Clark Gable and Carol Lombard who had a passionate romance that developed into an enduring love and successful marriage until Lombard’s life was cut short. Plane Love by Rosary Hartel O’Neill references the relationship of these two celebrities.

You know how you can see one version of a play with one set of actors and another version with different actors and a whole new meaning is presented with different themes and an enhanced understanding? Last month Rosary Hartel O’Neill’s play Plane Love directed by Melissa Attebery and starring David Copeland and Shana Farr presented at the Player’s Club in New York City had that effect on me. The play had a previous showing a year ago at the National Arts Club with a different group of actors and production values. I enjoyed it then and thought the play’s promise, if picked up by other Off Off Broadway producers had the potential to create momentum and drift up the line so that it could create a followership as happens with many Off Off Broadway productions.

Rosary O’Neill and Diane Bernhardt (then President) at the National Arts Club reading of Plane Love.

The reading of Plane Love was held in one of the many anterooms of the National Arts Club’s beautiful Victorian building which is a historic landmark.

A bit about Rosary Hartel O’Neill, the playwright before I discuss the play will elucidate some interesting details. I’ve known Rosary’s work now for over a year and have been privileged to have seen a number of her plays presented in scene studies at the Actor’s Studio. I have seen a few presentations of Plane Love, one at the National Arts Club and the other at The Actor’s Studio. I have read a number of her dynamic plays and absolutely love her The Awakening of Kate Chopin, based on the real life Kate Chopin. (If you have not read Chopin’s groundbreaking The Awakening, regardless of whether you are male or female, it is a compelling story and you will walk away from it shocked, your intellect, your soul lazered.)

Rosary O’Neill and Melissa Attebery (Director) at the Player’s Club cafe.

O’Neill’s play The Awakening of Kate Chopin reveals how the real Kate Chopin came to write The Awakening. O’Neill strips open the events which are iconic in shaping Chopin’s phenomenal work. After The Awakening was published and universally vilified with criticism nearly likening her to the maw of Satan (Male critics at that time were terrorized by the true tenants of her themes.) Chopin never wrote or published another word again. O’Neill’s play is historical yet modern, it is vibrant and transfixing and it should be added to the repertory of seminal works showing casing men’s and women’s struggles with self-definition as they attempt to step beyond issues of sexual stereotype and fail miserably. Sound familiar? Welcome to the 21st century. Chopin’s character is a modern day Medea with a twist. O’Neill’s play examines the Kate who could write such an incredible story.

David Copeland (Actor’s Studio actor) and Shana Farr in the library of the Player’s Club where the reading was held.

Plane Love echoes some of the struggles of love, autonomy in relationships and trust revealed in the play The Awakening of Kate Chopin. But Plane Love has lighter notes, is clever and witty with the deep undercurrents playfully brought to the surface in a successful expiation. Interestingly, it too, has a basis in real life relationships. The characters and situation are styled after a celebrated Hollywood couple, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard who were passionate for each other and fit together in a Plato’s soul love that is rarely duplicated. It was a love that Gable never overcome after Lombard’s death in a plane crash.  The couple in Plane Love is also mirrored to some extent to reflect O’Neill’s relationship with her current husband, Bob. Rosary and Bob met on a plane and grew their romance through letters. (In the play they chat via e-mails and IMs. Tweets and Facebook posts are too potentially public. Yes, folks their love chats were private and personal, not to be shared with others in this Anthony Weiner social media culture of “fat finger” clicking mistakes.) Their absences, because of Bob’s extensive travel and Rosary’s living in another part of the country made their joyful hearts bond with the heat of their words and imaginations. Distance love can be a really great spur for passion.

Shana Farr plays the role styled after Carole Lombard in her relationship and marriage to Clark Gable. Melissa Attebery is introducing the play.

