Gore Vidal's "On the March to the Sea" at Duke

Theater Previews at Duke Review - On the March to the Sea

By Scott Ross

I cannot be neutral about Gore Vidal. It’s a condition shared by a great many of his readers -- and detractors. Establishment figures of both parties (which Vidal views, aptly, as two wings of the same organization) either dismiss our greatest essayist as an addled gadfly or demonize him as a kind of ideological heretic; during the Iraqi invasion a reactionary web site issued its own deck of “most wanted” cards, with Vidal the King of Clubs.

If America has an unaffiliated official historian, it is Gore Vidal. His series of connected historical novels (Washington DC, Burr, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age) limn the entirety of the American experience from the Revolution onward with both an unerring sense of drama and an enlightened view of the democratic experiment gone hopelessly (and Ben Franklin would say, inevitably) awry. Vidal’s masterful novel Lincoln fully re-imagines our most enigmatic President -- even Richard Nixon was more immediately comprehensible -- and his The Best Man is arguably the finest (and funniest) political play ever written in this country.

Vidal was the first popular American novelist to publish a novel (The City and the Pillar, in 1948) unapologetic about its homosexual protagonist’s obsession with his boyhood lover, a move that got his future work banned from review in The New York Times -- a reprieve Vidal endured with considerable success. Hardly daunted by the experience, Vidal went on to publish, in 1968, the uproariously incisive sexual satire Myra Breckinridge (the last name suggested, perhaps, by a notable Hollywood transsexual?) and its equally devastating 1973 sequel Myron, in which the author memorably replaced “obscenities” with the names of then-current Supreme Court Justices. A penetrating critic of religious hysteria, Vidal is also the author of two extraordinarily savage and prophetic novels: Messiah (1954) and Kalki (1978), the latter eerily prescient: its central notions were born out, not much later, by the Jonestown Massacre.

As an essayist and social critic, the man has no peer; his 1993 collection United States: Essays 1952-1992 would be an essential Desert Island tome, in tandem with his luminous 1995 memoir Palimpsest. Naturally, Vidal’s social-political-historical oeuvre (as Polonious might term it) is incessantly -- even obsessively -- picked at by those academicians Vidal refers to, deliciously, as “scholar squirrels” as well as by his contemporaries. (William F. Buckley, piqued by Vidal’s trenchant analysis of that perennial Harvard man’s “crypto-fascism” during a live 1968 debate, threatened to punch his opponent “in the goddamn face.”) When the History Channel broadcast the British-made “Gore Vidal’s Presidents of the United States” a few years back, the network assembled a cohort of talking heads, including the dread Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to refute at length nearly all of Vidal’s conclusions -- a display of public cowardice and pre-emptive self-censure pretty much unparalleled in the history of American television.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Vidal’s newest work, the invigorating Civil War play On the March to the Sea, currently on display in a thoroughly satisfying staged reading as part of Theater Previews at Duke (March 1-6 at the Reynolds Industries Theater in the Bryan Center on the University’s West Campus) is an event of enormous significance and dramatic integrity.

Adapted, and expanded, by Vidal from his 1955 “Playwrights 56” television drama “Honor,” On the March to the Sea is especially relevant now, given the Imperialist adventures of the present presidential administration in what Vidal rightly calls this nation’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” (If there was ever a time to rediscover the beautifully astringent 1964 Paddy Chayefsky comedy The Americanization of Emily, and its exaltation of cowardice as the universal antidote to warfare, this is it.)

I won’t take away from your experience of Vidal’s brilliance here by divulging the plot, save to note that it concerns the seizing by Union troops of a Georgia mansion during Sherman’s infamous 1864 campaign, and a communal promise reneged upon for possibly ignoble reasons. What matters is the work in itself.

I am bored to tears by the vogue, beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing, seemingly without surcease, ever since, for what I think of as “elliptical theater.” This will doubtless get me into a world of trouble, but what I feel is missing from the incoherent flailings of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, and others of their ilk is the traditional theatergoing pleasure in hearing language luxuriant with literacy and character, spoken by dramatic figures of great richness and complexity. This sort of generous, full-bodied playwriting still exists, of course, but much less ink is dispensed extolling its virtues. (Although I take the popular and critical success of the movie Sideways as a hopeful sign.)

On the March to the Sea abounds with wit, metaphor, keenly human observation -- even poetry. To sit in a theater and let this sort of erudition and feeling wash over you is to experience one of the great joys available in life. I’m tempted to quote from Vidal’s vigorous aphorisms and pointed exchanges endlessly, but will make do with two, one humorous, the other dramatic.

The first, a beguiling defense of preparing one’s words: “Even Cicero rehearsed his speeches -- especially the impromptu ones.” This is pure Vidal, impressing with historical acumen, then disarming with an ironic fillip. (The line is pronounced, appropriately, by the character most closely resembling the author himself.)

The second, a strand of dialogue that both illuminates its characters’ impotent fury on the one hand and resignation on the other, and serves as a heresy that will be shocking to those convinced that all good Americans are, and ever have been, solidly Christian. No, on second thought, I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

While there is heroism as well as villainy on display here, no one is either wholly good, or wholly evil. That may not be an attribute a vast public can swallow in our time of instant human codification, but it is at the core of great drama, from Shakespeare to Shaw. The Southern merchant Hinks, unable to restrain himself from profiting even at the expense of friends, is in many respects complimented by his captor, the Union Colonel Thayer, a man so deadened by the “wearisome pursuit” of killing men that he longs only to be cruel. And caught between them is a wife who has grown to hate the word duty.

In a large (and remarkably stellar) cast, Chris Noth and the great Harris Yulin conjure figures worthy of comparison with Willy Loman and Stanley Kowalski. I don’t mean that either role is imitative, merely that both can stand with the finest characters in American theater. (Although I suppose it could be argued that Yulin’s John Hinks shares with Loman a certain self-delusion, and that Noth’s Col. Thayer matches Stanley in the area of deliberate malice.) These are bold, complicated, contradictory figures, fully and pitiably human, whose dimensions are as beautifully evoked by Noth and Yulin as the characters are brilliantly invoked by the playwright.

Michael Learned does wonders with the relatively minor role of the Hinks’ social dragon of a neighbor, and the splendid Charles Durning exhibits a graceful civility in both triumph and defeat. Richard Easton is stunningly effective as the Vidal prototype Grayson, affably discursive one minute and barely suppressing a seething rage the next. Isabel Keating is a revelation as Mrs. Hinks. Not for her (or the author) the simpering, honor-corseted Southern belle; this is a role, and a performance, of searing dimensions. Vidal knows, as Euripides before him, that the greatest atrocity of war is what becomes of its vanquished women.

The young people in On the March to the Sea are wonderfully written, and equally well acted. Indeed, in a play less dominated by its older characters, the performances of Cheryl Chamblee, David Turner, and Corey Brill would be star making. They are utterly, and devastatingly, there.

The play’s director, Warner Shook, preserved from the distractions of set, lights, and costume, has been free to work with his actors on the nuances of character and dialogue, and it shows. At the improbable age of 79, Gore Vidal says he’d “rather give up sets than give up actors.” Change “Actors” to “authors” and, on evidence the feeling is, pretty obviously, mutual.

The Gore Vidal Index: http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.