All the Way at the
Neil Simon Theatre
Bryan Cranston in All the Way.
Neil
Schenkkan’s All the Way might as well
be called The Cranston Show.
The script
is well-written, Brandon J. Dirden, William Jackson Harper, and Michael McKean
put in inspired performances, and Bill Rauch’s direction shows promise. But once Bryan Cranston stalks, in the dark,
on stage at the beginning of the show (rarely to leave), he takes command, much
as his character might have.
For five
years on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Cranston played a gruff, harried, evil
genius, a man who knew how to control people and valued loyalty. Now he is playing a character with much the
same description — Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United
States. (Hubert Humphrey, played
exceedingly well by Robert Petkoff, is his Jesse Pinkman — earnest and kind near
the beginning of the play, Johnson’s use of him as a glorified errand boy
deadens his resolve and morals by the end.)
Mr. Cranston’s range, though, is not in question here. To play the President, he hunches and walks
bowlegged, seeming thirty years older; he adopts a staccato Texan accent that
would fool even the oldest Good Old Boy; and he seems to wield so much power
that might have scared Johnson himself.
He is an electrifying performer, and every second that he is onstage,
calculating wildly the votes he needs and then getting them at any cost, he
overwhelms the audience with his pure talent.
He fills the room with heat. This
is a once-in-a-lifetime performance.
The first
act of All the Way traces the period
from John F. Kennedy’s assassination (for which Johnson shows a modicum of
grief, but not enough to distract him) to the passage of Johnson’s flagship
Civil Rights Act, which, as he frequently insists in the play, he needed the
country’s grief over Kennedy’s death to do.
The second details the President’s efforts in the 1964 Presidential
election, in which he is beset by calamity at every turn but (spoiler alert)
wins in the greatest Democratic landslide in the history of the country. Throughout, the focus is on Johnson’s complex
relationship with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King (Mr. Dirden,
in a performance that almost rivals Mr. Cranston’s). King’s repeated compromise with Johnson on
the Civil Rights Act, especially on the removed voting rights section,
frustrate him to the point that he agrees to work with SNCC leader Bob Moses
(Eric Lenox Abrams) and Stokely Carmichael (the very talented Mr. Harper) on
the almost certainly suicidal Freedom Summer project. (Here some creative license is taken;
Carmichael was too low-ranking a member of SNCC at the time to have ever met
with Dr. King, and even when Carmichael ascended to its presidency, King always
disagreed with and personally disliked him.)
Meanwhile, the conniving J. Edgar Hoover (Mr. McKean, sleekly
terrifying) is bugging Dr. King and his associates everywhere they go, at one
point even sending Dr. King’s wife recordings of her husband’s adultery.
The
President must deal with all of these problems.
They consume his life — Johnson’s relationship with his wife, Lady Bird
(Betsy Aidem), is portrayed as dismissive and harsh in the wake of issues with
civil rights. Equally, they consume the
rest of his presidency — Johnson signs off on orders to essentially start the
Vietnam War without even seeming to think about it. This may be because playwright Neil Schenkkan’s
Johnson is obsessed with power, and these issues were an exercise in collecting
and using it. But this Johnson — reminiscing
sincerely about poor Mexican children in a border town in Texas, about his
African-American staff’s inability to enter a public restroom — seems also
legitimately desirous of a country where equality for all is the norm. (Indeed, many of the black characters
repeatedly refer to him as “the most sympathetic President since Abraham
Lincoln," perhaps a bit optimistically.) So once again, Mr. Cranston is portraying a
character whose innate humanity it is left to the audience to decide. Moral quandaries aside, though, he is still a
whole lot of fun to watch, and that means something, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment