Past Imperfect
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Past Imperfect By Stefan Kanfer OMNIUM GATHERUM IS the Latin term for catchall, and as the title of the play at the Off-Broadway Variety Arts Theater it is an example of truth...
...Director Peter Askin keeps the tempo light and swift, but he cannot disguise the fact that this is arecitation rather than adrama, a hagiographie exercise rather than a portrait...
...But neither were these men without a long list of hypocrisies...
...Under the crisp direction of Will Frears, all eight performers make ensemble acting an art as well as a craft...
...Omnium Gatherum has no agenda, hidden or otherwise...
...These are people used to talking, rather than listening, and they represent all shades of political opinion...
...Accordingly, some 41 filmmakers were subpoenaed...
...The effect is that of an editorial cartoon, not a genuine confrontation...
...There was much to like about Trumbo...
...Addressing the audience at the Mazer Theater in the heart of the Lower East Side, he shakes his head over the many changes wrought in America—including the fact that he, a practicing Jew, now has a grandson named Christopher, Yet it is not the Old Man's nature to remain gloomy orphilosophical for long...
...So it would seem, and yet the surroundings have a certain Dantean aspect...
...We have all been to such things, but this one takes the prize...
...This was in keeping with Lawson's work...
...Take the period of the notorious Ribbentrop Pact, for exampie, when Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed that Russia and Germany would not go to war against each other...
...Disgustin' habits...
...David Rockwell's set is appropriately eerie, and the lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer cannily balances the bizarre and the chi-chi, as do Junghyun Georgia Lee's costumes...
...It was this 'inalienable right' in Fascist countries which directly resulted in the slaughter of 5 million Jews...
...His joy and consolation is his memory—of this neighborhood way back when, of the simple pleasures of stoop ball, of vaudeville, of daring to dream in the Promised City...
...And now, the world's finally recognizing the disastrous error behind the whole bloody thing— Roger: The world will always use a double standard toward the Jews because they hate Jews...
...When the terrorist arrives as a surprise guest, his rhetoric is so inflammatory that he gets pounced upon by the novelist and the fireman and melodramatically beaten to a pulp—after which the crowd welcomes him to a helping of the entrée: Moroccan spiced lamb, and a salad of Belgian endive and Anjou pear...
...Though the reports of the trials have appeared in only fragmentary form in most American newspapers," it asserted, "they have by sheer weight of evidence established a clear presumption of guilt of the defendants...
...An odd mix ?? Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Outward Bound and Dr...
...The finale is the only flaw, but it is a large one...
...Otherwise there can be no freedom for anyone...
...Seizing the moment, the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), I Pamell Thomas (R.-N.J...
...The veteran script writer was a mustachioed, garrulous old gentleman reminiscent of "Esky," the popeyed symbol of Eccwire magazine...
...On cue, Dalton reads from relevant letters to friends, enemies, Hollywood folk, and family members...
...in Celluloid City, where trophy wives abound, he had stayed married to the same woman for decades...
...A sample exchange between Terence the Brit, Roger the novelist, and Suzie, their hostess: Terence: Four decades of Arab suffering under the most humiliating and degraded conditions— Roger: Humiliated by fellow Arabs who never lift a finger to help their own— Terence: Children murdered in the streets by Israeli soldiers— Roger: Palestinian maniacs blowing themselves up— Terence: Nobody's hands are clean over there...
...First comes the wine, and soon afterward the loosened tongues...
...Designed as a flashback to simpler times, the musical is moved along by its narrator and director, known only as the OldMan (Lon Gary...
...As Trumbo glowers at his desk, two large screens show newsreel footage from the period in grainy black and white...
...He asked for a fairness doctrine for such unclassifiable nonCommunist progressives as James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck, then considered enemies of the party...
...Among the signers were Cole and Ornitz...
...His large house was à la mode without being ostentatious...
...And the interesting thing is that in the course of securing for himself these rights he must also guarantee it to his enemy...
...It was not until he presented his version of history that things began to seem at odds with the facts...
...What informs every discussion is the awareness of 9/11, and the imminent clash of civilizations...
...On Stage Past Imperfect By Stefan Kanfer OMNIUM GATHERUM IS the Latin term for catchall, and as the title of the play at the Off-Broadway Variety Arts Theater it is an example of truth in labeling...
...Worse, while the terrorist is chewing away, the fireman makes a confession: He was at the Trade Towers when the planes hit, andhe perished when the building collapsed...
...Nobody's hands are clean...
...Lane articulates amusingly (he will be followed in the same role by F. Murray Abraham), but neither he nor the ingratiating MacDonald ever truly interact...
...What could be bad...
...Freedom of expression was all very well for those who toed the party line...
