,” its “pace and scale . . . gives [sic] one a physical sense of just how exhausting and tenuous these negotiations really were.”  The TM review-writer felt that Sher’s production and Rogers’s text “draw us into the world of international diplomacy,” but affirmed that it’s “the performances that hold us rapt,” giving special mention to Mays and Ehle.  Stewart summed up by stating that “Rogers has crafted an invaluable and incredibly watchable drama.”  Steven Suskin of Huffington Post, calling Oslo “gripping, provocative, wrenching, funny and altogether riveting,” reported that “you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat.”  Though it’s a three-hour play—which “flies by far quicker than some eighty-minute one-acts”—of men talking “across a table,” Suskin found that “it turns out to be a wildly suspenseful and sometimes dangerous ride.”  The HP reviewer asserted, “Credit rests equally with” Sher and a cast that’s “remarkable on just about all sides.”  Once again, the review-writer singled out Mays and Ehle, and continued, “They are surrounded by a marvelous ensemble.”  In the dog days of summer, Suskin suggested, “A true-life, historical, intellectual thriller about government and international politics might not sound like what you are looking for, but Rogers, Sher and LCT have given us the real thing.”  At the end, he added, “Inquiring playgoers, be apprised.”

The Associated Press’s Jennifer Farrar characterized Oslo as “a riveting political thriller with a personal approach” that “features tense, behind-the-scenes dialogue.”  Farrar continued, “Such is the skill of the production . . . that we feel caught up in real negotiations of the so-called Oslo Accord” during which “[d]arkly humorous comments permeate the tense conversations.”  The play is composed of “swiftly-paced scenes” that are “deftly” performed by a “top-notch ensemble.”  The AP reviewer stated in the end, “The talents of cast and crew in ‘Oslo’ make a complex historical event feel understandable, intimate and profoundly affecting.”  On WNBC-TV (New York’s Channel 4), Robert Kahn, dubbing the play a “new political thriller,” wondered, since we know now that the Oslo Accords failed to bring peace, “Is there still drama, then, to be mined from a story about the agreement’s genesis?”  His conclusion: “The answer, assuredly, is yes.”  Sometimes the script “is more playful than its subject matter might suggest,” Kahn thought, but he found, the “writing and staging are literal-minded.”  Lending the story “heft” is Rogers’s studied neutrality. 

Because of the subject matter, I thought it would be interesting to hear from the press of some of the parties involved in the play’s history: Norwegians, Jews, and Israelis (I didn’t find a Palestinian comment on the play).  In the Norwegian American, Arlene and Thor A. Larsen (relation to Terje Rød-Larsen unknown), posited that “Rogers has an interesting way of drawing the audience into these negotiations so that even though we are well aware how history played out in the Middle East, we still feel the same hope and possibility for peace as the main facilitators,” Rød-Larsen and Juul.  “Anyone with a sense of justice, especially if they are Norwegian,” continued the columnists, “cannot help feeling a bit disappointed and regretful that at the actual signing of the Accord, Mona and Terje were relegated to looking on from the back of the room receiving no special accolades or recognition of any kind.”   The NA writers found, “The playwright and the director make sure you do NOT want to leave your seat, even for a moment, as you become totally engaged with the drama,” concluding that Oslo is a “must-see for anyone who appreciates historical drama, the Middle East, and especially those who want to understand the role Norwegians played in realizing the first of the Oslo Accords.”

Anna Katsnelson, in the Forward (formerly the Jewish Daily Forward), cites a “famous” psychological study that states: “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.”  Oslo, posited Katsnelson, “re-creates something like a geopolitical test case for this theory.”  She determined that the play “will hold the attention of those with an existing interest in the history of the Middle East peace process and the challenges” that are inherent in it.  Oslo “also comes replete with Arafat and Kissinger jokes.  But it struggles to convey larger moral implications.”  Katsnelson felt, “No inherent criticism of the Accords is permitted, and with this absolute certainty comes a lack of nuance.”  The Forward reviewer thought, “A play about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a happy ending may seem hard to believe, and it does gloss over some important facts,” such as the failure to deal with the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.  In conclusion, Katsnelson asserted, “‘Oslo,’ [u]nfortunately, lacks . . . historic weight and immediacy.”

Adi Eshman opened her column on Oslo in the Jewish Journal by stating, “If you want to see the Middle East that could have been—and, with any hope, could still be,” you should see Rogers’s play.  With a “cast of talented performers,” director Sher begins the first act “in fog”; “actors enter even before the house lights go down.  A cloak of secrecy swallows these players, and we, the audience, must focus to discover their motivations.”  Eshman explained, “What animates [the] dialogue—indeed, the whole play—is the idea of seeing one’s opponent for the first time.”  In her final analysis, the JJ writer contended, “Whatever the future may hold, Rogers’ must-see play affirms the bravery of men who fought to see their enemies as partners.”  In Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily paper, Yael Friedman focused largely on the history both of the Oslo Channel negotiations and of the creation of Rogers’s script, but she acknowledged, “Few playwrights were perhaps more perfectly poised to conceive the dramatic contours of a story like” that of the Oslo meetings because Rogers is adept at “portraying personal dramas cast amid larger political ones.”  She also affirmed that this history was “a natural fit for the stage,” though the distinction between Rogers’s play and other recent history plays (Friedman cited the Lyndon Johnson bio-drama All the Way) is that Oslo “does not rely on the outsized personalities of the big, familiar, players”; instead it focuses “on those carrying the actual burden and the glory of changing history.”  These instrumental figures “may have worked, and to some extent may have remained, in relative obscurity but they are now receiving their due.”

In surveying the press for this production, I noticed that most of the reviews were pretty long, but I found that most spent the bulk of their length on the history of the Oslo Accords and the plot of Oslo.  Remarkably little space was given to a discussion of the dramatic or theatrical aspects of the play despite the laudatory quality of the overall assessments.  I couldn’t help forming the sense that the reviewers were influenced in their critical opinions by the historic (and historiographic) nature of the subject, dismissing any dramaturgical deficiencies (such as the play’s enormous length, three-act structure, talkiness, and the constant narration) out of a sense of duty: the play is “important” so it must be good.  If my assessment is accurate, it may account for the 100% positive rating Oslo received on Show-Score.  As much as my companion, Diana, liked Oslo—she seems to have a predilection for talk plays: she liked David Ives’s New Jerusalem and I didn’t (see my report on ROT on 20 April 2014)—I found much of it enervating and, as I already wrote, undramatic and anti-theatrical.  Too many of the review-writers I read swept all that aside for me to believe something wasn’t operating sub rosa.

