Theatre in Review: A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney

	Larry Pine. Photo Julieta Cervantes

Rarely does one encounter a title as revealing as the one above, and what you see is what you get at The SoHo Rep. We are in a corporate boardroom with three actors sitting at a long table, waiting while jazzy music plays on the sound system. Finally, a fourth actor enters, looks at us, and says, "I'm Walt Disney. This is a screenplay I wrote. It's about me."

If so, then it's the first self-administered hatchet job in the history of Hollywood. In a series of disconnected, choppily edited scenes -- this screenplay would not make a workable film -- we hear about Walt fabricating events in his nature documentaries; frustrating the growth of unions at his studio; taking part in shady transactions to obtain the land for Walt Disney World; engaging in corporate maneuvering against his brother and partner, Roy; elevating his unimpressive son-in-law, Ron Miller, to executive status; and planning to live forever through the miracle of cryogenics. Not a moment too soon, either: The dying Walt self-medicates with pills and vodka and coughs up prodigious amounts of blood. At one point, he pulls one bloodstained handkerchief after another out of his suit, a kind of grisly magician's trick.

Other charming details: In a defensive moment, Walt boasts about his friends and admirers, a list that includes Joe McCarthy, Werner Von Braun, and Mussolini; he adds with pride that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Alan Turing's favorite film, strongly implying that it inspired Turing's suicide by poisoned apple. He threatens to disown his daughter unless she names a child after him. And we are treated to a graphic account of his eternal-life plan, which involves severing his head from his body and keeping it on ice until the day when his ailments can be cured and he can be sewn back together. On the phone with his estranged wife, he offers to make it a two-for-one plan.

It's open season on Walt Disney these days, what with Philip Glass also composing a new opera, The Perfect American, which focuses on his final days. Disney is certainly ripe for reappraisal, and, mixing fact and myth, the playwright, Lucas Hnath, assembles a persuasive portrait of a distinctively weird Howard Hughes-style megalomaniac. The text is a rush of words and scenes that initially sets a jangly, jumpy tone. The performances are highly assured. Larry Pine makes Walt into one of nature's true hunters, exuding acquisitiveness and bile in a creepily insinuating voice. For nearly half the running time, he partners brilliantly with Frank Wood's depressed, disconnected Roy. Also making first-rate contributions are Brian Sgambati as the toadyish Ron, and Amanda Quaid, who makes the absolute most of her brief scenes, making it clear that she considers her father to be a malign, soul-destroying presence. Sarah Benson's canny direction is clearly in tune with Hnath's intentions; the production design -- Mimi Lien's boardroom set, Kaye Voyce's costumes, Matt Frey's lighting, and Matt Tierney's sound -- all help to convey an atmosphere of unease.

For all the good work, however, A Public Reading palls pretty quickly once it becomes obvious that Hnath has character assassination on his mind and nothing more. Left undiscussed is Disney's long-running hold on modern culture, the way his vision merged with the aspirations of mid-century Americans who flocked to his films and theme parks, buying into, among other things, his sanitized version of the country's small-town past. Love him or loathe him, he infiltrated the minds of several generations, providing them with an endless number of cultural touchstones. In setting out to deconstruct Disney, Hnath only diminishes him, reducing him to an easy target in a glib hit job that is all but guaranteed to get a big hand from a downtown theatre audience.

There's one fantastically telling passage in A Public Reading in which Walt, planning his Florida park, buys a parcel of land that contains an ancient tree he is contractually barred from cutting down. With his typical can-do spirit, he moves it to another location. When wood rot sets in, he fills the center with cement, and when the leaves die, he has them replaced with imitations. The tree continues to exist, after a fashion, a beautiful, if almost entirely fake, representation of nature and a product of Walt's indomitable will. That's Walt Disney in a nutshell; he might horrify, but he also seduces, and Hnath's play never really engages that dual nature.--David Barbour