...He had written with considerable pride in Theater Magazine, "As for myself, I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position and to do so in the most specific manner...
...Not all the guests are prominent...
...They were immediately labeled the Hollywood Ten, and were cited for contempt...
...My critics were entirely right in writing that certain fundamental ideas in my article would, if pursued to their conclusion, result in the dissolution of the Left-wing cultural movement...
...Later research showed how manipulative and revisionist he was...
...No malefactors escape his wrath, whether they're tradesmen who have padded their bills, or Congressional Visigoths who make Red-baiting a way of life...
...he argued against the CP's insistence that art must always serve a propagandistic end...
...Ya breed like rabbits No way we should support 'em We can't afford 'em We should deport 'em The immigrants, trapped in sweatshops, have their own lament: The gold that sits at the end of rainbows, The one they said was therefor us to grab: I think that pot might be somewhat elusive...
...To a great degree it succeeds—those in the audience who know no history applaud, chuckle and cheer at all the right moments...
...The going is the goal, and the journey crackles with ideas and absurdities—like a New York social gathering on a bad day, or the UN on any day...
...We might continue to love our parents and grind away at school," recalled Irving Howe in World of Our Fathers, his magisterial study of the Lower East Side...
...Trumbo was only too delighted to see Trotskyites hounded, crowing in the Daily Worker: "If you tell me Hollywood, in contrast with the novel and the theater, has produced nothing so provocative or so progressive as FreedomRoad or Deep Are the Roots, I will grant you the point, but I may also add that neither does...
...They did not deserve to be imprisoned and later exiled...
...Still, the intermissionless Omnium Gatherum is well worth the price of admission...
...Exclusive for the upper classes...
...Albert Maltz, once a promising proletarian novelist, had felt uncomfortable marching in lockstep with Moscow...
...A particularly sleazy operator, he later went to jail for receiving kickbacks...
...There is an enceinte vegetarian (Jenny Bacon), unsure of who impregnated her...
...It resembled, to my ear, the appealing rhythms of Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz...
...In this clamorous work by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, a group of loudmouths assemble at a chic dinnerparty...
...headed an "Inquiry into Hollywood Communism...
...His children were pleasant...
...Suzie: Wonderful...
...That was the day Lillian Hellman appeared at a Screen Writers Guild meeting to announce in horror, "The Motherland has been attacked...
...a striving black essayist (Melanna Gray...
...Two months later the brainwashed Maltz recanted...
...They became known as the Unfriendly 19...
...The lives of these strivers are made credible and poignant by a large cast of men, women and children whose limitless energy compensates for a lack of polish...
...Said Trumbo's rejection slip: "It is difficult to support your belief in the inalienable right of man's mind to be exposed to any thought whatever, however that thought might be to anyone else...
...Together they make most of J the evening a dinnerparty from Hell...
...An indignant and vocal group immediately let it be known that they would not under any circumstances cooperate with the investigation, which they labeled an inquisition...
...They make the Ten appear to be victims of entrapment, and the Committeemen look like fools...
...At various junctures, Christopher (Gordon MacDonald) summons up incidents in his father's life...
...The apocalyptic ending, complete with the roar of 747s crashing into buildings, is deafening rather than scarifying, and tends to diminish the bright verbal fireworks that preceded it...
...CHRISTOPHER TRUMBO'S epistolary play, Trumbo, contains the actual writings of his father, Dalton Trumbo (Nathan Lane), who had been blacklisted by Hollywood studios for his political beliefs...
...En route it would also expose those who wrote, directed or acted in those pictures...
...and kept something of our bruising gutter-worldliness, our hard and abrasive skepticism...
...Its locale is uncertain...
...That ignoble statement is in direct conhast to the play's high-minded quote from Trumbo after he had been blacklisted: "The right to express ideas, good ideas, bad ideas, wicked ideas, crazy ideas, impossible ideas—this is the most precious right the individual can have...
...Others need not apply...
...I see now that my characterization of [Trotskyite James T. Farrell] was decidedly lax...
...Each speaker has a point, and myriad blind spots...
...You could see it in cab drivers and garment manufacturers, but also in writers and professors who had grown up as children of immigrant Jews...
...It is based on the testimonies of thousands who struggled on, and graduated from, these very streets...
...In the streets we were roughened by actuality...
...Thomas claimed HUAC'S intent was to expose "all the pictures which have been produced in Hollywood in the past eight years which contain Communist propaganda...
...I'd like to turn your attention, if I may, to the salad...
...a fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor...
...The English pundit (Dean Nolen) might be a doppelgänger of Christopher Hitchens...
...The formerly anti-Fascist Communist Party suddenly advocated peace at any price, and Trumbo published Johnny Got His Gun, an antiwar novel about a limbless, eyeless soldier maimed by battle...