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1909 to 1920

by Kirk Woodward

[Below is the third installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of articles on the theater writings of George Bernard Shaw, based on his reading of all six volumes of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The first and second segments, covering, respectively, plays written from 1885 to 1902 and 1901 to 1909, were posted on 3 and 18 July.  While it’s not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 before you read part 3, it’s helpful—and I recommend reading the whole series in whatever order in any case because, whether or not you’re a Shaw fan (as both Kirk and I are), he’s an endlessly fascinating figure and Kirk’s take on his work and ideas is more than worth reading.]

MISALLIANCE (1909-1910 / 1910) – The preface, “Parents and Children,” begins aggressively enough in tone to raise suspicions that Shaw wrote it out of frustration over his marriage and his wife Charlotte’s fear and revulsion (according to Michael Holroyd’s 1997 biography Bernard Shaw) at the idea of having children.

Whether this is so or not, the preface ferociously redefines all the aspects of childrearing that Shaw can think of – children are “slaves,” doctors are “quacks,” “the family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance.” Underneath one can feel Shaw’s pain from his own childhood. 

The preface does calm down somewhat as it goes along, although Shaw continues to make statements that are, to say the least, arguable, for example that “families are not kept together at present by family feeling but by human feeling,” an assertion that to say the least takes in a lot of territory.  

“We must reconcile education with liberty,” he says; urges toleration; and writes, “What is needed in dealing with children is not logic but sense.” Ultimately, “Fine art is the only teacher except torture.”  

In a sense the preface is written backward; an acknowledgement that few families resemble each other comes toward the end, when it would have been more helpful at the beginning.

Misalliance, a long play in one act, although usually performed with one or two intermissions, is a play that Shaw does seem to have written by starting to write and seeing what happens, rather than by plotting it out first.

It and its preface have an interesting relationship: the preface expands on the themes and topics in the play in ways that the play only lightly suggests.

The play itself is a romp, or perhaps we should say, a ripping good time. Unfortunately the characters in the play are not really very interesting. Aristotle may have been on to something when he said that plot is the soul of the drama.

The play has precious little plot, so it sails along on the strength of its dialogue, but it’s hard to be interested in anyone in it. Nothing very good or bad is going happen to them. It feels like a Heartbreak House where no one is particularly worried, depressed, or threatened.

In the middle of the play, an airplane crashes; it turns out to contain, not a bomb, but a young female Polish acrobat, vibrant enough to stir up a great deal more talk about marriage. She is definitely a dea ex machina, if not for the storyline, at least for the play itself.

Holroyd writes:

The extravagant ideas and incidents that cluster within the second part of Misalliance . . . all help to establish Shaw’s kinship with Ionesco . . . and show him to be, in R. J. Kaufmann’s words, ‘the godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias to the theater of the absurd.’ G.B.S. was familiar with early modernist experiments and had his own agenda for clearing away the dominance of the well-made play.

Shaw even comes close to “breaking the fourth wall,” the imaginary separation of the stage and the audience. We will see more of this kind of daring.  I forgot to mention that there is also a mysterious intruder with a gun who hides in a Turkish bath.

The play, in other words, is not a model of tight construction. I wonder if Shaw, who was criticized for borrowing the plots of other plays, was irritated when people criticized him because he didn’t.

“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (1910) – Shaw knew Shakespeare’s verse, including the Sonnets, backwards and forwards. He wrote this one act “occasional piece” as part of an effort to create a British Shakespeare National Theater. In it Shakespeare, pursuing his “Dark Lady,” has an unexpected encounter with Queen Elizabeth.

At least the first half of Shaw’s preface, in which he describes why he decided to use Mary Fitton (1578-1647) as the “Dark Lady” in this playlet, is engaging, and the preface contains a line that sets him extremely high in my estimation.

He describes spending his days at the British Library reading, and making the acquaintance of an obsessed Shakespeare researcher named Thomas Tyler, a friendless and solitary man of “astonishing and crushing ugliness,” disfigured by two large goiters on his face.

Shaw struck up an acquaintance with Tyler because “I am not,” as he declares magisterially, “to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor.” That surely is (to use W. S. Gilbert’s words from H.M.S. Pinafore) “greatly to his credit.”

Shaw had a remarkable ability to make friends, many that one would assume would be his enemies. He was also, of course, a handful, leading Oscar Wilde to call Shaw “an excellent man; he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.” Friendship is complex; but Shaw did have many friends.

FANNY’S FIRST PLAY (1911) is the surprising answer to the trivia question: “Which play by Shaw had the longest initial run?” It ran for 622 performances, an astonishing number, and deserved its long run. It is a charming comedy.

The preface is short and one of Shaw’s best:

Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience, was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

Fanny’s first play – meaning the first play she has written – is a play within a play; she has invited several London critics to see her work (they don’t know she wrote it) and tell her what they think. Shaw has fun with this concept: he doesn’t name himself as the actual author, and he models the critics on reviewers of the time. (One of them, Arthur Walkley, who also suggested the idea that became Don Juan in Hell, liked this concept so much that he helped the actor who played “him” with his makeup and movement.)

The play within a play is the only one by Shaw to have a group of young people as its central characters. They and their parents make up most of the play. The young people have all been in jail recently for various hijinks, and those experiences have helped them reach authentic understandings of who they are. Their parents are shocked, and must do their own growing.

Although Shaw calls the play a potboiler – it certainly is an audience pleaser – it contains a number of his themes: women who are miles ahead of men; the way people pretend to be anything but who they really are; the idea that we are better off doing what we want to do, and taking the consequences, than spending our time doing what we think we ought to do in order to please others.

Shaw writes in the preface:

Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? . . . I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural.

ANDROCLES AND THE LION (1912 / 1913) – Shaw said he wrote Androcles to “show what a play for children should be like.” With its dancing lion, it has reminded many of a British Christmas pantomime. It had a short initial run (55 performances), apparently because it was reported to be irreligious. In fact it characterizes its Christians fairly, if skeptically. The preface is another story.

Shaw’s hundred-page preface (for a two-act play, and seven more pages of explanation follow it!) is titled “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity: Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?” Christians excited by the title might want to calm down. Shaw seldom accepts anyone else’s definition of a concept, a belief, or anything else. He redefines everything.

In this case, he redefines Christianity, re-creating Jesus in his own image. This is not a unique phenomenon, as Fr. Raymond Brown, in An Introduction to the New Testament (Doubleday, 1997) has pointed out:

In The Quest for the Historical Jesus . . . A[lbert] Schweitzer passed judgment on more than a hundred years of such “historical Jesus” research. He contended that most of the investigation . . . told us more about the investigators than about Jesus, for they were describing their own mirror-image reflection.

Here is Shaw:

I must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and sound economics.

Shaw’s preface can be intelligent. But it is limited both by his Enlightenment-based scholarship, which has been in many cases superseded; and by his assumptions, which rule out anything he would call supernatural – this from a man who champions the Superman and the Life Force! – who therefore has to assume that toward the end of his ministry Jesus became delusional.

