Blackball Jungle

In the five years that Trumbo has
been playing select intimate venues around the country it has attracted
some impressive mature talent: Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, Liam Neeson,
Tim Robbins, Brian Dennehy, Steve Martin, and, before he left this
mortal coil, Paul Newman. At the desk in Syracuse is the only local
actor whose name on a marquee can fill the house: Bill Molesky. When he
recreated the men, women, kings and fools of Shakespeare the show was
called Bill Does Will. In conjuring up the verbal
whirlwind known as Dalton Trumbo at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard
Studio, this Simply New Theatre mounting could well be known as Bill Does Dalt.

If you’ve forgotten for a moment where
Dalton Trumbo fits in, the opening 20-minute sequence of feature film
clips and newsreels, narrated by Molesky, tells you. In the late 1940s
the troglodyte right in the form of the House Un-American Activities
Committee mounted a Salem-like assault on the film industry and
condemned 10 uncooperative witnesses who would not “name names,” i.e.
point fingers at filmmakers and actors who had been members of the
Communist Party. For this Trumbo was sent to prison and “blacklisted,”
denied employment in the movies. At great financial hardship, he
persisted, writing some of his best work, such as many women’s all-time
favorite, Roman Holiday (1953), incidentally an anti-Soviet satire, and The Brave One (1956), winning an Academy Award under his pseudonym “Robert Rich.”

Trumbo (which features the subtitle Red, White and Blacklisted)
was compiled by Dalton’s son Christopher Trumbo, who assures us that
every word we hear originates from the subject. Played by Tom
Ciancaglini, Christopher sometimes speaks from the record in his own
voice and at others appears to extemporize linking and explanatory
passages. They are accompanied by Emmett Van Slyke’s original
complementary, non-intrusive compositions for guitar.

If Dalton Trumbo were only a victim of
reactionary hysteria, there would not be much to bring us to the
theater. What we learn instead is that the screenwriter was a wordsmith
of Nabokovian luminosity. When badgered in childhood by a Calvinist
minister that intimacies with a girl on a date was as evil as misusing
his sister, Trumbo wrote: “If you did, you were a blackguard, a
degenerate, a runnion, a cullion and a diddle-cove. It seemed plain to
me that if one day I did burst upon the world as the hymeneal Genghis
Khan of my dreams, I’d be in for an extremely incestuous time of it.”

Together with nine others, Trumbo became
part of the “Hollywood Ten,” vilified by the Sean Hannitys and Bill
O’Reillys of the day as the scum of the earth. They were also assumed
to be cultural “others,” either foreigners, homosexuals, Jews or
Manhattanites. But Trumbo was none of the above, born instead to a
Protestant family of Swiss heritage in small-town Colorado. Several of
his wartime scripts, like A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), were flag-wavingly patriotic, and he saw combat as a war correspondent. His Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945)
featured a scene worthy of the Disney factory, when a poor immigrant
(Edward G. Robinson) spends his last penny to give an elephant ride to
his daughter (Margaret O’Brien). Despite being an artist of demanding
standards, Trumbo was at root a middle-American.

In his early career Trumbo had published a landmark war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939),
later filmed (1971) with Trumbo as director, but his other works with
the film industry were thought to be mere entertainment, unworthy of
academic scrutiny. Throughout Trumbo’s blacklisting, his impecunious
exile in Mexico, he never suggested in any letter that his work for the
movies was hackery or done slapdash. Instead, he argued that a good
movie was generally better written than the average Broadway play, a
notion that must have seemed self-deceptive at the time. Now it seems
prescient. Most of us today would prefer to see a better Trumbo script,
like Kitty Foyle (1940) or Lonely are the Brave (1962), than almost any work by prestige playwrights of the day, such as Maxwell Anderson or Robert E. Sherwood.

Although he would not testify before the
committee, there is no question today that Trumbo had indeed been a
member of the Communist Party. Encouraged by the Loyalist cause in the
Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939), he thought the party was a force for
social justice. And to join in the midst of World War II, when the
Soviet Union was an ally making great sacrifices to defeat the Nazis,
it seemed like no big deal. Looking back Trumbo said the Communist
Party’s 80,000 U.S. members made it comparable to the Elks, but with
far fewer guns. When the Trumbos experienced racial segregation during
Dalton’s incarceration in Kentucky, they all felt this was a greater
threat to American ideals than Community Party membership had ever
been. And in none of his work, before or after his blacklisting, did
Dalton Trumbo ever speak as anything other than a loyal American.

Not all of his letters speak of art and politics. Trumbo concludes with an extended bravura piece based on a letter Dalton had written to son Christopher about Albert Ellis’ Sex Without Guilt. Most
fathers would not care to speak to their sons about masturbation at
all, but Dalton chose to with the most high-flown rhetoric of any of
his letters. Here’s a sample: “Cowering there in seminal darkness,
liquescent with self-loathing, attentive only to the stealthy rise and
Krafty-Ebbing of my dark scrotumnal blood . . .”

Director John Nara introduces dozens of
lighting cues to shape the action, and Van Slyke’s music heightens the
tone of scene after scene. Tom Ciancaglini’s Christopher often speaks
to us in his own voice, yet Molesky’s Dalton always remains a creature
of the letters or, on occasion, of testimony from congressional
hearings. Even when he has no need to look at them, he always has
sheets of paper before him, reading more than extemporizing. This
serves to authenticate the dialogue and also to remove the character
from the present.

Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of summer are not usually times to take the spoken word seriously. But make no mistake: Trumbo is one of the community theater events of the year.  

This production concludes Saturday, May 30. See Times Table for information.