Theatre in Review: The City of Conversation (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)

	Jan Maxell: Photo: Stephanie Berger

It was Henry James who called Washington, D.C. "the city of conversation," and Anthony Giardina's play is about one of the women who used her social skills to facilitate that conversation. For decades, hostesses like Perle Mesta, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and Katharine Graham were known for their bipartisan soirees, creating safe spaces where politicians from both sides of the aisle could meet, get to know each other, and possibly find common ground. "We're an arm of the government, really," says Hester Ferris, Giardina's heroine, and indeed she is one of masters of the game. She charms her guests by pointing out Joseph Alsop's house next door and telling her favorite story about a dinner party where John F. Kennedy carefully sounded out Isaiah Berlin about the Russians on the evening before the Cuban Missile Crisis began to unfold. The rest is simple -- a good dinner, some fine liqueurs, witty conversation -- who knows what could happen?

The City of Conversation is not the first contemporary drama to explore this material -- David Auburn's The Columnist, about Alsop, recalled a world where the President could step outside the White House of an evening for a quiet get-together with friends -- but Giardina's play is also about what happened when the conversation stopped. When the lights come up, it is 1979 and Hester is in a state of high excitement. The Jimmy Carter years have not been good to her -- the President brought his entourage from Georgia and has shunned the Georgetown social whirl -- but now Ted Kennedy is planning a presidential challenge and she sees the imminent restoration of her role. She flies down the stairs of her stunning townhouse in robe and curlers, ready to finalize the details of a soiree where the liberal Senator Chandler Harris -- Hester's married lover -- is hoping to secure the cooperation of a conservative colleague on a bill sponsored by Kennedy. It's all part of a larger plan to prep Kennedy's campaign to unseat a sitting president from his own party.

Hester, of course, is living in a fool's paradise, as Washington is about to undergo a regime change led by Ronald Reagan and his conservative cohorts. There are intimations of this future to be found in her very own drawing room when her dinner is thrown into disarray by the unexpected arrival of her son, Colin, and his girlfriend, Anna, recent graduates of the London School of Economics. Hester plans to groom Colin for a plush government position, but is stunned to learn that both he and Anna are ready to be foot soldiers in the Reagan revolution. (To Hester, the idea of Reagan even getting the GOP nomination is too, too ridiculous.) As Anna, whose steel fist is only partially concealed by a velvet glove, notes, Hester and her ilk have worked hard to secure a sweet deal for minorities, but the politics of liberal guilt have proven to be too divisive and it is time for ordinary Americans to feel good about America again. Colin concurs, recalling how, when, as an undergraduate, he protested the Vietnam War, he felt thoroughly inauthentic sharing space with "Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer at the barricades."

Hester is also dismayed to see that Anna is far more ambitious and high-powered than her son. Even more disconcerting, Anna is determined to observe Hester at close quarters, soaking up her wisdom and wiles. "I think I saw this movie," says Hester, and the feature she has in mind is All About Eve. Her fears are very real; Anna thoroughly upstages the dinner party, derailing its main purpose and forcing Hester to get steely in front of her guests. The action then jumps ahead to 1987, when Colin and Anna are unhappily married and living in a chilly state of truce with Hester. Anna has a plum job at the Department of Justice and Colin works in a less glamorous position as an aide to a New Hampshire senator. The Robert Bork nomination is in the process of going south, and both Colin and Anna are on the defensive; they have extracted a promise from Hester that she will do nothing to undercut the nomination, a promise that she has promptly broken.

In the confrontation that follows, Giardina deftly shows how the consensus politics that once made Washington function has devolved into a zero sum game, with each party trying to annihilate the other. In ghosting letters for senators that will appear in dozens of newspapers, Hester takes a no-holds-barred approach, framing Bork as the enemy of blacks, the poor, and women with unwanted pregnancies. (The choice of the Bork brouhaha, one of the big setbacks of the Reagan Administration, is particularly felicitous, as it is led by none other than Ted Kennedy.) Anna and Colin, who fear for their careers if Bork is rejected, fight back, even to the point of using their son, Ethan, as a bargaining chip. Hester dotes on Ethan, and is arguably crucial to his happiness, since his parents barely have time for him. "A relationship between a mother and son doesn't end over politics," says Hester, but in the brutal confrontation that follows the family is blown apart.

Giardina is arguably best known as a novelist, but on the basis of The City of Conversation there can be little doubt that he thinks like a playwright, for he writes real scenes -- full-throated, double-or-nothing confrontations from which no character escapes unbloodied. He also gives us complicated characters who battle each other so fiercely because they have so much to lose. In Doug Hughes' superlatively cast production, you'll feel the impact of each psychological blow, leading up to a quiet knockout of a final scene, set on the eve of President Obama's inauguration, when an elderly, reclusive Hester, having been left behind in the brave new world of ultra-partisan politics, must face up to the damage done to (and by) her and family.

The City of Conversation needs a dazzling performance in the central role and it has exactly that in Jan Maxwell. Her Hester is the most delightful bully you've ever met, determined to stage-manage the lives of her loved ones. She is a star in her own world and is proud of it, but her pride blinds her to the social changes in the offing and leads her to fatally misjudge the resentment she arouses in Colin. Whether swanning around the stage in full charm mode, doing her best not to condescend to a conservative political spouse and her book club; furiously pursuing an argument that can only end in familial disaster; or, slowed by time, crankily informing a young visitor that she will not aid him in writing a dissertation as long as the title contains the phrase "the decline of liberalism," she is the play's active storm center, stirring up new squalls with each remark. She is extremely well matched with Kristen Bush's Anna, a woman of vaulting ambition who, as a Midwesterner, deeply resents D.C.'s chattering classes. (In one of the play's more scalding exchanges, Anna yet again inveighs against Washington insiders who have lost touch with the American citizenry, but for once Hester is having it. (Noting Anna's important position and insider contacts, she says, in a tone suitable for a small, stupid child, "You're like me now.") Making a smashing entrance in a dress provided by Hester, crashing an all-male brandy-and-cigars interlude, or, sadder and wiser, admitting to be disappointed by marriage and motherhood, she is every bit the daughter-in-law of Hester's nightmares.

Making his New York debut, Michael Simpson doubles skilfully as Colin, neatly capturing the anger at Hester that partly influences his ideological choices, and as Ethan, who at last shows up at Hester's door to discover why no one in his family speaks to anyone else. There are also fine contributions from Beth Dixon as the sister Hester uses as a private secretary, John Aylward as a senator who doesn't want to help the opposition too much, Barbara Garrick as his charm-resistant spouse, and Kevin O'Rourke as Harris, Hester's slightly too-boozy companion in love and politics.

In addition to John Lee Beatty's detailed Federal-style set, Catherine Zuber's costumes are vitally alert to details of region, generation, social role, and time period. This isn't the kind of design work that typically wins many accolades, in its own way, a tour de force. Tyler Micoleau's lighting is especially effective in a moment when, in the final scene, we see Hester's shadow on the stairs several seconds before she slowly descends. Mark Bennett's sound design provides solid reinforcement for both his original music and a cut of Frank Sinatra's "It's Nice to Go Traveling" plus a handful of other effects.

The beauty of The City of Conversation is the way it uses the dissolution of one politically connected family to show how American political discourse has become poisoned by the ideological true believers who are willing to sacrifice anything to get their way. Although he clearly sympathizes with Hester, he does not exempt her from his scathing analysis; in his view, American politics has become a battle from which none of us can hide, no matter what our convictions are.--David Barbour