Needless to say, Shaw has no belief in Jesus’ resurrection, which leaves him the problem of accounting for what motivated Jesus’ followers to have the effect they did on the world. He explains this by asserting that the apostle Paul basically invented a new religion using Jesus’ name. This explanation too is seldom today considered credible on the evidence.

Anyone creating a new Jesus story confronts the same problem: the gospel texts and the other New Testament books are the only source materials from the period (the gnostic writings come significantly later).

So anyone trying to pick and choose a Jesus story from those sources is like Dickens’ character Mrs. Todgers (in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-44) “a dodgin’ among the tender bits with a fork, and an eatin’ of ‘em.” Making a “version” of the story means choosing the parts one likes, based on one’s own assumptions, and discarding the parts one doesn’t like.

Shaw buttresses his narrative with by now familiar overwrought assertions:

The attitude of the Roman Emperor and the officers of his staff towards the opinions at issue were much the same as those of a modern British Home Secretary towards members of the lower middle classes when some pious policeman charges them with Bad Taste, technically called blasphemy…

After the preface the play is a relief. Androcles shares with The Devil’s Disciple (and others of Shaw’s plays) the theme of a person – numerous persons in this case – who with death imminent finds out what she or he really believes. It is hardly a play for children.

But it is exceptionally well written. Shaw takes religion seriously. The theological discussions in the play emerge from the characters and their situations. Androcles is a wonderful character. So is the lion. The second act is a marvel of dramaturgy: everyone gets a moment.

“Overruled” (1912) – In his preface, Shaw writes about “my playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical comedy.” “Overruled” is farcical in its situation: a man and woman, in love with each other on a ship, find that their spouses are also on the ship – and also in love with each other. Aside from this, the play is not a farce but a comedy, in which sex is thoroughly discussed and analyzed.

Shaw’s preface, remarkably serious-minded considering the play that follows it, begins with a discussion of what Shaw calls “polygamy” and most of us would call “infidelity;” jealousy as a learned response; the lack of statistical information on sexual behavior; revenge; farce; sex on stage; realistic stage scenery; the purpose of art; and the failure of farce to fully illustrate sex. It’s hard to think what he left out.

Noel Coward was familiar with Shaw’s plays (Shaw defended him when Coward was accused of plagiarizing the plot of You Never Can Tell for 1921’s The Young Idea). The situation in “Overruled” reappeared in 1930 in Coward’s brilliant play Private Lives.

PYGMALION (1912-1913 / 1913) – Shaw’s biggest popular success is not this or any of his plays, but the musical My Fair Lady (1956), based on this wonderful play about the dictatorial, oblivious language teacher Henry Higgins and the flower seller Eliza Doolittle whom he teaches to act like an upper-class lady.

                     

Alan Jay Lerner, librettist and lyricist of My Fair Lady, took significant pieces of dialogue intact from Shaw’s play. He also brought Higgins and Eliza together at the end of the play, which Shaw would have strenuously objected to, except that he had died in 1950.

My own reading of the play is that Lerner is correct in his estimate of the trajectory of the plot, and Shaw is not; I find his notes about what happens to the characters after the curtain goes down unpersuasive. On this matter opinions, of course, differ.

What I think is unarguable is that Pygmalion is a brilliantly written play, a practically flawless comedy, with an original and engaging plot, vigorous characterization, and frequently hilarious dialogue based, not on gags or jokes, but on the characters themselves.

Shaw claimed that he didn’t work out the plots of his plays in advance, but wrote them as the words came to him, without any thought for structure, and this same comment is often made about his plays as an objection to them. For example, C. D. Warner, in The Library of the World’s Best Literature (1917), writes:

As a playwright, Shaw has never been particularly interested in problems of construction. In his earlier pieces, he was satisfied to pour new wine into old bottles. The content of these early plays was new, but the structure was based upon the pattern which Pinero had previously borrowed from T. W. Robertson. In his later plays, Shaw has introduced no notable improvements in technique. At times he has discarded altogether the pattern of “the well-made play”; at other times he has reverted to the loose and easy pattern of the Elizabethan “chronicle-history”: but in such experiments as these, he has merely revolted against the rigors of contemporary dramaturgy without offering any acceptable substitute for the structure which he has attempted to discard. As an architect of plays, Shaw is certainly inferior to Pinero and Jones, and possibly to Galsworthy. He has never made a pattern so remarkable as that of ‘The Thunderbolt’ or ‘Mrs. Dane’s Defense’; and he has never built a structure so self-sustaining and so rigorous as that of ‘Strife.’

The plays of Bernard Shaw may lose their potency within a score of years, because they were so novel at the time when they were written.

I see contradictions in this passage. In any case, it’s possible that Shaw wrote some of his plays by starting at one end and writing until he was finished, without prior calculation. It’s equally possible that he was so aware of the requirements of play structure that he didn’t have to think much about it.

But it’s just as likely that a number of his plays were carefully plotted in advance, whether on paper or in his mind. The structure of Pygmalion is impeccable. It’s just a marvelous play in every way.

  

“Great Catherine” (1913) is a raucous playlet about the Russian Empress and an English military man. It has no obvious purpose – Catherine is not even a superman! – beyond contrasting the presumably sexually uninhibited Catherine with the rigid Englishman for laughs; it premiered at London’s Vaudeville Theater. The preface begins by defending the play’s version of history, but gives that up and settles for observations on theater:

Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake. . . . [But] in the long run, the actors will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

“The Music-Cure” (1913 / 1914) was written as a curtain-raiser for Magic (1913), a play by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). A spindly young man who has had a breakdown, and can only play popular songs on the piano, is confronted by a brilliant, forceful lady classical pianist. They work out a sort of duet and decide to get married. Shaw subtitled the play “A Piece of Utter Nonsense”; it took him nine months to finish. From the preface:

This is not a serious play: it is what is called a Variety Turn for two musicians. . . . As a last desperate resort a pianola behind the scenes can be employed; but the result will lack spontaneity.

There is, however, no pressing reason why the thing should be performed at all.

“O’Flaherty V.C.” (1915 / 1917) – “V.C.” stands for “Victoria Cross,” England’s highest military honor. O’Flaherty, who has won it, is an Irish peasant lad who went to fight for England in World War I because his home life in Ireland was so frustrating, irritating, stultifying, and boring.

As a truth-telling experience the play ranks with John Bull’s Other Island, but Shaw tells us in his preface that it was designed as a recruiting poster for the Irish. In effect it says, “Join the English Army – your life in Ireland is so wretched that fighting for England can’t be any worse.”

Remarkably, England’s military was not enthusiastic about the play, particularly one in which a character says “It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.” Eventually it was allowed to be produced, in 1917, for troops already in Belgium.