Energetic and vital David Copeland and Shana Farr melded with the ethers of director Melissa Attebery and the result was dynamic and alive. Some script changes were made for the better and the ending  was supernally charged and had morphed from the time I had seen it at the National Arts Club and the Actor’s Studio. I will not give a spoiler alert except to say that the changes made the poignancy and connections to today really pop. I was moved and emotionally affected where in the previous versions I was not. The actors subtly and seamlessly developed the relationship between the characters through their power and ability to be eternally present. Exceptional acting talent whispered and nuanced the delicacy of how couples bond, the wheels and woes of emotional stripping and unmasking toward trust, the inevitable hurts and glories and the risks of unifying one soul to another.

After the performance, the audience applauds . David Copeland, Rosary O’Neill and Shana Farr

This production for me proves that casting excellent talents like Copeland and Farr is essential, good direction is paramount. A fine play will stand despite mediocre direction and a lack of will on the part of all concerned. Nevertheless, the audience will walk away from such live theater feeling something was not quite right, there was a drop of energy, the actors had a bad night or the play had dead spots. And as such, a good play will be forgotten until it is unearthed two decades later and electrically the cast gets it, the director is on fire, there is a unity of spectacle and everything is right. That is when the audience walks away with a sigh of relief, energized in a catharsis of human feeling and the play has a long run or a full run.

Great actor Edwin Booth purchased the Victorian building off Gramercy Park to have a place where he and his actor friends could congregate and enjoy themselves. He hired Stanford White to renovate the place adding various features which were conducive to enjoying parties and seeing plays. There is a cafe downstairs and auditorium with a stage on the second floor. There is an amazing library with old volumes and the place is festooned with paintings and pictures and drawings of actors. Booth also had White renovate an upstairs portion where he had apartments for himself. When all this was finished, Booth lived at the Player’s Club for five years and then died…presumably a happier man for giving his actor friends a comfortable and convivial place to hang out in NYC,

This production of Plane Love was in the second category. Look for the playwright, the actors and the director. They are not fading away, and look for Plane Love to gradually get its wings and fly uptown eventually toward wider avenues and brighter lights.

Al Pacino is a consummate actor. In the Broadway production of  Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet won the Pulitzer in 1984) insightfully directed by Daniel Sullivan, Pacino shines. His portrayal of Shelly Levine is truthful, vital and empathetic. He is backed up by a superb ensemble of actors, each a bulls-eye in his own right. Together, the cast adheres beautifully like a religious mosaic. They are powerfully felt, moment to moment, vibrant, subtly manipulative yet outrageous.  They overwhelm. And when you step back at the play’s conclusion to see the work they have wrought together, the impact of the production’s meaning smashes you like lightening.

This setting may be the Regan era economic corporate construct of 1983, but the play reminds that this is the seminal period that got us to 2013. The hapless characters are snared in a vise of proving their economic worth and are forced to predate their hapless victims. Through their struggles, we see how more than ever, as citizens and social creatures we are compelled to deal with the horrific results of corporate fascism, greed, corruption, callousness. As the characters game each other with slippery ploys and psychological maneuverings, we know the score, that the winners today are the losers of tomorrow, that ambition and greed are infinite and infinitely destructive, and that they, like Sisyphus who must roll the boulder up the mountain knowing he will slip and fall to the same result every time, are born to failure in a culture that is unrelentingly wicked. Indeed, even corporations, like Sisyphus, are beset by the ever-increasing need for profitability, cost cutting and downsizing to eliminate their “dead weight, useless eaters.” The play is timely, Mamet was prescient and the production is faithful in spooling out how devouring corporations, represented by the callous actions of Mitch and Murray, wipe out true industry and humanity.

Having played Ricky Roma in the film, Pacino pulls off a miracle in his Shelly Levine, a character who was once like Roma but whose soul has become seared and savaged by the daily press of demeaning “employment” that offers no uplift nor ignites any spark of hope. Pacino portrays Shelly as a shabby shadow of once brimming confidence, now smarmy with the unseemly rot of connivance and calculation that is required to prey upon clients, cornering and badgering them into purchases, regardless of their wants and needs. His Shelly is tired, desperate, mentally fogged, tipping a precarious balance of initial fight and bluster and later waning energy and soul death.

