Theatre in Review: Kunstler (59E59)

	Jeff McCarthy, Nambi E. Kelley. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp, 2017.

The best thing about Jeffrey Sweet's new play, about the famed -- and sometimes notorious -- trial lawyer William Kunstler, is Jeff McCarthy. Best known as a musical theatre leading man (Side Show, Urinetown), here he performs a remarkable act of transformation. Dressed in a rumpled, and none-too-expensive, suit, glasses perched on his head, his hair an unruly gray mop that looks like a woodland creature crawled on top of his head and went to sleep, McCarthy is thoroughly convincing as the figure we remember so well from the evening news, the lawyer who spent his career pursuing unpopular, even dangerous, cases, his crafty legal skills and love of the spotlight often rendering him more famous than his defendants.

McCarthy's Kunstler is a preening, strutting figure, always ready to work the room, but also ready to stand up to bullies. If there's any oxygen left for anyone else, it isn't obvious. Speaking to us directly -- for the purposes of the script, an audience of university students -- he opens with a few jokes. ("What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 70? Your honor.") He offers a few bizarre fun facts. ("I drafted a will for Joseph McCarthy.") And he presents some irresistible, too-good-not-to-be-true war stories. For example, he recalls meeting with Ross Barnett, governor of Alabama, to get released from jail five Freedom Riders who tried to integrate a lunch counter. Trying to bond with Barnett on a man-to-man basis, Kunstler mentions he has two daughters. Barnett responds, "'What would you think of your daughter married to a dirty, kinky-haired field-hand n-----r?" So much for male bonding.

In Sweet's view -- no doubt an accurate one -- Kunstler was ineluctably drawn to controversy, driven by his reverence for the Constitution and its guarantees of individual freedom; he was also unable to resist the lure of the spotlight. As such, his life could provide the source material for a dozen dramas. Here, for much of the running time, however, Sweet is content to follow the Dead Celebrity Playhouse method, allowing Kunstler to review his judicial greatest hits: winning a housing discrimination case in Rye, New York ("Hurrah. The system works. This time."); providing a megaphone for Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine to condemn the Vietnam War ("They wanted to be arrested."); taking part in the raucous circus that was the trial of the Chicago Eight (he compares Judge Julius J. Hoffman to Mr. Magoo); and trying to negotiate a just and peaceful end to the Attica prison riot. (At a dinner party a few years later, Mary Rockefeller leaned over and asked, "Why did you call my father a murderer?" Kunstler, seemingly never at loss, explicitly lays out what Nelson Rockefeller could have done to quell the violence, had he not declined to show up.)

All of this is colorful and engaging, but because Kunstler tries to cover so many cases, each ends up receiving cursory treatment, and, after a while, the stories begin to pall. Sweet tries to inject a little drama by setting the play in the mid-'90s, when Kunstler, no longer a liberal lion, was frequently vilified by both the right and left for taking on the cases of mobster John Gotti, Yusef Salaam, a defendant in the Central Park Jogger case, and Colin Ferguson, a madman who shot up a Long Island Rail Road car, killing six and wounding nineteen. (Interestingly, the script avoids the messy details of Kunstler's attempt, which ended in disqualification for him and his partner Ron Kuby, to represent the defendants in the first World Trade Center bombing.) As the play begins, the stage is littered with garbage, and we hear the offstage chants of protestors, proof that Kunstler has become radioactive to a new generation of college activists.

The playwright adds another character, Kerry (played with sparkplug energy by Nambi E. Kelley), a member of the student committee that organized Kunstler's appearance, who regards him with a skeptical eye. She remains onstage throughout, quietly fuming and occasionally being made to play the straight woman in some of his comic routines. They finally get into it near the end of the play, in a battle of wits that ends before it gets going. Sweet also lets Kunstler off the hook too easily with the comment, "If you think my cases have declined in nobility, well, I can only choose what is offered me. And so I do." Indeed, Kunstler could be made much more powerful by cutting back on the lecture and building up the clash of ideas.

Still, the times being what they are, I imagine that plenty of people will thrill to stories from the days when liberalism was on the rise -- and on the offensive. In addition to getting such good work out of her actors, the director, Meagen Fay, has overseen a solid physical production. James J. Fenton's lecture hall set, complete with an eye-catching spiral-shaped ceiling piece, has nice clean lines; the lighting designer, Betsy Adams, confidently shifts between subtle white washes (for the bulk of the action) and bold splashes of saturated color (for certain flashbacks and moments of heightened emotion). Will Severin's sound design includes those protestors, plus gunfire, crowds at Attica, and the ripple of dinner party conversation; he also composed the incidental music that makes good use of piano chords and a clarinet to set the tone.

And however Kunstler is received, it opens up a new career for Jeff McCarthy. I can see him taking this play to college campuses everywhere -- and why not? Kunstler's convictions have never been more relevant. -- David Barbour