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The New York Times/ - Politics, Seg, 02 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
Mr. Chairman, the Great State of
Nostalgia ...
Yards and yards of patriotic bunting stun the senses as
you enter the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, where a
revival of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” opened on
Sunday night. Television monitors displaying
black-and-white footage hang from boxes that frame
the stage, and the usher handing you your program
wears a festive boater with red, white and blue trim.
The aim is to give the audience a sense of being
present at a presidential nominating convention in
Philadelphia in 1960, where the play is set.
I suspect the producers could have spared themselves
the expense of all this you-are-there paraphernalia. By
the time the curtain came down on this starry but
sluggish production, and a nominee had been formally
announced, I did feel as if I’d endured a particularly
fractious and constipated evening at a political
convention. Need I add that acquiring this experience
has never been one of my great ambitions?
Mr. Vidal’s drama about backroom deal making and
the withering of America’s political discourse first
opened on Broadway in 1960, back when party
conventions in election years were still suspenseful
battles for delegates and not ceremonial coronations of
preselected candidates. There has been talk that this
year’s campaign for the Republican nomination might
go down to the wire, old-school style, which adds a
small fillip of fresh topicality to this production, directed
by Michael Wilson and featuring a glittering dais of
stars, including James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury,
John Larroquette and Eric McCormack. (The previous
Broadway revival also opened during an election year,
in 2000.)
Unfortunately a thin veneer of currency isn’t sufficient
to revitalize a drama that feels positively quaint,
despite Mr. Vidal’s winking cynicism about the political
arena and his undeniable prescience about future
trends in American politicking. He was certainly on
target in noting the corrupting influence of television
cameras on the tone of political campaigns and the
rise of pandering populism as a crucial element in the
playbook of any politician hoping to make headway in
a presidential contest.
But anyone following politics with even the slightest
peripheral vision is acutely aware of how radically the
landscape has changed. The toxins Mr. Vidal was
identifying in 1960 as hovering threats on the
democratic horizon are now confirmed facts of political
life, so that this once-trenchant drama — concerning a
battle for the nomination between a high-minded,
deeply moral candidate and his canny, cutthroat rival
— feels like a civics lesson drawn from a long
out-of-date textbook.
Mr. Larroquette (a Tony winner last year for “How to
Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) and Mr.
McCormack (television’s “Will & Grace”) play the
contrasting characters dueling for the top prize of the
carefully unnamed political party. William Russell (Mr.
Larroquette) is the patrician candidate who exemplifies
the ideals Mr. Vidal clearly favors in a man and a
president: intelligence, probity, a Harvard degree and a
healthy distaste for the grim business of currying the
favor of voters by coddling their baser instincts. (His
campaign manager, expertly played by Michael
McKean, has to restrain him from dropping too many
erudite references to the likes of Bertrand Russell and
Oliver Cromwell at his news conferences.) He’s no
saint, however: long estranged from his wife, Alice
(Candice Bergen), Russell has a reputation for
philandering, a detail that must have seemed daring in
1960 but inspires a yawn in the post-Clinton,
post-Edwards era.
Joseph Cantwell (Mr. McCormack) is the ambitious
senator who pulled himself up by his bootstraps,
attended a state school and has no qualms about
using any and all means available to gain an upper
hand over his more well-connected rival. This means
smearing Russell by revealing his past history of
psychological frailty.
Cantwell is clearly meant to represent the
degenerative tendencies in American politics of Mr.
Vidal’s era (which have only metastasized our own),
but I have to admit that from a theatrical standpoint the
cool savagery embodied by Mr. McCormack’s
Cantwell, all camera-ready smiles and animal energy,
proves to be far more appealing than the tormented
nobility of Mr. Larroquette’s Russell.
Mr. Larroquette gives a restrained performance, doling
out Russell’s wise musings — on the anathema of
personality politics, on the importance of leading men
as opposed to following polls, on the relentless artifice
involved in campaigning — with a studied air of
pained, weary wisdom. But the character comes
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