“The Inca of Perusalem” (1916) is Kaiser Wilhelm II, then fighting England in the World War. We see him in disguise, on a romantic errand. In the course of the play he makes it clear how little control he has over the actual war. One cannot imagine this approach was very popular at the time.

“Augustus Does His Bit” (1916 / 1917) is one of several short plays Shaw wrote during World War I. The play is a satire on the way England is conducting it, and it mocks everybody except the troops. 

Augustus is a War Office official, a nincompoop and straight man to two comedians, one his clerk and one, a woman, trying to steal a confidential list on a bet, which she does. With the war in such hands . . . . Shaw knows how to write comedy scenes, and does.

“Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress” (written 1917, performed 1918), a variety show sketch, is a spoof on the Russian Revolution and to my mind remarkably unfunny. Annajanska is a princess who has escaped and become a Bolshevik. Good luck with that, honey.

Apparently it went over like a house afire because of its performers. Shaw says the only compliment he got on his writing was from a friend who commented, “It is the only one of your works that is not too long.”

HEARTBREAK HOUSE (1913-1919 / 1920) – Shaw had a hard time getting this play produced, despite his substantial reputation as a playwright. It was finally produced to, it appears, a number of critical yawns. My guess is that many in his audience were suffering from World War fatigue.

In any case, I find the play, which Shaw called a fantasia on Russian – that is, Chekhovian – themes, one of his most appealing. Heartbreak House is a play about weakness. Captain Shotover, the owner of Heartbreak House, is substantially insane, and his guests are all damaged goods; even the billionaire in the play is a timid fellow.

So many of the characters in Shaw’s plays strenuously try to justify themselves. The characters in Heartbreak House know that that effort is futile.

[For those who haven’t been following Kirk’s series, I’ll restate the plan (such as it is).  There are five segments in the collection and I’m running them every couple of weeks.  The next section, covering plays from 1918 to 1933, will appear (as if by magic—which, of course, is how computers work) in about two weeks.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT to read Kirk’s further thoughts on the Irish playwright and his works.]

'Butler'

On 16 May 1861, Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-93) was promoted to major general in the Army of the United States by Pres. Abraham Lincoln.  (The Civil War had started in earnest on 16 April when secessionist troops fired on the Union forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.)  The former Massachusetts lawyer, born in New Hampshire, was immediately dispatched to take command of Fort Monroe on the mouth of the James River in southeastern Virginia.  He arrived to take up his new post on Wednesday, 22 May—and the Virginia legislature ratified the vote to secede the very next day, joining South Carolina (seceded 20 December 1860), Mississippi (9 January 1861), Florida (10 January 1861), Alabama (11 January 1861), Georgia (19 January 1861), Louisiana (26 January 1861), Texas (1 February 1861), Arkansas (6 May 1861), and North Carolina (20 May 1861); of the ultimately 11 Confederate States, only Tennessee hadn’t yet seceded (it would do so on 8 June 1861). 

On the same day as Virginia’s official separation from the Union, three runaway slaves rowed across the inlet separating Union-held Fort Monroe from the Confederate stronghold at Sewell’s Point in Hampton Roads, all of 15 miles on the water, but an incomprehensible gulf in the mind and in politics, the gulf between slavery and freedom, between one world and another.  At least, that’s what the three men, Frank Baker, about 42; Shepard Mallory, 20; and James Townsend, 36, must have thought.  Presenting themselves to the fort’s commander, the escaped slaves requested sanctuary.  The three men, forced by their owner, rebel Colonel Charles King Mallory (1820-75), to build fortifications and artillery emplacements to oppose the Union fort, provided intelligence about Confederate fortifications, armaments, and troop strength. 

The men’s request for refuge at the fort, however, prompted Butler, known as an attorney for his ability to weave his way through any statute and discover a way to demolish his opponents’ arguments, to devise the innovative legal theory that these escaped slaves, because they’d been used to further the enemy’s war efforts, were “contraband of war,” no different from a canon, a musket, or a cavalry horse, and did not have to be returned despite the articles of war, the U.S. Constitution, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that declared they must be.  This was an astonishing move for Butler, a staunch Union man but, at his own admission, no abolitionist.  He’d even voted for Jefferson Davis (who, by February 1861, was President of the Confederate States of America) against John C. Breckenridge at the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston as his party’s presidential nominee to run against Republican Abraham Lincoln. 

No sooner had the general declared the three runaways contraband, legally retained by the Union army, than a virtual flood of escaping slaves, having heard the story through a remarkably efficient slave grapevine, followed their example; on Sunday, the 26th, eight more escapees showed up at the fort’s gates and on the 27th, there were 47 more—including women, children, and old men.  Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, an army officer for all of four weeks by this time, became an unlikely hero of freedom from slavery a year-and-a-half before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln ultimately endorsed Butler’s decision and commanders throughout the Union military adopted his practice regarding Southern slaves. 

(The general’s subsequent military career was mostly successful but undistinguished.  He was, in fact, considered by Southerners in areas he administered such as New Orleans as brutal and ruthless, attaining the sobriquet “Beast Butler.”  Even today, Butler’s a despised figure among some Southerners.  After the war, however, Benjamin Franklin Butler, who served in the Massachusetts state senate before the war, would go on to be elected to congress from Massachusetts from 1867 to 1875 and 1877 to 1879, and then served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1883 to 1884.  He ran for president in 1884 as the nominee of the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly parties but lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland; Butler came in a very distant fourth, behind not only Cleveland but Republican James G. Blaine and Prohibition Party candidate John St. John.  He returned to the practice of law, a profession in which he was deemed a brilliant practitioner, his difficulties in other fields of endeavor notwithstanding, and died in a Washington, D.C., court on 11 January 1893 at the age of 74.)

Having read about this bit of historical lore in a footnote in a biography of Abraham Lincoln, playwright Richard Strand (Clown, The Bug) was intrigued.  “The information was tantalizing because it didn't make logical sense,” insisted Strand. “I couldn't understand why an anti-abolitionist supporter of Jefferson Davis would take such a personally risky stand against slavery.”  Additional research didn’t solve the puzzle for the dramatist, so he decided to write a play about the momentous historical footnote and the man who perpetrated it; in 2012, that play became Butler, which premièred at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, on the Jersey Shore, from 12 June to 13 July 2014.  “Writing the play,” explained Strand, “was my attempt to find a plausible explanation for something that seemed inexplicable.”  The dramatist has acknowledged that he composed Butler to suggest one scenario of what might have occurred at Fort Monroe in May of 1861.

