On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Portrait of a Stupid, Vulgar Nincompoop The Gang's All Here. By Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Directed by George Roy Hill. Presented by Kermit Bloomgarden...
...The young "interim" White House worker, onto whom Hastings thrusts his burdens, presents the case for honesty, for "someone who cares...
...What they have tried to do is a bit hard to tell...
...with an assist from Melvyn Douglas in the role, make him the low–water mark of rotten timber—a stupid, vulgar, coarsely animal nincompoop...
...That's the only talent I've got...
...With Griffith P. Hastings in The Gang's All Here, the platform is Cash...
...But the characters fade into a few remarks and a facade...
...Warren G. Harding was a polished fellow who, if not warmhearted himself, had something that warmed the hearts of those that met him...
...The situation calls for an Aristophanes...
...The authors' Inherit the Wind showed a conflict between ideas and values...
...The present play seems content to revel in rascality...
...The authors want us to think that Hastings feels revulsion at his cronies' depredations, and rises to a final gesture "worthy of the Presidency," as though he attains greatness in the moments of his dying...
...Only the sets, by Jo Mielziner, reach toward the potential scope of the drama, with a symbolic background—the many lighted rooms of a great hotel or the distant white dome of the Capitol—looming beyond the schemers in the smoke–filled convention room, or the floozy dancing with the President of the United States on a table in the basement, beside the poker chips and the prohibition hooch (from the Presidential cellar...
...Also, he is wholly self–concerned...
...The final penitence and suicide are like the last two scenes of a "comic" book: After 82 pictures of brutality, sadism and successful villainy come two pictures in which virtue claims the day...
...The final sop to virtue does not change the basic effect...
...Even when dying, he commands his wife to allow no autopsy and to get rid of the pill–bottle, so that he will seem to have died naturally...
...he has no single word or thought of her...
...WHEN "Wintergreen For President" was the campaign cry in Of Thee I Sing, the candidate ran on a platform of Love...
...G. Marshall, Jean Dixon—who could bite into a part, were they given something into which they could put their teeth...
...He dies in order to seem a deceived fool instead of a scheming villain...
...There is also much motion in the play, even commotion, director Hill rousing a stir that might be mistaken for dramatic action...
...Even his dowdy wife seems to toughen herself to stand it all simply because she is the "First Lady...
...He has flashes of shrewdness—"1 was born unimportant...
...Griffith P. Hastings is a self–centred cold fish no one could endure but those that sought to take advantage of him...
...The authors should have written their play to match the sets...
...One is repelled by the completely callous dishonesty, the disregard of public interest, the absence of the least shreds of decency, in these folk in the highest offices—all of which is presented as though usual, natural, almost inevitable under the American system of free enterprise...
...But I beheld a man who is merely trying to keep his own reputation clean, who would have permitted the theft of the many millions of public dollars if it could have been carried off without the scandal...
...There are good performers too—E...
...This is, of course, a little disguised storv of Warren Gamaliel Harding...
...what they have done seems not worth the doing...
...I was convinced neither of Hastings' innocence nor of his good– heartedness...
...that belie the crass stupidity he manifests at other times...
...No one else in the play cares a tiddledy–wink for that patient ass...
...At the Ambassador Theater...
...The attempt to picture Hastings as a well–meaning fool, imposed upon by false friends, gives an opportunity for some speeches...
...The authors manage a few slick lines, such as the politician's grumble lest the opponents put over "some grass–roots amateur with nobody behind him but the people...
...it gets a team that seems not sure whether it has found a farce or attempted a tragedy...
...the public...
...Yet he was the editor of a successful newspaper and a Senator...
...Harding has been called many things, but Lawrence and Lee...
...This is perhaps not quite their intention, for the lines try to show him as a well–meaning man in a post beyond his powers, cruelly deceived by his rapacious cronies, so troubled when he discovers the enormity of their graft that he orders an investigation and then commits suicide...
...The cynical politician who put Hastings in office, now Attorney General, delivers a harrangue on feathering one's nest: Everybody's doing it...
...He knew his way around...
...Swung in by a shrewd and unprincipled politician to break a nomination deadlock, Hastings on his election establishes "government by crony" and bulges the pockets of his friends...
...His naivete may be abysmal: the only reading he does is in The Boys' Book of Presidents...
...Presented by Kermit Bloomgarden Productions, in association with –Sylvia Drulie...
Vol. 42 • October 1959 • No. 38