...The recollection ofthat moment plays well on the stage of the Westside Theater...
...All others should bring a grain of salt along with their tickets...
...In a paper entitled "What Shall We Ask of Writers...
...But the story is far more complicated than the playwright is willing or able to concede...
...Back in the 1970s I spent a pleasant day with scenarist Dalton Trumbo when I was compiling material for A Journal of the Plague Years, a history of the show business blacklist...
...Are we near Ground Zero in Manhattan...
...The others were Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner Jr., EdwardDmytryk, and Adrian Scott...
...Strangelove, Omnium Gatherum swiftly nosedives from civil discourse to furious skirmishes...
...Whenever he threatens to get sentimental, though, sharp recollections intrude, like the song of apoliceman(JoelHalstead) who has little use for these greenhorns: Why don't you go back where you camefrom Pack your bags and rags you wear...
...The heretic was summoned to a meeting, where Biberman condemned his stance, and Bessie declared, "We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class theory...
...And as lagniappe it would garner careermaking headlines for many committee members, including an ambitious Californian named Richard M. Nixon...
...We spoke (or rather, he spoke and I listened) about the bad old days, from which he had emerged scathed but still eminently employable...
...InNovember 1947 the Cold War grew icier by the hour...
...Jay Kholos' score is derivative but tuneful, and his book is filled with humor and rue...
...Dalton Trumbo was one of them...
...The sophisticated Middle Easterner (Edward A. Hajj) suggests the late Edward Said...
...He seemed enchanted with the sound of his own voice, and with good reason...
...They argued diligently for the rights of black America, yet when the government's racist policies herded Japanese-Americans into detention camps the party stalwarts offered no cogent objections...
...Translation: Russia had been invaded by Nazi troops...
...The brassy neocon novelist (Phillip Clark) bears a certain resemblance to Tom Clancy...
...For as it turns out, they too are dead, probably victims of 9/11...
...Throughout, Trumbo père is depicted as a cantankerous American of deeply ingrained principle...
...Joseph Spiorta as an ambitious kid, and the women's ensemble, led by Anne Tonelson, are especially memorable...
...The hyperactive hostess (Kristine Nielsen) bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Martha Stewart...
...The Ten were not without talent or occasional moments of grace...
...In the first place, most of the Ten were flat-out Stalinists, ever ready to defend the worst oppressions, provided they were committed under the banner of the hammer and sickle...
...When a group ofMinnesotaTrotskyites was convicted under the Smith Act, no cry of unconstitutionality was heard from the show business Left...
...Trumbo's other liability lies not in its text but in its presentation...
...Trumbo holed up in Mexico, writing scripts pseudonymously...
...Frequently such a right encroaches upon the right of others to their lives...
...If only the truth were so twodimensional...
...Ten of the 19 refused outright to answer questions about their affiliations with the Communist Party...
...What a wonderful point...
...Kirk Douglas finally insisted on giving him full credit for Spartacus, thereby restoring the screenwriter's name and reputation...
...and even an Arab terrorist (Amir Arison...
...The contemptible Moscow Trials, which used "confessions" obtained by torture, were defended in "A Statement by American Progressives" (read members of the American CP...
...Trumbo the play is an attempt to have it both ways, to trade facts for postures, to morph a very blemished figure into an icon of humor, courage and responsibility...
...The others do more than sympathize...
...Trumbo called the HUAC sessions "the beginning of an American concentration camp...
...The statement exhorted its readers: "We call on [Americans] to support the efforts of the Soviet Union to free itself from insidious internal dangers...
...Dalton Trumbo played the obedient comrade like the rest...
...Fool's gold for us huddled masses...
...Before the public memory fades, I thought I would clarify the political record...
...And so they were...
...It is this gutter-worldliness that saves A Stoop on Orchard Street from drowning in nostalgia and shmaltz...
...And when Trumbo edited a Left-wing periodical, he turned down a manuscript from an open-minded writer...
...But all that is to be revealed later...
...With good reason...
...The novel was serialized in the Communist Daily Worker...
...These concern everything from food and drink to the relative morality of omnivores and vegans, individual responsibility and collective guilt, globalization, and the state of Israel—with a splash of irrelevance whenever the quarrels reach white heat...
...they empathize...
...Hollywood's forthcoming schedule include such tempting items as the so-called biography of Stalin by Leon Trotsky...
...But it was the streets that prepared us for the future...
...Then, abruptly, Johnny dropped out of sight for almost three decades, beginning on June 21,1941...
...Save for the brief excerpts from those newsreels, the production has all the visual excitement of a hortatory tape recording made by family and friendsybr family and friends...
Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5