That NJ Rep staging, directed by Joseph Discher, eventually moved to New York City where it began previews as part of the 5A Season at the 59E59 Theaters on 15 July for an opening on the 27th, scheduled to run in Theater A until 28 August.  Though it’s my preference to see a play after it opens—I don’t like seeing productions that aren’t finished yet—my usual theater companion, Diana, and I went to Butler at its first preview on Friday, the 15th.  (For further description of 59E59 and its programs, see my report on “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” 12 August 2015.)  Prior to this New York première, there were independent productions of Butler in small theaters around the country, including the Peninsula Players Theatre in Fish Creek, Wisconsin (20-31 August 2014); the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Massachusetts (14 May-13 June 2015); the Florida Studio Theatre, Sarasota (9 December 2015-5 March 2016); the Phoenix Theatre, Indianapolis (7 January-7 February 2016); the Detroit Repertory Theatre (7 January-13 March 2016); the Majestic Theater, West Springfield, Massachusetts (25 February-3 April 2016); and the Northlight Theatre, Skokie, Illinois (11 March-17 April 2016).

The plot of Butler is essentially the history I laid out above, though most of the play, said Strand, “is conjectural.”  Strand’s play begins with Major General Butler (Ames Adamson) at his desk in his office (designed by Jessica L. Parks, and lit by Jill Nagle) when he’s interrupted by Lieutenant Kelly (Benjamin Sterling), a young West Pointer who’d started in the army as a private, fighting in the Mexican War (1846-48) before attending the academy.  The general’s aide (the only character of the four in Butler who’s fictional, as far as I can determine) enters to inform the commandant that a “Negro slave” is demanding to speak with him.  Well, this sets Butler off on a tear (which I later realized was Butler’s style of courtroom cross-examination).  He’s “astonished,” he tells Kelly, in no uncertain terms, and demands that Kelly explain why he’s astonished and not merely surprised.  Because there’s a runaway slave in the fort and the general didn’t know it until now, guesses Kelly.  No, that would only be surprising, retorts Butler.  Because there are not one but three slaves in the fort?  No again.  

Because the slave—Kelly never asked the man’s name, which displeases Butler all the more—has “demanded” to speak with the commandant, not requested or asked.  Butler reminds Kelly that no later than the day before, he’d explained to the lieutenant that one thing that he most dislikes is people who make demands on him.  The only people who can do that, Butler elucidates, are President Lincoln; Secretary of State William Seward and other cabinet members; Gen. Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the army; any officer who outranks him . . . and, Kelly chimes in, the general’s wife.  But what really got Butler’s dander up, he instructed the young officer, was that Kelly had reported that the Negro slave had made this demand! 

By all accounts, General Butler was a rough, uncouth, and irascible man, and it seems that this initiating scene is meant to establish that personality in a slightly humorous way.  (Butler isn’t a comedy, but there are many funny lines and moments in it.)  In any case, the inadvisability of making demands on Butler is a leitmotif in Strand’s script.  Butler is reputed to have had one other character trait that’s important to the play’s unfolding—and which comes closest to explaining why this particular man took the action he did: he’s said to have had a soft heart.  So when he tells Kelly at first that he won’t see the slave and Kelly observes that if the men are sent back to their owner, they’ll likely be killed for escaping, the general hesitates.  He can’t offer the men sanctuary at the fort because that violates both the law and the articles of war, not to mention President Lincoln’s own statements about not interfering with slavery where it was legal.  But he can’t send them back to die, either.  So what can he do?  He orders Kelly to show the slave in, and we finally meet Shepard Mallory (John G. Williams), who’s made himself the spokesman for the three asylum-seekers.  (We never see the other two men, though their names are mentioned more than once—as is the name Colonel Mallory, the slave-holding former judge to whom the men belong.)

Butler and Mallory (the question of whether Shepard and the rebel colonel are related is raised a few times because of their last names, but left unresolved) finally meet, and Butler becomes intrigued with the well-spoken man (he’s learned Butler’s full name from reading the crates with the general’s belongings that are scattered around the headquarters—he’d been taught to read against custom and law—and he uses the word “convoluted,” which actually makes Butler stop for a second or two) who has landed on the officer’s doorstep.  The two men engage in an unexpected and extraordinary battle of wills and wits.  Mallory, it turns out, is just as obstinate as Butler is—in fact, they are something of kindred spirits, which may be part of the reason Butler is impelled to find a way to help the three escapees.

Meanwhile, Butler reveals that he’s received word that the Confederates are sending an officer under a flag of truce to retrieve Colonel Mallory’s property.  That officer, not by coincidence Shepard Mallory reckons, is Maj. John B. Cary (1819-98), the colonel’s artillery expert who doubtlessly has been assigned to take advantage of the situation to gather information on Fort Monroe’s armaments and emplacements.  When Cary arrives, Butler’s decided to blindfold him, and it turns into a sight-and-sound gag off stage as he’s obviously guided by Kelly so that he bumps into furniture and open doors on his way to General Butler’s office.

When Major Cary (David Sitler) enters and is relieved of his blindfold, he proceeds to read the demands—oh, that word!—Colonel Mallory has sent with him.  Cary, whom Butler insists he met at the 1860 Convention when the then-Massachusetts state senator supported Jefferson Davis, steadfastly denies any acquaintance with the Union officer.  Uniformed like a Confederate peacock, in gloves he makes a elaborate display of removing and tall, black cavalry boots, his gray tunic embellished with a red sash around his waist and more gold braid on his sleeves than the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, carrying a cavalry hat with an impossibly broad brim, and wearing expansive side whiskers, Cary even refuses to take a glass of the general’s “particularly good” sherry with him.  This is something in which Butler apparently puts great store as he made Mallory take a glass earlier and will insist again at the end of the play.  (In addition to the sash, Sitler’s costume also has copious red trim signifying an artillery officer, and Cary may actually have been one, though I only found a few mentions of this on the ’Net.  Lieutenant Kelly wears an artillery officer’s uniform, too, though there’s no mention in the play—or the program—of his military specialty.  It may merely have been that the costumer, Patricia E. Doherty, liked the look of a blue uniform with red trim—although photos of most of the other productions of Butler that depict Kelly, show him in the red-trimmed uniform of an artilleryman.)  

So, making demands on him, insisting they never met, and refusing to drink with him, Cary has seriously ticked Butler off but good, which is certainly the second part of Strand’s reason for the general to deny the return of the fugitive slaves.  Nearly foaming at the mouth as Kelly puts the blindfold back on him, Cary is sent back to his colonel empty handed—bringing back neither useful intelligence nor the escaped slaves.  But now, Butler has to come up with a rationale for doing what he just did—or he and Kelly will face courts-martial and Mallory will be returned to face execution.

As the play ends, Butler has begun writing his dispatch justifying his actions to the president, secretary of war, and general-in-chief, and he, Kelly, and Mallory swear to keep the act secret, but we hear a large commotion on the parade ground outside the commandant’s office.  Kelly reports that eight more runaways have entered the fort—what we know, but they don’t, will be just the beginning of a flood.  (Historically, we also know that Butler’s “contraband decision” becomes the foundation of a general order for Union forces during the Civil War.)  The men drink a toast . . . “to contraband!” 