In his scene where Shelly flickers back to life in a last harrah which we discover has been prompted by his sordid theft in a deal with Dave Moss, Pacino’s delight barreling into the office announcing he has made the windfall kindles our enthusiasm. His commanding Williamson to ” Get the chalk and put me on the board,” (in competition for the cadillac) convinces us that Shelly isn’t a hack after all, he is the selling machine he used to be.  This counterpoint becomes all the more devastating when we and Shelly discover the sale is a deception and the deceiver, swindler and liar has been hoodwinked.  When the revelation comes that the old couple who signed the check in the coup de grace deal are broke, Pacino slumps physically, demeaned and deflated once more in failure. Prayed upon by his delusions, the reality hits him and us with ferocity as John Williamson, played with precision by David Harbour, twists in the knife deeper for the kill. Williamson takes a particular relish and glee asking Shelly about the couple’s apparent poverty, “Didn’t you see the way they were living?” and then snapping out in triumph, “They just like to talk to salesmen.” Pacino allows us to feel the desolation creeping back into Shelly’s soul. In his performance he wrenches all the emotional heft out of himself and enervates us with the power of living this character as we, with Shelly, victimized by the corporate ethos, cultural apathy and our own delusions about “making it” face his inevitable doom of hopelessness.

As John Williamson, David Harbour makes the perfect foil to Pacino’s Shelly. He has taken the role far from Kevin Spacey’s  interpretation in the film. Spacey brilliantly plays Williamson as droll, dry, milktoast.  Harbour is perfection, the golden-haired, relative of someone at Mitch and Murray brought in to cut the dead wood and mechanize people and sales for profitability. Harbour’s Williamson is overtly cruel and aggressive, loud and brash. He smarms Pacino’s Shelly, showing that middle managers, too, can play the game, conniving,  manipulating, calculating, tormenting. We note Williamson’s slow deadliness as he listens to Shelly’s pleas, appears to be yielding, then with enjoyment backpedals, rejecting Shelly’s demands. He refuses to give Shelley the premium leads an intention he had all along, but with double speak he blames the result on Shelly’s selling failures as the rationale of denying him. Through this scene beautifully portrayed by Harbour and Pacino, we see the malevolence and self-victimization and cruelty in their representative dance driven by a market economy.

The symbol of middle management, Harbour aptly forges his character’s knowledge of the divide between the two classes of workers, the managers and the slaves.  Harbour’s Williamson carries the banner of his bosses and will never put it in the hands of the underlings. He portrays this knowledge, in his attitude, his carriage, showing his superiority with dominant confidence, regardless of the slaves’ resentment. His impeccable characterization as the perfect bastard is unforgettable, one you must grovel to, yet can manifest hatred to, up to the point when you remember he has the power to decide your fate. Harbour’s Williamson is inviolate and trenchant, recognizable as every corporate middle management position, the henchmen of henchmen.

The second foil to Pacino’s Shelly is John C. McKinley as George Moss. McKinley relates Moss’ fury with exceptional intelligence. His rage is layered and he shows that the closer Moss comes to fulfilling his plan of conniving a co-worker to steal for him, leaving the colleague holding the bag, the more irate he becomes. McKinley’s duplicitous Moss games his colleagues and Williamson with bluster and bravado that is empty and filled with complaint.  McKinley subtly weaves together Moss’ arrogance, rage and shadiness which we only understand later, having been connived by his rants and apparently legitimate condemnations against Mitch and Murray.  McGinley’s Moss is dominant alpha in believing that not only can he best Mitch and Murray at their own level of rapaciousness and cruelty, but he can use the company’s desperate slaves to effect his plan to sell the premium leads to create a profit for himself.

We especially see McGinley’s brilliance during his “Fuck You” tirade. In this scene McGinley allows Moss’s presumptuous arrogance to ignite beautifully barreling out a crescendo of “Fuck yous,” to the staff and Williamson with a ferocity that becomes humorous. We revel in the depiction. It is comical and identifiable, for we have been at that same place of having to swallow so much crap, “Fuck You” sums up our primal scream of frustration. We feel McGinley’s empathy with Moss’s rage at being cornered by Mitch and Murray, snared by his dreams of “becoming rich” and himself for believing the lie. It is felt experience and we know that behind the rage is the despair that things will never change, for we can do little but be beholden to bosses’ emp0loyment at will. Can we select the alternative, joblessness and utter failure?

