Ours is not a great time for nuanced portraits of public figures, politicians especially. With an alternately idol-worshipping and judgment-drunk culture empowered by social media, a golden boy can be transformed overnight into a pariah, as reaction to revelations about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s past proved recently. And here at home, the current Oval Office occupant has revealed—using Twitter, aptly, as his principal forum— the moral and intellectual complexity of a pebble.
It wasn’t always thus, as Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society reminds us. The new play is the sequel to All The Way, which traced Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency through most of 1964, the year in which John F. Kennedy’s vice president was elected to the office he assumed upon Kennedy’s assassination. Where the Broadway production of All The Way starred a crowd-pleasing Bryan Cranston in an account of the trials and triumphs that marked Johnson’s transition and ascent, Society casts Brian Cox—a Scottish actor, whose credits range from principal roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company to the current HBO series Succession—as the Texan-born-and-bred Commander in Chief, and follows an even more tumultuous period, during which the civil rights struggle and the growing quagmire in Vietnam competed for Johnson’s attention, and for a divided nation’s resources.
But if Society deftly shows us the shades of gray in leaders and conflicts that invite some parallels to our current ones, Schenkkan and director Bill Rauch are less effective in fleshing out their historical characters as human beings. The playwright described this work in an interview as a tragedy, and given the events it chronicles, from racist violence and inequality to a corrupt war that devastated a generation, that’s technically hard to argue. Rauch and his design team make these elements dramatically compelling; Paul James Prendergast and Marc Salzberg’s sound and Victoria Sagady’s projection are especially noteworthy, from a blazing depiction of 1965’s Watts riots to a screen chart that looms later in the play, silently ticking off the casualties in Vietnam.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Cox does an excellent job relaying the lavish political gifts that saw LBJ through the challenges posed by his era, and his foes; several of Society‘s finest and funniest moments find Johnson outwitting his rivals, among them Bobby Kennedy, played by Bryce Pinkham with a refined earnestness that’s both touching and amusing. Schenkkan also gives his leading man a couple of juicy personal monologues to reinforce Johnson’s charisma and the crass ferocity he could demonstrate in more private settings, both of which Cox nails—despite being, at 73, more than a decade older than Johnson was when he left office, having decided not to seek another term.
What we get less of a sense of, despite Society‘s largely sympathetic portrait of its still controversial subject, is the turmoil Johnson must have endured, along with other leaders he engaged. Their dialogue is often too obvious to invite reflection, so that even the most supple actors can seem as if they’re reciting lines in a well-crafted reenactment of historical events. Richard Thomas, who generally makes any production worth seeing, is wasted as Johnson veep Hubert Humphrey, presented here as part dutiful aide, part convenient foil. Marc Kudisch juggles a few heavies who contest Johnson’s more progressive policies, among them Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley, and emerge as cardboard slimeballs—accurate in spirit, perhaps, but less interesting in execution.
The youthful Grantham Coleman is simply miscast as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., capturing some of the civil rights leader’s elegance and vigor but little of his gravitas. And presidential spouse Lady Bird Johnson, though played with endearing warmth by Barbara Garrick, has a less prominent role than she did in All The Way, mostly smiling and expressing support for her increasingly beleaguered husband.
By the time this First Couple takes leave of the White House, in fact, you feel more relieved for them than sad. That The Great Society lacks the weight of its tragic aspirations may owe to a variety of factors, but as a docudrama revisiting a famously fraught, and relevant, period, it’s admirable and even eloquent in reminding us that history—like people—can be more complicated than we’d prefer.
The Great Society opened October 1, 2019, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and runs through November 30. Tickets and information: greatsocietybroadway.com
