Ah, good, you may think. Finally the master manipulator played by Brian Cox — the Scottish Shakespearean and star of HBO’s “Succession” — will become interesting as a dramatic character.
So why doesn’t he?
In the first act, which covers the period from Johnson’s State of the Union address in January 1965 to his signing of the Voting Rights Act that August, we’ve seen the 36th president as a forceful, crude, high-minded, lowdown political realist who knows how to ram his will through Congress.
This is enjoyable but very familiar, not only from biographies but also from “All the Way,” the first part of Schenkkan’s diptych, which starred Bryan Cranston on Broadway in 2014. In that play, LBJ, having attained the presidency upon the death of John F. Kennedy, basically arm-wrestles Washington into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It ends with the triumph of his election victory that fall.
If we know anything about Johnson’s remaining time in office, we know that “The Great Society” will not end as well. Days after the Voting Rights victory, the Watts riots in Los Angeles serve as a quick corrective to his optimism. And the death toll in Vietnam, which has been creeping upward in a series of projections since the start of the play, foretells even greater disaster.
That’s fine; that’s history. But when we look to the play to explain what happened to LBJ himself, it has nothing to offer but facts. Torrents of them.
We see the president receiving inaccurate information about Vietnam from his defense secretary Robert McNamara (Matthew Rauch) and from Gen. William Westmoreland (Brian Dykstra). We see his FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover (Gordon Clapp), feeding his fury about Bobby Kennedy (Bryce Pinkham) and manipulating Johnson into a paranoid renunciation of Martin Luther King Jr. (Grantham Coleman), with whom he previously shared a wary working relationship.
We even see him get trapped in the same chess moves he formerly used to trap everyone else. As the war starts to eat up his budget, he can no longer protect the Great Society programs that were meant to be his legacy. And in one of the play’s nicer conceits, Johnson’s difficulty in corralling the impatient King is neatly paralleled with King’s difficulty in corralling the impatient Stokely Carmichael (Marchánt Davis). The chess game here is three-dimensional.
Alas, Johnson isn’t. We never see the man inside the bluster and betrayal. Why was he able to achieve what he did against all odds? Why did he suddenly lose that ability at the peak of success?
Instead of psychology we are shown stratagems. Just as in “All the Way,” Schenkkan tries to dramatize Johnson through a series of triangulations, often with Vice President Hubert Humphrey (Richard Thomas) standing by as a pawn. Using flattery and the threat of embarrassment, he gets the American Medical Association to support the creation of Medicare, which it vehemently opposed. With the press watching, he boxes George Wallace, the white supremacist governor of Alabama, into a corner, forcing him to express support for a plan to protect the civil rights marchers from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery.
But these realpolitik skits, in which history is divvied up as unlikely dialogue, tell us little about Johnson beyond what a detailed timeline would. Perhaps it tells us even less, because there are way too many of them for a play that runs 2 hours and 40 minutes, and because they are all fundamentally the same.
Certainly they are staged as such by the director, Bill Rauch. As he did in “All the Way,” he places the supporting characters of “The Great Society” in a semicircle around Johnson as if they are witnesses in a jury box or potential victims in an amphitheater. They come forward, are mauled, then slink away.
Nor do Johnson’s interstitial arias about rodeos and rattlesnakes do more than provide surface color. We already understand that the president grew up hard, poor, plain-spoken, proud; what we don’t understand, and the play fails to show us, is the man beneath the self-invention.
In a prose biography that needn’t matter; indeed, we do not want too much speculative psychology from historians. We let the accumulation of facts suffice. But a play that doesn’t dramatize a man’s interior landscape is just a pageant, and to act such a character is to recite a résumé. That’s a shame because Cox, a notable Titus Andronicus and Lear, certainly has someone like Johnson in his wheelhouse. But “The Great Society” is Shakespearean only in its bellowing; the poetry of consciousness has largely been boiled away.
You can sense what a deeper treatment might have felt like in the few scenes that feature personal rather than political conflict, thus allowing character to emerge, albeit timidly. In one, Johnson and Lady Bird (Barbara Garrick) take a secret drive outside the White House to gander at the hippies protesting the war. In another, the commander-in-chief’s failure to find the right words to console families of soldiers killed in action gives us a glimpse of the deep-seated sense of inadequacy that might be a clue to his moral collapse.
That’s not enough to replicate the success of “All the Way,” which won the Tony Award for best play. Cranston, whose portrayal of LBJ won a Tony Award as well, could carry that story, essentially a comedy, on pure skill and charisma. “The Great Society,” a tragedy, needs more than that but instead gets less. It’s bad enough that Johnson is so two-dimensional; the supporting characters have it worse. Their traits are parceled out on a one-per-customer basis: Humphrey’s a patsy, King a worrier, Carmichael a hothead and Wallace a weasel.
I don’t mean to suggest that politics, with its standard personality types, can’t make good plays. (“Richard III,” anyone?) And surely we are today in the market for insight into presidents, especially those whose rises contain the seeds of their disintegration.
But Schenkkan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Kentucky Cycle,” his nine-play exploration of national themes, appears to be a big-picture man. He wants to give us history as if it were a different and nobler thing than character.
If only that were true!
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Production Notes:
'The Great Society’
Tickets: Through Jan. 19 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, greatsocietybroadway.com.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
Credits: By Robert Schenkkan; directed by Bill Rauch; sets by David Korins; costumes by Linda Cho; lighting by David Weiner; music by Paul James Prendergast; sound by Paul James Prendergast and Marc Salzberg; projections by Victoria Sagady; hair and wigs by Tom Watson; production stage manager, Jennifer Rae Moore; technical supervision, Hudson Theatrical Associates; company manager, Michael Altbaum; general management, RCI Theatricals. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Louise L. Gund, Rebecca Gold, Stephanie P. McClelland, Cynthia Stroun, Jennifer Manocherian/Judith Manocherian, Gabrielle Palitz/Cheryl Wiesenfeld, Mark Pigott, Ted Snowdown, Marianne Mills, Franklin Theatrical Group, DeRoy-Schmookler Productions, Shadowcatcher Entertainment, Jacob Soroken Porter, and Lincoln Center Theater.
Cast: Brian Cox, Gordon Clapp, Grantham Coleman, Marchánt Davis, Brian Dykstra, Barbara Garrick, David Garrison, Ty Jones, Marc Kudisch, Christopher Livingston, Angela Pierce, Bryce Pinkham, Matthew Rauch, Nikkole Salter, Richard Thomas, Tramell Tillman and Frank Wood.
This article originally appeared in
.