Theatre in Review: The Best Man (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)

Some critics have dismissed The Best Man as a potboiler. To them, I say, what's wrong with that? Not every play need be a revelation of the playwright's soul, if he or she has a cracking story to tell. Gore Vidal is best known as a novelist and essayist, and, by his own admission, most often turned to the theatre in order to make money. Still, if each season featured five or six more plays as good as The Best Man, Broadway would be a much happier place.

Others have complained that The Best Man, with its three-act structure and cunning bear trap of a plot, is hopelessly old-fashioned, aged in both its construction and its observations about the political scene. To them I say, turn on the television and watch the current crop of presidential candidates -- or, rather, their "unaffiliated" super-PACs -- practice the politics of personal destruction. Ask Herman Cain how outdated it is.

Fifty years ago and today, The Best Man was and is an elegant guide to the fine art of political throat-cutting, as practiced by a gallery of strivers, schemers, and party hacks -- in other words, the members of that small and seedy subset of humanity known as the political class. At a fictional presidential-nominating convention in Philadelphia of an unnamed political party, a deadlock looms as three candidates vie for the nomination, all of them lacking the magic number of delegates. It's scoundrel time, as rumors are spread, reputations are shredded, and deals are cut; blackmail is simply the opening bid in a poker game where lives are the bargaining chips. Much of The Best Man turns on a pair of dossiers -- one suggested that Secretary of State William Russell is a mentally unstable womanizer, perched on the edge of a nervous breakdown; the other alleges that Senator Joseph Cantwell was caught up in a gay sex scandal during his Army years. (The year is 1962 and, of the two, a man would have better luck with the insanity charge.) It's politics as mutually assured destruction, and much of the play's suspense hinges on the question of who will strike first.

Vidal, the grandson of a senator, spent much of his youth in Washington, D.C. and knew whereof he wrote; he has supplied The Best Man with knife-edge plotting and cool, canny observations about the messy way we elect our leaders. Much of the pleasure of Michael Wilson's production comes from the first-rate cast of connivers he has assembled to act out Vidal's vision of the dirty business of politicking. John Larroquette's natural authority and understated wit make him ideal for the role of Russell, the intellectual in the race, who abhors politics as usual, and whose tendency to quote the likes of Pascal and Bertrand Russell to reporters lands him in hot water with his staff. Eric McCormack's Cantwell is full of boyish charm -- one is reminded, eerily, of John Edwards -- which only barely conceals the steel underneath. Riding herd on them both -- and having a whale of a time doing it -- is James Earl Jones as the former president and head of the party, whose endorsement is a vitally sought prize. (It's also hard to get; his ideal candidate would combine Russell's brains with Cantwell's ruthlessness.)

Vidal has populated his play with a vivid cast of supporting characters, and the rest of the cast more than does them justice. Candice Bergen is touching and funny as Russell's estranged wife, who is horrified to find herself dragged back into the political spotlight. (She's no shrinking violet, either; at one point she offers to help her husband shoot Cantwell, and, really, she's only half-kidding.) Kerry Butler is a riot as Cantwell's spouse, an ambitious Dixie belle who swans around her hotel suite half-dressed, sipping martinis ("only to settle my stomach") and handing out honeyed compliments that land like a knife in the back. Good as they are, they're barely a match for Angela Lansbury as Sue-Ellen Gamadge, chair of the party's women's division - "the only known link between the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan" -- who, smiling like the Cheshire Cat, dictates exactly what American women will and will not accept in a presidential candidate. There's also sterling work from Michael McKean as Russell's top aide, who tries to unmoor his boss from his idealism, Jefferson Mays as an angry little milquetoast who thinks he has the goods on Cantwell, and Dakin Matthews as an affable gasbag of a senator, who sips each candidate's bourbon while deciding which one to betray.

Even as the play's central conflict continues to resonate, part of its charm is its evocation of the mid-20th century political process, an aspect that is very well served by the production design. This is Derek McLane's season of environmental set designs; just as he turned the Marquis Theatre into a ruin for Follies, so he drapes the Schoenfeld in bunting, placing a Walter Cronkite-ish commentator in one of the side boxes with a vintage set of television screens behind him. These and other old-fashioned TVs placed on the set and in the theatre (just outside the proscenium) are filled with picture-perfect recreations of old black-and-white broadcasts by the projection designer, Peter Nigrini. Kenneth Posner's lighting is typically expert in both hotel room interiors and press conferences, contributing hugely to the final coup de theater on the convention floor. John Gromada's extremely evocative sound design includes the babble of convention noise -- speeches, applause, an organ playing "God Bless America" -- before the curtain goes up, and provides a constant reminder of the chaos outside each candidate's door. I have to express some mild disappointment in Ann Roth's costumes, noting that she has outfitted Bergen and Butler in equally unflattering outfits, although the men's suits are spot-on, and Lansbury's ensembles are hilarious, especially the Act II outfit that makes her look like a peach parfait.

It all adds up to a fine evening of cross and double-cross, a reminder of how much the political world has changed, and how much it hasn't. In its particulars, The Best Man is as nostalgia-provoking as a Huntley-Brinkley broadcast. In its character assessments and its appreciation of the underlying fundamentals of American presidential politics, it's like a bulletin from MSNBC. If that makes for a potboiler, then let's have a few more, please.--David Barbour