McGinley enacts the scene to intimate Moss’ self-deception at too readily believing his delusional plan will work. Once again comes the lightening crash as we realize Moss’ rage is at himself, another failure gone amuck. His “Fuck Yous,” are in actuality, “I fucked me.” He has screwed himself and has brought everyone down with him, except his enemy Mitch and Murray. They will thrive, continuing to grind slaves to bits because the climate is a desperate one and there is no protection for non-union workers. Ultimately, Moss and Shelly will be put in jail for their dreams.

As Ricky Roma, Bobby Cannavale aptly steps up to the challenge of playing the character Pacino played in the film. His Roma is more direct, apparently honest and less slickly selling a fabulous concept to his mark. Cannavale’s Roma is portrayed with vibrancy and candor. We see that he doesn’t understand the desperation of Shelly, Moss and George Aaronow, played excellently as a counterpoint by Richard Schiff.  Unlike Shelly and the others, he is the alpha, the star performer, on the top of the heap. We enjoy watching him finesse his prey, James (played by Jeremy Shamos) and are unnerved when Williamson blows the deal for him.

Cannavale’s portrayal brilliantly makes us want Roma to succeed, though it is counter to our sense of the Golden Rule and human decency.  With his clever, likable depiction we admire Roma, his talents, his charm. We enjoy seeing him at work, forgetting the sale is a con until it fails and Shamos’ James leaves in fear. That reality crash snaps Cannavale’s Roma and it awakens us. The charm flees like James and Roma turns on Williamson.  It is then Cannavale’s portrayal shows that behind Roma’s superb salesmanship is the same desperation and fear that have overtaken Shelly, Moss and Aaronow.

Though Roma is a winner today, he  knows the future is bleak. Underneath the dominance is a painful understanding; he is out there on his own and the company he works for puts obstacles in his path and is incapable of providing the proper resources for him to effect his talents. It is only  a matter of time before the premium leads will be given to a new top seller on the board.   Cannavale intimates this understanding when Roma draws in Pacino’s Shelly and compliments him for his creative “crap slinging” on James. We are allowed to empathize with Cannavale’s Roma, after all, for like the others, has duped himself. The future is now. Little does he realize the game is up for all of them. With the leads gone, Roma will be joining his pals selling old leads that can’t be sold, as two of his colleagues, the one he planned to work, end up in jail.

As the low key salesperson, Richard Schiff’s George is us. He listens to Dave, Shelly and Ricky with tired sensitivity, with every step of the way relating to fruitlessness of the struggle of each man. Yet he is the solid presence that tries and loses, not with grace, but with quiet resignation. Schiff’s George is exceptional. And his counterpoint characterization enhances the complexity of the dynamic in the struggle each character has with his own delusions of which George gracefully seems to be absent of. He has gotten to the bare reality and he puts up with it all until he, too, has to cry out with frustration. A superb performance, Schiff listens, is always present. Wonderful.

Mamet saw what many recognized yet tossed aside in their quest for the riches during the Regan era of corporate growth and shrinking unions and voiding worker’s rights. The productive, aggressive ones, the middle management henchmen and those like uber confident Ricky Roma would one day be on the refuse heap. Why? Even in the market, and with hedge funds, past performance guarantees nothing. Mamet’s work and this production are timeless and reveal that our cultural dynamic needs to change. Corporations must not be the feudal lords. We must not allow them power by handing over our imagination, creativity, personalities and dreams to them because we have swallowed the lie that survival is steeped in economic despair.  We are more than “survivalists” and this is not a reality program, it a paradigm that we can end if we choose to. Sullivan’s and the casts’ production show that what people accept, they have. The lies and delusions they allow, ensnare them. It is a powerful message for all time. If you missed the production see the film and read this review again. You shouldn’t miss it a second time.