There’s little biographical information available on Strand.  He wrote his first play, a one act entitled Harry and Sylvia, while he was a college student in 1976.  He directed it himself and it won two national awards and was published by Hunter Press in Edinburgh, Scotland.  A full length version of the same play, called Clown, premiered at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 1981.  His scripts have premièred at the Actors Theater of Louisville, GeVa Theatre, Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf, Mixed Blood, the Eugene O’Neill Center, and other venues.  The Bug, Strand’s most successful play so far, has been translated into five languages for productions in France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

Strand is currently the chairman of the theater department, technical director, and set designer at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California (near Los Angels), where he also teaches playwriting and the history of theater; he lives in California with his wife.  Previously, he was production manager at Columbia College School of Dance in Chicago and at Centre East in Skokie, Illinois.  In addition to his plays, Strand’s written articles on technical theater that have been published in Dramatics magazine.  He has an MFA from the Playwright’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

The New Jersey Repertory Company was founded in 1997 by husband-and-wife partners Executive Producer Gabor Barabas and Artistic Director SuzAnne Barabas.  Located in Long Branch in Monmouth County on the New Jersey shore (about 55 miles south of New York City), the theater’s goal is the development and production of new plays.  Since its inauguration, New Jersey Rep has produced more than 90 plays in pursuit of this mission, including over 60 world premieres, in its small, 64-seat playhouse (on Broadway!), a few blocks west of the boardwalk.  (The company is currently negotiating to purchase two additional properties in Long Branch for an expansion of its services to the community with a movie house for art films and an art museum.)  The theater has committed itself to nurturing the work of both established and emerging writers and, maintaining an open-submission policy, receives scripts from throughout the U.S. and around the world.  In 2012 New Jersey Rep received a National Theater Company Award from the American Theatre Wing, sponsor of the Tony Awards, and 2013’s Broomstick, by New Orleans playwright John Biguenet, was nominated for the Steinberg Award by the American Theatre Critics Association.  The theater has also received several New American Plays Awards from the Edgerton Foundation of Beverly Hills, including one for the world première of Butler, which won the award. 

The problem I had with Butler is that Strand clearly never satisfactorily worked out his puzzle.  He hasn’t come up with an explanation for why Butler, the anti-abolitionist who voted for Jefferson Davis as his party’s presidential nominee, would invent a legalistic rationale for not returning escaped slaves to their “rightful owner.”  Butler’s entirely a semi-humorous treatment of the historical moment that has no real dramatic point.  If it weren’t largely fictionalized—the dialogue is imagined by Strand, and he’s invented one of the four characters—it would be a classroom role-play or a History Channel docudrama.  

The script is well enough written and the production is well done, however, and the performances are creditable without being exceptional.  As enjoyable as it is, though, Strand has relied on Butler’s reputed kind heart, hidden behind his peppery bluster, and his obvious exasperation with Major Cary’s arrogance to motivate the momentous action the general takes.  Though I compliment Strand on not telegraphing Butler’s soft-heartedness—it’s never mentioned by anyone, we just glean it from his response to the plight of Shepard Mallory and his companions—it and his irritation at Cary’s behavior are rather wan motivation for defying orders, the law, and the constitution.  (Okay, I’ll admit that the reason there isn’t a cogent explanation for Butler’s decision in the history books may well be that it was just peevishness and tender-heartedness that led him to it, but life isn’t drama, and real life isn’t necessarily dramatic.  To paraphrase something that George Bernard Shaw wrote which I quoted recently, it’s a playwright’s job to enhance the facts of history to make a story stageworthy.  As I said of George C. Wolfe’s remake of Shuffle Along in my report of 28 June, Butler isn’t a documentary play, but it is a history play, and even Shakespeare meddled with fact to make great drama of recorded events.) 

On the positive side, Strand has found wonderful ways to enliven history with humor without resorting to jokes and slapstick, or even ridicule.  (He may have let a little of the last slip into his portrait of Confederate Major Cary, who’s portrayed as something of a popinjay—though some of that’s surely the responsibility of Sitler and director Discher.)  As Aaron C. Thomas wondered in American Theatre, “The Civil War is an unlikely setting for a comedy.  After all, how do you mine humor from one of our nation’s bloodiest periods?  Can a play about America’s shameful legacy of slavery manage to shine light on a neglected corner of that story—and also get laughs?”  The answer appears to be yes.  

Strand believes that it’s the very situation depicted in Butler that is the basis of the humor.  The “very absurdity of slavery,” as AT’s Thomas put it, generates the comic circumstances.  “I was aware that both Butler and Cary (the Confederate officer) accept the absurd premise that one man can own another man,” explains the playwright.  “I knew that their acceptance of that premise would force them to defend things that were indefensible and, therefore, that portions of the play could become humorous.”  He’s not making fun of slavery or slaves, as some might fear at first blush; he’s making fun of people who twist themselves into pretzels to justify a tacitly absurd and indefensible practice—and the equally absurd lengths others found it necessary to go to in order to oppose it.

The humor, however, isn’t either a sidelight or a mask.  It doesn’t distract from or cover over the serious and, indeed, unpleasant truths inherent in the play’s situation.  In large part, it serves as the “spoonful of sugar” that helps the disturbing facts go down.  But some of the comedy acts as a spotlight—or perhaps a fluoroscope is a better image, letting us see things hidden behind the immediate circumstances.  In scene three, for instance, when General Butler notices that the runaway slave and his owner have the same last name, he asks, “Is he a relative of yours?”  It’s a laugh-line, made funnier by Shepard Mallory’s response: “Not as far as I know.  But I‘m a little hazy on just who my relatives are.  Colonel Mallory owns me.”  At the same time, though, without actually raising the issue, the exchange alludes to the practice among slave-owners to rape and father children by the African-American women they owned.  (Not all of the abhorrent realities of slavery and its era are handled with humor.  The whipping of slaves for minor and even perceived misdeeds is confronted straight-on when Mallory shows Butler the scars on his back and the general is genuinely shocked.  This launches a difficult and perceptive exchange about why people with power perpetrate violence on those they control.  It will be understandable if spectators start to think about Black Lives Matter and its cause of action.)

The writer’s also telescoped time enough to keep the story rolling—the real events took five days (plus the aftermath); the play runs two hours—even though the play’s mostly talk—some of it animated, granted.  Strand also wisely stays away from attempts to make the language sound like mid-19th-century prose, even as he’s also avoided obvious rhetorical anachronisms, so that we hear what the characters are saying rather than how they’re saying it.  As Thomas of American Theatre observed, Butler “shows how two men in a room can break each other’s defenses down, make each other (and the audience) laugh, and develop a respect for one another as intellectual and moral equals, no matter their official status.”  Butler isn’t great drama (or even good dramatic literature), but it does make good theater—Ken Jaworowski of the New York Times stated categorically a the time of the Long Branch début, “Just call it splendid”—especially in the hands of an accomplished director and cast.  (As a spotlight on an obscure moment in American history that ended up having far-reaching consequences, Strand’s play serves an honorable purpose beyond art.)

