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By Jeremy McCarter
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"We are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets," wrote Clifford Odets. The most socially committed of the great American dramatists set a pattern for his successors to follow when he declared, in 1939, that he didn't want his plays to be just "psychologically profound," he also wanted them to be "immediately and dynamically useful" in the fight for social justice. If political plays have this dual function, it means we shouldn't judge them on merely esthetic grounds (that is, whether they're good or bad), but also on how they change our impulses and perceptions—on what they do. This month, three of these public-minded productions have opened in New York. Each tries, in a markedly different way, to make us reconsider how we feel about America, Iraq and our Dubya-era leaders, such as they are.
In "All My Sons," which is now getting a starry revival on Broadway, Arthur Miller spun a real-life news story into a family drama about personal morality and public responsibility in wartime. Joe Keller (John Lithgow) owns a factory that sold defective parts to the armed forces, resulting in the deaths of American pilots—a crime that earned one of his associates a long jail term. Now the associate's daughter, Ann (Katie Holmes), has arrived to marry Joe's son, Chris (Patrick Wilson), even though she used to be the fiancée of Chris's brother, who was lost during the war. Joe's wife (Dianne Wiest) insists the boy is still coming home.
Even though Iraq and Afghanistan give our times plenty of resonance with 1947, the year of the play's premiere, director Simon McBurney feels an urge to punch things up. Taking a page from "Our Town," the show begins with the cast walking onstage in house light, as Lithgow reads the opening stage directions. Like most ideas boosted from Thornton Wilder, this works like a dream. Alas, it's followed by distracting music cues, extraneous video and a performance style that has Lithgow, Wiest and Wilson—actors of great presence and power—careening from flatness to shout-y excess. Next to them, Holmes—who creases her brow when she's upset and raises her voice when she's mad—looks like what she is: a rookie among pros. The result is a tragedy that breaks no hearts nor puts much oomph behind Miller's timely plea that we abandon narrow self-interest and work for social solidarity.
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While McBurney plays up the public side of Miller's drama, director Doug Hughes takes the opposite approach with a Broadway revival of "A Man for All Seasons." By removing the character of the Common Man, whom the playwright, Robert Bolt, intended to narrate the action and toss in stray historical facts, Hughes tightens our focus, leaving us to consider Sir Thomas More, the legendary chancellor of England, with no fussy adornment. Well, with as little fussy adornment as a play starring Frank Langella can achieve. Though he's famously fond of big, scenery-chewing gestures, Langella also has a spark of Noel Coward wit: drollery, when he's onstage, always seems a mere eye roll away. Here, those bright touches enliven what could otherwise feel academic.
In the play, More's refusal to accept Henry VIII's break with the Vatican inspires a series of debates about the tension between private conscience and duty to the state. More argues that when statesmen abandon the former for the latter, "they lead their country by a short route to chaos." The cogency and timeliness of these fights invite an unflattering contrast between More and all the public figures who might have taken such a stand against the Bush administration—over Iraq, for instance—and didn't. (What, I kept wondering, would Colin Powell feel as he watched this play?) Even if it seems a little slow here and there, the revival gets the big things right, and leaves you thinking.
So, for that matter, does "Black Watch." Few pieces of theater this decade have shot more bullets (in the bold, truth-telling, Odetsian sense) with greater accuracy than the National Theatre of Scotland's docudrama about soldiers in Iraq. Playwright Gregory Burke interviewed members of the fabled Black Watch regiment, and John Tiffany emptied his bag of directorial tricks—including explosions, videos, choreographed sequences for his cast of 10, songs—to put their stories onstage. The result is funny and profane, violent and moving. By criticizing our leaders from the perspective of soldiers themselves, it's also devastating. I know of no work of art that leaves you with a more acute sense of how corrupt the war has been. When Odets had his breakthrough with "Waiting for Lefty" in 1935, triumph sounded like the opening-night crowd leaping to their feet and roaring, "Strike! Strike!" When the stage lights wink out at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, success sounds like stunned and queasy silence.
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