Imagine your writing career is about to take off. You’ve interned at the New York Times and by some straight miracle that you have helped to manipulate, you land a job there. You are ecstatic. But also imagine that you have  a few character flaws you ignore. You lack focus; you are ambitious without the required determination and discipline to accomplish your goals; you are incapable of dealing with high pressured stress; you seek out “coping mechanisms” which encourage addictive, annihilating behaviors in the name of “dealing.”  Perhaps this could describe any one of us during a period in our lives when we were in transition and were unable to self-correct. In CQ/CX*  (which completed its run at the Atlantic Theater Company) it describes the personality of Jay Bennett, an intern who lands the prestigious job at The New York Times, then proceeds to blow up his life and career because of sloppy carelessness fueled by an indulgent penchant for alcohol, cocaine and self-destruction.

From the point we meet the character Jay Bennett as an intern, to the play’s conclusion after he has impaled himself and his two editors on the sword of fraud and plagiarism (cardinal sins of reportage) we painfully absorb the truth that an individual’s decline often carries with it many pivotal declensions that can either lead toward opportunity, or initiate doom.  In Bennett’s case it is the latter: we watch silent and stunned as the miserable twine of the knave’s life unravels, becomes a scrawny tendril then breaks with the weight of error, plummeting the self-vicitimizer into the abyss of no return. And we come away understanding how someone, who is potentially addicted to failure can lure others into a web of deceit, despite their own better judgment.

Gabe McKinley’s writing is vital. Having served as a journalist for the New York Times, he witnessed the plagiarism incident of Jayson Blair, the disgraced journalist the play loosely is based on. By the time McKinley left the paper, accomplished a year’s research and wrote the play, he had sifted the events and dramatic energy of the individuals, creating characters, some composites, and others loosely based upon the major players (Blair). Then he created the arc of events that led up to the plagiarism and its impact. The result is a newsroom landscape peppered  with complexity, humor and pathos.  Integral to McKinley’s  backdrop is his concentration on the Times as a renown institution facing this doomsday scenario: crumbling old media empire hobbles light years behind the new media reformation. McKinley reveals the extent to which these circumstances may have impacted how Bennett/Blair tweaked and exploited the editors’ and owner’s desire-concern to be trending and competitive.

Though we know the inevitable, we are engaged as events and characterizations unfold. Partly due to the excellent direction by David Leveaux and the ensemble acting, which remained moderated between tension and argument, McKinley reveals that in this institution, as in all institutions that have preceded themselves, there are those wise Cassandras who see potential disaster. And they are ignored as the “forward thinking” view preempts. So though we ironically have been warned the train wreck will occur, we draw close, interested in understanding the how and the why. Though we might not have worked in similar circumstances, we do know such problem scenarios and there is always the question, “Where did the players/me/my family go wrong?”  McKinley provides answers, but they are not paramount.  One must dig beyond the superficial and obvious reasons why this young reporter with problems was able to manipulate experienced editors who, themselves, didn’t check the facts (relates to the title) but took an expedient route.

The play’s message is prophetic: its warnings for readers and writers alike, emphatic  (if one has the ears to hear and the eyes to see). There is a danger of trusting institutions which ride on the coattails of their former reputations. Independent internet news, social networking and the changing virtual paradigm have shifted news reporting away from the ethos of group think characteristic of large, venerated, news organizations. In a number of instances bloggers, writers, free lance journalists and professional experts in their fields have trumped such organizations with in-depth online pieces that have gone viral, eliciting a new meaning to the words, “breaking news.” This medium of independent online reporting has taken a pick axe to traditional media. In the past information might never have been revealed because of loyalties, cronyism and paternalistic decisions. Decisions not to report information were justified by such capstone logic that not reporting was for “the good of the country,” when in fact not reporting was blatant cover-up and protection of systems and individuals. In the past news institutions were hand maidens of politicians, governments and corporations, and few suspected this was the case. Only those on the inside had the power to know. Only they were well networked to keep the known, unknown.

