To
Whom It May Concern
By Terry Stoller
Trumbo
By Christopher Trumbo
Westside Theatre (Downstairs)
407 W. 43rd St.
Box office: (212) 315-2244
While scholars and critics debate the borders
of the real and representation, contemporary audiences are filling
theatres to hear the stories and words of actual people in plays
like The Vagina Monologues and The Exonerated.
One reason may be the draw of star performers, cast by wily producers;
another reason may be that people are eager to learn about personal
and public history as a way to find meaning in their own lives.
Trumbo offers both a starry experience and a window into
the life of a fascinating and talented writer. The play, performed
as a staged reading at the Westside Theatre/Downstairs, is a presentation
of the letters and speeches of Dalton Trumbo. He was one of the
"Hollywood Ten," who in the late forties were blacklisted
by the movie industry and served prison terms for contempt of
Congress. The production opened with Nathan Lane starring as Dalton
Trumbo and Gordon MacDonald as his son Christopher. It is currently
advertising a rotating celebrity cast in the weeks to come, including
F. Murray Abraham and Brian Dennehy.
Christopher Trumbo put together the piece,
which narrates his father’s journey from his appearance as an
unfriendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities
to his time in prison to his self-imposed exile in Mexico and
his eventual return to California. Throughout these troubled times,
Trumbo circumvented the blacklist by submitting film scripts under
a pseudonym or using the services of a “front.” Not until 1960—thanks
to Kirk Douglas as a producer of the film Spartacus and
Otto Preminger as producer/director of Exodus—did Trumbo’s
name appear again in film credits.
The play opens with a eulogy by Trumbo’s
friend, writer Ring Lardner Jr., who makes it clear that Trumbo
was neither virtuous nor universally revered. The Trumbo who emerges
from his writings is by turns acerbic, angry, righteous, loving,
and funny. That he was angry as he experienced the seismic shocks
in his world is understandable. But he was not above targeting
his acid words and sharp wit at a local telephone signal company
that installed an intercom system for him. He advised the head
of the company to send the bill to Trumbo's business manager,
who “hates creditors and does not pay them too promptly.”
Having addressed an earlier correspondence to the company to “Dear
burglars,” Trumbo also extended his "good wishes for
the holiday season to everyone in the thuggery." Incarceration
did not diminish his humor. A poem he composed for Christopher’s
tenth birthday was (like all his other correspondence from prison)
capped off with the words Prisoner Number 7551. A devoted father,
Trumbo fired off a passionate protest to the principal of his
daughter’s elementary school, where she was experiencing negative
fallout from her father’s reputation. Trumbo wrote letters as
copiously as he did screenplays, and one historian says he was
able to turn out forty script pages a day. (Letters dating from
1942 to 1962 have been collected in a volume titled Additional
Dialogue.)
The play doesn’t delve into Trumbo’s political
affiliations or explain why he and his friends joined the Communist
Party. In an aside, however, the son shares his father’s explanation
of the difference between communism and capitalism. For communism,
the father gives the classic definition: from each according to
his ability, to each according to his needs. But capitalism, explains
the parent, is a “system where one person hires a second person
to perform some task, and then sells the product to a third person
for a profit.” Weighing the two systems, the son resolves to become
a capitalist. Christopher also relates a moment of personal political
consciousness-raising when he visited his father at the Federal
Correctional Institute in Ashland, Kentucky. The son's introduction
to segregation rules came when he stumbled into the blacks-only
balcony of Ashland’s movie theatre. How ironic, he thought, that
his father was accused of un-American activities in a country
in which discrimination was tolerated as an American activity.
Director Peter Askin’s staging employs
clever lighting and projections to suggest the change of place,
from Trumbo’s study to his prison cell to his Mexican retreat.
Historical footage provides context, with scenes from the House
committee’s proceedings, including testimony by such “friendly”
witnesses as Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper. The two actors remain
aware of each other as they read the material, with Lane addressing
sections of the “Christopher” letters to MacDonald and MacDonald
showing his enjoyment of both Trumbo’s writing and Lane’s performance.
Their rapport enlivens the recitations and underlines the son’s
affection for his father.
The eloquence of the letters is well matched
by Lane’s expressiveness. In the hands of the musical-comedy star,
the piece has the feel of a concert. There is a beautiful ballad,
a long, moving letter Trumbo wrote to the mother of a recently
deceased friend whom he had met as a war correspondent and who
had agreed to act as his front. The letter vividly describes the
experiences of two men far from home, facing the dangers of war.
The show-stopper is a letter that Trumbo wrote to his son about
the benefits of masturbation, detailing his own experiences and
practices. The delivery veers into a Nathan Lane extravaganza
with vocal mannerisms and gestures, but the writing is equally
extravagant, even masturbatory. Yet Christopher includes this
letter as a representation of his father; he says he shared it
with many friends, and it came to be known as “the letter.”
Though the blacklist era feels like an
episode of the past, curtailing people’s rights is very much a
concern of the present. As I left the theatre, I heard people
making connections between the play and the Bush Administration’s
campaign for the Patriot Act. Indeed Trumbo’s producers
are dedicating a portion of the proceeds to People for the American
Way, an organization, the program reads, that is “active wherever
the First Amendment, other constitutional rights and core democratic
values are at risk.”
Trumbo is a compelling firsthand
account of a man who lived through a dark period in American life.
It’s also a reminder of the riches to be found in correspondence—a
tribute to the art of letter writing, an art that may be vanishing
in an era of erasable e-mails.
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