Though some reviewers and spectators will complain that Strand’s light-hearted rendering of history—especially such a weighty moment—is wrong-headed and flip, I find it endearing that a great historical decision may have been based on no more than one man’s prickly personality.  It recalls my response to the 1969 musical 1776 in which the decision to declare independence for Britain’s American colonies hung on the choice of one delegate in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, to vote for independence because it was easier to maintain his historical anonymity as one of the many who voted in favor than as the one man whose vote defeated the proposal.  Wilson’s fellow Pennsylvanian John Dickinson asks, “And is that how new nations are formed—by a nonentity seeking to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves?”  Well, in Strand’s view, the momentous determination not to return escaped slaves to their Confederate masters turned on a lone major general’s snap decision in a fit of pique at a hubristic secessionist.  How fundamentally, endearingly human!

Joseph Discher manages to keep the production on target, never letting the comedy overwhelm the serious theme but, conversely, not allowing the often dire aspects of the story to swamp the humor.  In Parks’s tight office set, a prop-cluttered space, Discher, who’s directed Butler twice before aside from the New Jersey début (the two Bay State stagings at the Barrington Stage and Majestic Theater), prompted the actors to move and behave completely naturally even when there were four men on stage together.  (Thanks to fight director Brad Lemons, Williams and Adamson even engage in a brief tussle in the cramped office—and pull it off rather nicely.)  The actors, however, all came off a little stiffly—far from historical animatronics, but not quite warm-blooded beings, either.  Even though Diana and I caught the very first preview of the New York run, I’d have thought after performing the month’s run in Long Branch they’d have been more comfortable in their roles.  Perhaps the two-year lay-off was more than the Off-Broadway rehearsal period could overcome (which is why I prefer to see plays after they open).  Adamson and Sterling’s opening scene, for example, was brittle and artificial as Butler and Kelly fenced through the general’s response to the announcement of Mallory’s arrival at the fort.  It seemed not only contrived, but as if the two actors didn’t quite believe what they were saying.  Some of Sitler’s interview with Adamson, especially Cary’s and Butler’s first lunges and parries, was similarly remote and canned.  I hope that the cast works its way out of this rabbit hole by 27 July, but I lay the problem at the feet of Discher.

Parks’s set is a model of a busy man’s cluttered work place, filled to overflowing with the boxes of his newly-arrived personal belongings, his papers and books stuffed into his secretary and other nooks and crannies, a desk at center-left, several chairs, a wash basin and pitcher on a stand, the requisite flag in a corner (33 stars?—it was draped so I couldn’t tell) and portrait of Lincoln on the wall, a map of the fort and its environs, and the table with the sherry decanter and glasses up center.  The room is lit effectively by Nagle and the realism of the production’s look is completed convincingly by Doherty’s three soldiers’ uniforms and Mallory’s earth-toned garb (perhaps a little clean and neat for a slave who’s lit out in the midst of a day at hard construction labor).  The costume designer outdid herself with Major Cary’s foppish look, however, including his outlandish mutton chops—closely resembling the famous side whiskers of Union General Ambrose Burnside, namesake of ‘sideburns.’  They defy gravity!  (Wigs and, I presume, prosthetic whiskers, are designed by Leah J. Loukas.)

(A totally irrelevant sidebar: Back in the 1960s, when the Civil War was marking its centenary, there were hundreds of articles and books, both fiction and non-fiction—and many combinations of the two—on the war and its many personalities.  I devoured a lot of these, including a slim volume called If the South Had Won the Civil War by  MacKinlay Kantor.  I remember one article, published where and by whom I don’t recall, in which the author did a survey of Civil War generals and correlated the volume of their whiskers with their success on the battlefield.  Statistically, the writer demonstrated, the most successful field commanders on both sides were those with the most facial hair.  In the majority of match-ups, the commander with the biggest beard beat his less hirsute opponent.  General Burnside, with his distinctive side whiskers but no beard, fared less well than his more heavily bearded counterparts.  By this standard, General Butler would be at a decided disadvantage since he wore only a small mustache and no beard or side whiskers at all.  Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were fairly evenly matched in the beard department, but Jefferson Davis’s goatee was no match for Abraham Lincoln’s chin whiskers.  I just think it’s a fun factoid.)

Adamson’s Butler is appropriately stuffy and petty when we meet him, but the actor manages incrementally to reveal the general’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as his shrewd legal intellect.  Despite some line problems on the night I saw the play, Adamson gives us a solid portrait of the title character’s complex personality as he deals with the dilemma that could at the very least end his military career, land him in a stockade, and potentially mean the death of his accidental charges.  As the slave Mallory, Williams seems to have taken some liberties with his status and the era—encouraged, to be sure, by Strand’s script and Discher’s direction—but creates a believable figure in extremis, a man who knows that he’s caught between the rock of the law and convention and the hard place of summary execution at the hands of his former master.  Strand has made Mallory not just intelligent, even astute—he reads Butler pretty accurately and knows himself pretty clearly as well—but self-educated and Williams plays these characteristics forthrightly.  Yet he doesn’t overlook the more elemental, emotional aspects of the character’s situation, not only when he shows Butler the flogging scars he bears but his panic when the general tumbles to the fact that this slave can read and Mallory fears that the officer will reveal his secret.  Strand doesn’t say so in the script, but if we know that a slave who’s been taught to read—and any person who teaches one—is a punishable offense in the South, we can understand Williams honest reaction to this possibility.

Sterling’s Lieutenant Kelly is really a glorified messenger, bringing the world outside the commandant’s office in, but Strand has given the young officer enough of a character for the actor to build upon.  Sterling allows us to see the touch of disdain the West Pointer who came up through the ranks holds for the general who used influence and political pressure to gain a lofty rank (at the time, Major General was the highest rank in the Union army) and a command and even more strongly, the contempt he had for Shepard Mallory and his slave companions.  But Sterling also shows us how, over the several days of contact, he comes to respect Mallory, a transformation that comes somewhat abruptly in the script, but which the actor pulls off successfully.  In Sitler’s hands, Major Cary is stiff-necked and condescending.  Although the character was a schoolteacher before the war (Cary was headmaster at a military academy and in the 1880s was appointed superintendent of Richmond’s school system), Sitler, who strongly resembles actor Željko Ivanek,  plays him as an aristocratic member of the FFV, looking down not only on the black slaves but Northerners like Butler.  While Sitler’s Southern accent (and the Tidewater region of Virginia, where Cary and Colonel Mallory came from, has a very distinct accent of its own, derived, many believe, from the 17th-century English spoken by the original British settlers) was a little strained, his characterization of Major Cary was vivid and solid, making him a viable foil of the testy Butler—and a credible motivation for the general’s refusal to turn the slaves over to him for repatriation.