The play shows the extent to which traditional media still clings to the “old way of doing things,” a dinosaur incapable of seeing its inevitable extinction. Couple this with the dumbing down of broadcast news to sound bytes as entertainment, overall, old institutional investigative reporting has become less and less substantive. The mastheads of ethical news tradition have been supplanted with the meaningless but urgent need to “get the story out,” to keep current and competitive with like organizations. And this is the ready made environment for someone like a Jay Bennett/Blair who can enter in and tell lie upon lie and weave deceit upon deceit while experienced editors, if they picked it up, didn’t put their foot down.  In such circumstances how can INSTITUTIONAL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IN A FREE AND OPEN SOCIETY function, survive and grow stronger?

After rethinking McKinley’s work, it was evident to me that the playwight poses another underlying question for us in this virtual age of Youtube and social media and virtual exposure of lies. Do editors working for institutional new organizations prize reporters’ expertise and willingness to ask the difficult questions and give them the time to commit to the true investigations? Do editors encourage reporters after interviews to really “CQ/CX:”  look for contradictions, half-truths and omissions and double check other sources against the first source? A lie is a lie and its exposure as a lie is substantive investigative reporting. To what extent are old media editors and owners encouraging their reporters to expose lies by those in power? Online sites are replete with information which contradicts and trumps institutional media news organizations that do expose lies by those in power. Shouldn’t traditional media do the same?

The plays suggests that The New York Times is an institution which may not be digging deeper, going farther, investigating, investigating, investigating. Lies have passed through (and still do, i.e. Dolores Kearns Goodwin, et. al) and because of this inconsistency, is it any wonder that a Blair/Bennett and others may audaciously crank out the falsehoods and get away it HOW MANY TIMES if no one calls them on it??? Certainly, some of the trusting New York Times readership do not know and rarely  suspect this could occur. For some, the prestigious masthead is enough and because this paper said it, it must be so. The Times, according to the play, has encouraged such readership pretensions and coasted on its venerability. But this is not good enough. It needs an overhaul and thorough CQ/CX!

For when one considers the seriousness of lies and their acceptance, what is the fallout of such deterioration of fact checking for investigative journalism on the world stage? Where was investigative journalism on the WMD (weaspons of mass destruction) that were supposed to be one of the causes for going to war in Iraq? Political figures have sold themselves as experts and that has been enough validity for traditional reportage, when in fact, the individuals were sharing opinions not facts, spinning spin and there was no fact checking from “investigative” reporters/editors who didn’t ask the difficult questions. Reporters supported by editors took quotes and wrote stories without really dealing with the substance BEHIND the quotes to note the gaps, the contradictions, the half-truths, the omissions. And indeed, the play brings us to this last overriding question:  to what extent were these large news organizations, representative old media, ever true exponents of a free press that was reliable, trustworthy and accurate AND NOT THE HAND MAIDEN OF POLITICAL AND CORPORATE INTEREST? Indeed how long has there been an unreliability with regard to CQ/CX; perhaps the Bennett/Blair incident is just the inevitable implosion of systemic corruption which has been happening for decades, a kind of “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire” cum old media?

This is the undercurrent of McKinley’s work and some may miss it if they are looking at the obvious.  But then they are in good company. They are just like Jay Bennett’s editors who ended up having to resign because they didn’t dig deeper; they accepted what was expedient and they trusted the rightness of their own judgment in a wallow of group think instead of doing their own CQ/CX.

Though the play’s run is finished in New York, we certainly haven’t seen the last of its performance elsewhere. The subject is a timely one and as more episodes of fact checking problems arise, the play will surely carry legs in other areas of the country. Indeed, they may even be looking into its eventually going uptown New York closer to Broadway in the future.

* John Farley interviewed Gabe McKinley in his article about the play for The Metro Focus Culture section online for Channel 13 and asked what the abbreviation means. This is what McKinley’s response was.

McKinley: They’re both shorthand used during fact-checking at the Times. Editors would use CQ — an abbreviation for the Latin term Cadit Quaestio, meaning “question falls” — if a statement was correct. CX is shorthand for corrections, if something was false.

