Theatre in Review: The Columnist (Manhattan Theatre Club at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

At this time of year, producers, aiming for awards glory, roll out their big guns, unleashing stage-devouring performances and musicals top-heavy with digital visual thrills. At moments like these, it's important to remember the value of understatement in the theatre. In the right hands, a knockout punch can be delivered with the force of a tap on the shoulder. Consider the case of The Columnist, a drama that minds its manners, rarely raising its voice above a polite murmur, which nevertheless delivers a harrowing portrait of a man caught in the bear trap of history, betrayed by his own acquiescence to the status quo. David Auburn's portrait of the political commentator Joseph Alsop demands that you listen to it very carefully; hidden inside its manicured sentences and carefully held-back emotions is a terrible, heartbreaking story. Interestingly, Auburn continually cuts off each scene before its climax, delaying our knowledge of crucial events until later. It's an original and thoroughly appropriate way to tell the story of a man who kept his public and private selves separate to a remarkable degree, and paid a huge price for doing so.

Alsop, a product of this country's WASP aristocracy (schooled at Groton and Harvard, trained as a journalist at the New York Herald Tribune), was a syndicated columnist in the years when a handful of journalists -- think Drew Pearson and Walter Lippman -- enjoyed vast audiences and the concomitant ability to shape public opinion. A distant relative of the Roosevelts, a foe of Joseph McCarthy, a staunch anti-Communist, and a key supporter of John F. Kennedy, Alsop was the ultimate Washington power broker. Married to a leading DC socialite, and a host whose dinner parties were filled with guests from the upper levels of government, he was also a closeted homosexual. "Politics is life," he asserts early in The Columnist, a belief that will be sorely tested as the world changes, undermining the rules on which he has built his existence.

"I've never had a Communist before." With that rather head-turning statement, we are introduced to Alsop, in bed in a Moscow hotel room in 1957, while a strapping young Russian tour guide is getting dressed. Even as he tries to drag the young man, Andrei, back to bed, a major misunderstanding is revealed. Alsop believed that the encounter had been arranged for him by a sympathetic official in the US embassy; Andrei claims he simply wanted to meet an American. Immediately after he leaves, there is a knock on the door, and voices calling Alsop's name.

We don't learn the full import of this incident until much later, but the repercussions will be felt throughout the play. When we next see him, it is January 1961, the night of Kennedy's inauguration. Alsop is positively jubilant. Terminally bored with the Eisenhower presidency ("It's like going to bed with a glass of warm milk"), he is deeply enamored of the new president, whom, he is certain, will be a bulwark against the Soviets. The scene also introduces us to his fiancée, Susan Mary; her adolescent daughter, Abigail; and his brother, Stewart, his sometime collaborator and verbal sparring partner. As the scene ends with the approach of Kennedy's entourage, the cases of champagne that Alsop has put on ice seem thoroughly justified -- it is the dawn of a new age, both in his personal life and American politics.

And how quickly it all unravels. On a trip to Vietnam, Stewart meets David Halberstam, leading a cadre of young journalists who have a tougher, more realistic view of the war, and who see Alsop as a toady and dupe of the American generals; the conversation ends in a stalemate, but the implied threat is there. A little while later, a scene of domestic bickering is interrupted by the announcement of Kennedy's death. What might have been a display of emotional fireworks is presented with exquisite tact. Susan Mary enters, stricken; the door to the office is left open; we hear the low rumble of a television report offstage. It's all downhill from there, as Abigail, treated by Alsop as his daughter, becomes involved in the anti-war movement; Susan Mary, bored with her duties as Alsop's hostess and denied the physical comforts of marriage, begins to drift away; and Halberstam and his young colleagues eat away at his reputation.

Some of Auburn's best scenes dramatize the standoff that Alsop's marriage becomes. "I don't want to be busy; I want to be necessary," Susan Mary says, as he tries once more to shoo her out of his study. When Kennedy dies, Alsop, unable to deal with his grief, turns immediately to his typewriter. Susan Mary tries to hug him from behind, and the sight of their embrace, timidly delivered and icily received, tells you all you need to know about their unsatisfactory arrangement. Later, in an even more poignant moment, Stewart discusses his encroaching cancer with Susan Mary (news that has been assiduously kept from Alsop); she embraces Stewart and then, in an unguarded moment, kisses him on the mouth, prompting his embarrassed withdrawal; it's one of the saddest things I've seen on stage all season.

And so it goes, with each new scene revealing the fallout from incidents that took place two or three scenes earlier, as Alsop finds himself deserted by his loved ones and his audience, and as evidence of his Russian tryst circulates throughout the worlds of government and the media. It all comes to a head with a final, admittedly slightly contrived encounter, around 1970, with Andrei, in which all the pieces come together and we realize, with a stab of dismay, how many terrible losses this honorable, inflexible, hypocritical, foolish, and terribly courageous man has sustained.

As is usually the case with Daniel Sullivan's productions, The Columnist has been perfectly cast. John Lithgow's Alsop is just about ideal, a puckish wit with a rake's taste for pleasure, driven by a lust for power and a ruthless work ethic, his instinct for self-preservation driving away the people who love him most. Whether raising a glass to the New Frontier; railing on the phone at James Reston, trying to get David Halberstam fired; or seated on a park bench dismissing the Beatles ("Thank God that silly fad has run its course"), he offers a vivid portrait of a now-extinct form of gentleman-citizen. Equally fine are Margaret Colin as Susan Mary, who struggles to find a way to love her spouse; Boyd Gaines as Stewart, who, even in the throes of illness, tries to exert a moderating effect on his mercurial brother; Stephen Kunken as Halberstam, whose caustic, skeptical point of view is the polar opposite of Alsop's silken manners; Grace Gummer as Abigail, who loves Alsop like a father but grows up to think for herself; and Brian J. Smith as the mysterious Andrei, who makes a stunning gesture in the play's climactic scene.

Once again, John Lee Beatty has worked his wizardry, finding a way to fit several detailed sets into the smallish confines of the Friedman stage; the swift transitions between scenes are marked by excerpts from Alsop's columns, seen in projections designed by Rocco DiSanti. Kenneth Posner's lighting is full of subtle details; notice, for example, how the sunlight caresses the bookshelves in Alsop's study. Jess Goldstein's costumes make note of the difference between an American bespoke suit and the cheap Soviet version, and of the changing fashions of the 1960s, especially the miniskirt sported by Abigail, which Alsop describes as the result of "some garment-rending incident." John Gromada provides both solid sound effects and effective musical underscoring for the scene changes.

It all adds up to a complex, deeply compelling portrait of a man who lived by his own rules, even if they denied him real happiness. The Columnist also provides a subtle, sideways look at the seismic shift that transformed American life in the 1960s, leaving so many stranded in a world they no longer understood. Don't let the tepid reviews fool you; this is one of the season's best plays.--David Barbour