Since I saw the play early in its preview run, I waited until opening to survey the reviews.  That also meant that not all the weeklies and monthlies had posted notices yet, so the pool of reviews was shallower than it might have been later in the play’s run.  Show-Score, which included in its average rating the coverage of the out-of-town productions, posted only eight reviews from the 59E59 New York première.  (My round-up will include a larger sampling of press coverage, and I’ve recalculated Show-Score’s rating to exclude the reviews of performances beyond New York.)  The website’s review collection,  all highly positive (89%) except one (11%), averages out to a fairly high score of 86.

The New York Times merely reran excepts from Ken Jaworowski’s 2014 review of the 2014 Long Branch première.  After acknowledging, “It’s hard to categorize ‘Butler.’  The play is part comedy, part historical drama and part biography, often all at once, and sometimes none of those,” the “Paper of Record” repeated the reviewer’s declaration that it’s “splendid.”  Jaworowski reported, “The beauty of the script . . . is how it approaches these thorny topics.  In short, it’s a hoot.”  The Timesman explained, “Rather than dry exposition or long-winded discussions, these men use wordplay that is by turns sarcastic, droll and witty.”  He praised Adamson for “a powerhouse performance” and Williams as “smooth.”  Jaworowski summed up by affirming, “At the end, it’s still not clear how to classify this two-hour show. . . .  Only one category really matters to theatergoers: good play.  Into that slot, ‘Butler’ fits effortlessly.”  (The full text of the 2014 notice is on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/nyregion/a-review-of-butler-in-long-branch.html.)

The Times was the only print outlet that published a review while I was compiling this survey.  The remaining notices were all on websites.  Carole Di Tosti called the play “superb” on Theater Pizzazz, adding that it’s “tightly directed.”  Sterling’s Lieutenant Kelly is “played with vigor and likeability,” said Di Tosti, “Adamson is a knockout” as Butler, and Williams’s Mallory is “wonderfully portrayed.”  The “plot development is neither pat nor obvious,” the TP reviewer reported, and “set-up in the extremely capable hands of” Discher.  “The play is full of explosive confrontations when Butler and Mallory go head to head,” Di Tosti added, thanks to “Strand’s brilliant writing.”  In conclusion, the TP writer declared, “The production is just stunning!  Butler is marvelous theater.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer characterized Strand as “shrewd” and his “talk between Butler and Mallory” as “both amusing and witty.”  Sommer predicted that Butler “will have a solid life” ahead of it and that “audiences will respond to” it. 

Samuel L. Leiter characterized Butler as “both informative and highly entertaining” and an “engaging historical comedy” on his website, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “The vibrant verbal volleys between Mallory and Butler,” reported Leiter, “invest the piece with wit and wisdom” and “Strand has comedic fun playing with the relationships among the” three military men and the fugitive slave.  Praising the physical production, Leiter cautioned, however, that the play’s “style is heightened for dramatic effect, its tone is mildly anachronistic, and its details conflated, so you have to take much of it with a grain of salt.”  Philip Dorian of Scene on Stage asserted, “Rarely has a slice of history been as entertainingly portrayed as in Butler.”  “Deftly directed by Joseph Discher,” continued Dorian, “Strand’s characters evolve from mutual hatred to grudging respect and even gestures of friendship and equality.”  With compliments for all the actors, the SoS reviewer concluded, “Making imaginary or real characters so sympathetic, so funny and so relevant, is damn good playwriting no matter the source.”

On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy dubbed Butler a “comedic-drama” with an “artful script,” “meticulous direction,” and “four excellent actors,” and affirmed that “the show is a wonderfully staged, unforgettable story of humanity.”  Kennedy reported, “The cast of Butler captures the spirited, intense, often humorous dialogue that makes this show completely captivating,” adding kudos to each member.  Her overall assessment of Butler was, “More than an entertaining show, it is a significant piece of theater and a timeless exploration of social conscience and individual responsibility.”  Howard Miller of Talkin’ Broadway called Butler a “glittering seriocomic play” that’s “amusing stuff, but rather puzzling” at its start.  Strand, however, “has taken an actual historic event and characters and turned it into an engrossing, non-pedantic play,” affirmed Miller, adding, “More surprising, the play is delightfully funny, packed with wit, farce, and slapstick.”  Of the staging, the TB review-writer said that “under Joseph Discher's sprightly direction,” all four characters are “splendidly realized.”  He concluded, “All told, this is a terrific show.”

TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart suggested that Butler “might just be the funniest play ever written about Civil War-era slavery.”  The play, however, “is simultaneously thought-provoking and sidesplitting,” continued Stewart.  Stewart went on to make some astonishing comparisons, too: “the physical style of performance . . . owes much to classic sitcoms like The Odd Couple and I Love Lucy,” observed the TM writer, but “Adamson and Williams . . . play their scenes as if they were performing Beatrice and Benedick from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.”  David Roberts labeled the play “scintillating” on Theatre Reviews Limited, in which Strand “delineates [the] conflicts carefully and—with the help of history—creates an admirable level of authenticity.”  Within Strand’s “well-written script,” Adamson’s and Williams’s “performances could not be more irresistible” as directed by Discher “with passion and sensitivity and brings out the best in his talented ensemble cast.”

The sole negative notice was David Barbour’s on Lighting and Sound America, in which the writer asked, “Do we really need a boulevard comedy about slavery?”  Barbour contended that Strand “has aims to illuminate a little-known piece of Civil War history in the manner of, say, Kaufman and Hart or Garson Kanin, an ambition that, on the face of it, seems weirdly out of step with our times,” and he attested that it made him feel “queasy.”  Describing the opening scene between General Butler and Lieutenant Kelly as “remarkably unfunny,” because “the playwright wastes pages of dialogue” comprising “endless back-and-forth.”  The L&S writer labeled the scene “tiresome, one of the least felicitous examples of exposition in recent memory.”  Barbour felt that “Strand never effectively makes the case that a bond exists between” Mallory and Butler and, further, the reviewer insisted that “there's a pervasive feeling that the characters are following the playwright's dictates rather than their own hearts and minds.”  He found that “the second act's clever construction and sometimes witty dialogue are undermined to the degree that they require soft-pedaling the horrors of slavery and minimizing the crimes of those who supported it.”  Barbour praised the design and production team, but had only grudging compliments for the actors and director—blaming Strand for their deficiencies.  The review-writer concluded by noting that “throughout Butler, there's a nagging question of taste.”  Observing that the “99% white” audience at the performance he attended “ate it all up with a spoon,” Barbour posited, “I suspect that a black audience wouldn't be nearly as amused.”