We all are enamored of the astronomer/physicist who defied the Catholic church for a season, and though it was heresy taught that the earth was not the center of the solar system/universe, but that our sun was. F. Murray Abraham famed Academy Award winner for Amadeus and acclaimed Shylock in last year’s Classic Stage Company’s Merchant of Venice must have been enamored of Galileo as well because he plays the man with empathy and brilliance.

It is interesting that the director Brian Kulick and the company have chosen the Charles Laughton, Bertol Brecht collaborative translation of Brecht’s play Galileo. The director states that it was chosen in part because in 1947 when the play was premiered in Hollywood and had a brief later run on Broadway, this translation was meaningful in light of the nuclear age ushered in upon the world stage after Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The inevitable interplay on science’s impact on the culture was something that Brecht wrote as a concern of Galileo, how men would use the truth of science. It is a theme that artists and writers like Ray Bradbury and other science fiction writers and filmmakers have taken up again and again, even in works like Alien and Kubrick’s 2001  A Space Odyssey.

But Brecht’s version playing at the Classic Stage Company which has none of Brecht’s later additions about Galileo and the church resonates for us in its themes about the inflexibility of changing with the nature of truth, and the nature of truth itself being shaped by culture, history and expediency. Galileo’s life is picked up at the point when he is living with his daughter and is tutoring wealthy sons of land owners. Brecht clearly makes the point that one of Galileo’s foibles was his flesh, his enjoying life and eating and wine. And of course, this is the hook later in the play providing the rationale why Galileo was not the martyr that many “heretics” were at the time when he ran afoul of the Inquisition in teaching his truths and proofs about the motion of the spheres, teachings which some of the cardinals, themselves, acknowledged as accurate.

No, Galileo was not a martyr. He caved. And F. Murray Abraham imbues this fleshly hero with an empathy we can all understand. Would we not do the same as he? Who of us would perish for some scribblings that may or may not be used to enhance mankind at some future date. No. Galileo will recant and not burn. He enjoys his wine. His flesh is weak and if the truth burns instead of him? Then, at least he will be able to get to his next meal and glass of wine, enjoying its taste.

But the price he pays brings a skein of bitterness, rejection of his students (interesting that they do not offer to burn with him for receiving the blasphemous teachings) the daily remembrance of his cowardice for his papers have been confiscated, and he must cope with the permanent guest in his house who guards him from writing anything down. So our genius is imprisoned in his home and his mind, unable to further any of his discoveries.

I do not advocate spoilers. So you won’t read what happens here.  Get a copy of the play. Brecht is a brilliant playwright, though this might not be his most superlative play. (Mother Courage and Her Children is better.) Don’t count on seeing this version. If you have connections, perhaps you will be able to get a ticket, though it will be difficult unless you know the director or F. Murray Abraham. The performance is completely sold out.

I would have loved to go again, but I’ll just have to remember, rereading this review, how splendid the supporting cast was and how human and alive F. Murray Abraham’s performance was. The circular stage, a sphere, naturally and the globes of the solar system hanging from the ceiling were an effective backdrop to the action of man at the center of the universe. It was only until Galileo’s discourses were noted far and wide that man was no longer front and center and the Age of Enlightenment propelled the sun to the center and knowledge, science and a different kind of truth began spinning outward farther and farther into space and time.

I couldn’t recommend this production enough. I do think that at some point other versions of Brecht’s Galileo will be picked up by other prodigious actors, who like a challenge and enjoy the thought that they can step into the cloak and mien of one of the most illustrious, brilliant and flawed  of scientists, making us actually happy that he did not, like so many others fall into the loathsome clutches of the nefarious Inquisition.

By the way, it is interesting to note that Galileo in all his science believes in God and is God’s man. Only the truly brilliant, the ineffably brilliant are able to reconcile science and God, bringing them together in complement, not stretching them from one end of the universe to the other (That is a joke; the universe has no end…and maybe no beginning, since no one was around to observe the Big Bang. It’s a theory.)

To that effect and because I was inspired by the play and F. Murray Abraham’s performance, I did write a sonnet to celebrate.

You can find it here. Enjoy!