Theatre in Review: CQ/CX (Atlantic Theatre at the Peter Norton Space)

	Kobi Libii and Steve Rosen. Photo: Kevin Thomas Garcia

One of the most sizzling journalistic scandals of recent times is brought to life in CQ/CX. Gabe McKinley, a former reporter for The New York Times, takes on the case of Jayson Blair, the gifted young reporter who plagiarized dozens of stories -- that is, when he didn't make them up altogether. McKinley is an experienced playwright, but his career as a Timesman may have dulled his taste for the sensational, a trait that would have proved useful here.

As many have noted, Blair got away with murder for so long because of the peculiar set of circumstances that roiled the Times in the late '90s; all of them are present and accounted for in CQ/CX. Junior (McKinley's name for Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.), the paper's CEO, is struggling to define himself against the legacy of his predecessor (and father) in an institution that is notoriously resistant to change. He presides over the selection of a new executive editor, a process that unleashes many a court intrigue. The winner is Hal Martin (read: Howell Raines), a boozy, garrulous Southerner who wants to remake the paper from top to bottom, getting rid of "dead wood" and presiding over an A-team of ace journalists; his sharp-elbowed ways earn him many an enemy. His lieutenant, managing editor Gerald Haynes (in real life, Gerald Boyd) is Martin's point man in ethnically and racially diversifying the staff, despite his gimlet-eyed view of the Times' power structure. And, of course, the digital revolution has begun, creating the 24-hour news cycle and posing a new set of commercial challenges.

Enter Jay Bennett, the Blair figure. A caffeinated go-getter with an almost comically romantic fixation on being a Times reporter, his ability to turn out story after story makes him a poster boy for Hal's regime. As a bonus, he is black, providing proof of Hal's socially progressive staffing policies; Jay adopts Haynes, who also is black, as a mentor, using their relationship to get himself transferred from the metro to the national desk, where he delivers a series of trenchant reports on American life just after 9/11.

The move is also prudent because Ben, the metro editor, is dismayed by Jay's increasingly error-filled stories. There are other clues that something is terribly wrong, including Jay's endless drinking, his fondness for cocaine, and his slightly creepy overreliance on his friends. The latter is illustrated by his supremely inappropriate decision to hit on a female colleague right after the Times lets her go. When a story by Jay, related to the John Muhammed sniper case, is questioned, the house of cards comes tumbling down, and the young man exits in a rage, vowing to take the Times down with him in a tell-all memoir.

It's juicy stuff, raising any number of pertinent questions about the way the news is shaped, but it only comes to life intermittently here. Possibly because he feels at ease with characters who aren't prominent journalism industry names, the best scenes focus on Jay, whose sociopathic tendencies are only gradually revealed, and his fraying friendships with Jacob, a young business reporter, and Monica, the colleague he tries to seduce. (Later, when she is working at a newspaper in San Antonio, he steals one of her feature stories in its entirety, an act that leads directly to his undoing.) Jay's increasing instability adds a welcome note of suspense -- it's very clear that he is going to blow up; the only question is when.

On the other hand, McKinley's imagination crawls to a halt when dealing with Junior, Hal, and Gerald; their dialogue has all the sparkle and flash of a Times editorial on corn tariffs. (McKinley no longer works at the Times, but he has two brothers on staff; one of them, Jesse, worked the theatre beat for a number of years; one wonders if this had a chilling effect on his dramaturgy.) These characters' traits -- Junior's self-importance, Hal's overweening ego, and Gerald's deep-seated rage at the paper's largely white hierarchy -- are all important facilitating factors in Jay's story, but the author fails to find any kind of dramatic slant on them. Humor is surprisingly absent -- even when Junior produces his infamous stuffed moose, which is meant to encourage staff members to speak frankly. (This idiotic bit of corporate-think -- the moose symbolizes the difficult subjects no one wants to discuss -- is reportedly favored by Sulzberger; it's the kind of useless tactical tip that insecure executives pick up at expensive management seminars.)

That moose also represents a lost opportunity. It appears just before Junior, Hal, and Gerald go to the company-wide meeting that, in real life, was a disaster for all three, as disgruntled editorial staff members vented their rage against Howell Raines' inflexible and autocratic ways. (Raines left the Times soon after.) It's telling that CQ/CX skips over this event; having established that the Bennett/Blair scandal was as much the result of corporate errors as one man's pathology, McKinley fails to show the story's climactic event, in which Junior and his two lieutenants are forced to face up to their own mistakes.

In any case, David Leveaux's production moves at a nice clip and a strong cast does its best, taking advantage of the script's best moments. David Pittu is such a natural satirist that one can only speculate what he could have done with the role of Junior if McKinley had given him the material to work with. Arliss Howard captures Hal's southern-fried self-importance, but a little more energy would be nice; is this really the man who promised to light a fire under the paper's sclerotic editorial staff? There's fine work from Peter Jay Fernandez, who captures Gerald's slow-burning anger. Tim Hopper's tough, no-nonsense manner is ideal for Ben, who alone recognizes the disaster in the making that is Jay, and Larry Bryggman makes something touching out of the underwritten role of a lifer at the Times who finds himself left behind in Hal's regime.

Kobi Libii, a relative newcomer, does remarkably striking work as Jay, peeling back layer after layer of his affable, eager-beaver façade to reveal the desperation and rage underneath. (In a moment that tellingly reveals how distorted his thinking has become, Jay furiously argues that, because he is black, he is being demonized, while Stephen Glass, who committed similar crimes at The New Republic, gets the kid-glove treatment because he is white.) On the basis of this performance alone, Libii is someone to watch.

Making an enormous contribution is David Rockwell's production design, a stylized gray newsroom setting featuring rows of overhead lighting units arranged in forced perspective. The scene changes are paced by sliding panels onto which Peter Nigrini and C. Andrew Bauer project images of Times headlines and computer screens filled with paragraphs and pulsing cursors. (Other interesting projection effects include a microscopically close-up view of newsprint and a New York skyline that slowly comes into view as Junior, Hal, and Gerald savor the Pulitzer Prize won by the paper following the events of 9/11.) Ben Stanton's lighting casts a chilly fluorescent glow over all the infighting and intrigue, and Jess Goldstein's costumes find a range of individual styles within the narrow confines of standard office wear. David Van Tieghem's sound system serves to convey his alluring, percussive original music.

You'd think that, with his insider's point of view, McKinley would be the man to deliver a lively, no-holds-barred account of one of the Times' most mortifying episodes, but it would seem that his years at the Gray Lady have permanently colored his approach. The great drama about the Blair affair remains to be written, and I'm guessing that it will come from an outsider with a strong imagination and nothing to lose.--David Barbour