Theater review: 'The Great Society'

Shakespeare took two plays to tell the story of Henry IV. Robert Schenkkan gives President Lyndon Johnson the same scope with his “All the Way” and its sequel, “The Great Society,” the latest Asolo Rep production. Where the first play told the story of Johnson’s rise, this speaks of his fall.

At the play’s rosy dawn, Johnson has just won the landslide election of 1964. LBJ figures he has a mandate from the American people to make his Great Society a reality. Thinking about timing, coalitions and the mid-term elections, he puts civil rights on hold. But the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers want freedom now. They march on Selma, Alabama and cops bust heads. Johnson scrambles to get the Voting Rights Act passed and sends in The National Guard to protect the marchers on their third attempt. But it’s too little, too late. Sick of waiting, the black power movement splits from Dr. King’s coalition. Watts goes up in flames. Chicago erupts in a white riot the following year. Coming back from the political dead, Nixon appears through the smoke and flames promising “law and order.” Through it all, the looming specter of the Vietnam War hovers in the background. It begins as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Then just keeps growing. Backstage screens reveal the rising body count. The Great Society is one casualty, LBJ’s political career another.

My bald summary only hints at the multiple threads Schenkkan weaves together. History lacks dramatic structure. The playwright does a fine job of turning its myriad fragments into scenes. With a highly personal approach.

“The Great Society” is history as character study. LBJ’s the character in chief, obviously—a shrewd chess master who uses self-deprecation and folksy anecdotes to get his opponents (and allies) to underestimate him. Martin Luther King is second in importance—realistically drawn, aside from using his preachy public voice in private conversation. Other characters fade into insignificance, like minor figures in a medieval painting. If you go into the play with some idea of who Hubert Humphrey, Robert MacNamara and J. Edgar Hoover were, their characters will resonate. But you can deduce little from the evidence of the play alone.

To be fair, a play full of fully fleshed-out characters would take as long as the actual history itself. At three acts, the play seems long. But it’s actually an amazing job of compression and distillation.

Director Nicole A. Watson echoes the expressionistic approach of the play’s original director, Bill Rauch. Truncheon wielding cops storm the aisles and create a sense of physical threat. In another iconographic touch, all reporters in the mid-1960s wear hats. And Stokely Carmichael stands in for all the other, conspicuously absent black radicals. Not exactly realistic. But, as Anthony Burgess once said, realism is a very slow way to tell a story.

Matt DeCaro’s trash-talking LBJ is a live wire—part charismatic preacher, part Machiavellian manipulator, a shrewd judge of human nature and always the smartest guy in the room. David Breitbarth is great in multiple roles, including a bantam rooster George Wallace and the oily eminence of Richard M. Nixon. A.K. Murtadha nicely conveys the relentless pressure on Dr. King—you can see the wheels in his mind constantly turning. As Carmichael, Ian Fermy embodies the fiery alternative to King’s Gandhi-inspired tactics. Tom Coiner reprises his soft-spoken portrayal of Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s bullied Veep. (A social justice warrior, though you’d never know it from this play.) Brett Mack’s Robert F. Kennedy gives presence (and a spot-on vocal characterization) to Robert Kennedy, LBJ’s chief rival for the soul of the Democratic Party. William Dick’s Hoover and Christopher Kelly’s MacNamara hover in the background—the wire-tapping devil on Johnson’s right shoulder, the number-crunching devil on his left. Denise Cormier and Taylar are three-dimensional and heart breaking as the wives of LBJ and MLK, respectively.

Steven C. Kemp recycles the set from last year’s “All the Way,” and deconstructs it over the course of the play. By the third act, it’s all wreckage and ruin. Subliminally, the chaos tugs at your mind and creates a growing sense of creepy unease. Sarah Smith’s costumes are tailored to the times. The ’60s may have been a decade of social chaos, but folks had a sense of style back then.

For political junkies, this is red meat with a side order of fries. If you love history and political machinations, this is the play for you. But your love should best be Texas-sized. This is a long-distance run, not a sprint. If you can go the distance, go for it.

All the sound and fury tells a great story.

 “All the Way” was a tale of triumph; “The Great Society” is a fall from grace. You could call it “The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,” although his character lacks a tragic flaw. No act of overweening hubris gets America stuck in Vietnam. Just a series of small decisions, the death of a thousand cuts.

If anything, LBJ’s tragic flaw boils down to bad math skills. Failing to see math’s limitations on the one hand. Failing to count the cost on the other.

MacNamara (who had a fallacy named in his honor) quantified the Vietnam War as bullets and body counts—and missed the human realities that couldn’t be measured. Johnson believed his facts and figures.

Johnson tried to have guns and butter at the same time. But it didn’t add up.

LBJ could bend any man alive to his will with charisma, bullying tactics, and manipulation. His tactics didn’t work on math.

And that’s the tragedy.

 IF YOU GO

“The Great Society” runs through April 2, at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Call 351-8000 or visit asolorep.org ‎for more information.