Herb Brown is a former Ohio Supreme Court Justice, professor, and acclaimed novelist. CATCO is to be commended for presenting the world premier of his new play, The Final Table. New plays presented with this kind of a robust budget and professionalism and seriousness are always to be cheered on and taken seriously.
You will not see better acting on a stage of Columbus this season, or maybe ever. Jon Putnam’s Richard Nixon – played previously by Putnam in Brown’s earlier play You’re My Boy – is a gift to the actor and to the audience, and Putnam tears into it with both hands, teeth flashing. Putnam avoids the mistake of speaking too quickly, he understands the deliberation and the nerves in Nixon, the combination of ego and insecurity and intellect is pitch-perfect. He gets not only some of the biggest laughs of the play, he gets the audience on his side more frequently than some might think is possible. As good is Ralph Scott’s Lyndon Johnson – charm spiked with confusion and rage and, at heart, a canny strategist with an eye on the future but insatiable appetites that he can’t resist, a vulgarity that’s part real and part learned rope-a-dope. There’s an exquisite, razor-sharp comic timing shooting between Nixon and Johnson like electrical current throughout, zinging through the other characters at times but when they go head to head like two old friends who always kind of hated each other, it’s a marvel.
Todd Covert – who stunned me as Sam Byck in Red Herring’s Assassins – brings a lower-key intensity and dignity to his Dwight Eisenhower, but he’s riveting to watch and his balancing of the personalities of Nixon and Johnson is a delight. Kevin Carty’s Harry Truman is a little more of a cartoon, a man baffled that he never got the respect he felt he was owed, a well-read Midwestern protestant who’s as close – for people at that level of power and accountability – as the play has to a viewpoint character for the audience, which makes it an icy dagger in the ribs as the play reminds all viewers repeatedly that he deployed the atomic bomb and changed the world forever. Tom Holliday’s Warren Harding is funny and charming and he plays the character’s feeling of being a little out of his league perfectly. Courtney DeCosky’s Dealer with a bluetooth in her ear to a higher power is very good – flirty, encouraging, lacerating, and grounded.
When these five Presidents find themselves pulled from a purgatory made of their own choices into a poker game with oblique stakes – maybe the winner gets to be reincarnated as President again, maybe the loser gets sent to a pit of flame, is everyone who doesn’t win a loser or do the three people eliminated between go back to their limbo “clusters”? It’s never quite addressed. The cosmology is confusing and muddled – a mishmash of an interventionist Christian God expanded to include Muses and Furies and intimations of other religions, most prominently those of the Book, and given enough stage time to be a distraction.
The first 45 minutes are hilarious and sharp as the Presidents banter and growl and try to charm each other and the Dealer. The voices are captured perfectly, and the gleaming modernist set feels just out of time enough (courtesy of Eric Barker, Scenic Designer, and Ben Sostrop, Props Master). Audience dissatisfaction starts to creep in when it becomes clear there’s very little poker in this play ostensibly using poker as a tentpole. Over the course of the 90 minute one act, by my count they didn’t play more than four hands, and just about every President goes “all in” very early – it feels like a squandering of one of the great theatrical metaphors and devices when the acting and writing both capture the contrasting personalities of these epic figures so well.
Unfortunately, the last third of the play throws away the hard-hitting humor and darkness for a corny, schmaltzy redemption story. There are bum notes hit with Nixon getting sent to – we’re led to assume – hell and then brought back, this attempt to show consequence lands with a thud, and in short order the Dealer launches into Johnson for being vulgar and perverse when she’d been encouraging that seconds before. These two sequences come from so far out of left field that the tone of the play irrevocably shifts and for the worse. Almost offensively, it also riffs on American Exceptionalism and a God who, we’re led to believe, really believes white men intervening is the one thing the Middle East needs because they are incapable of saving themselves, and a dig that the worst thing that can ever happen to a man is becoming a woman. Additionally, Africa is completely discarded as a world player, which is the cherry on top of the head-scratching “what just happened” conclusion – there’s a discussion of the treatment of African-Americans being America’s greatest shame, but contemporary situations are barely touched on except in broad strokes on a macro level.
There’s really interesting thematic material touched upon. Why do people want power? What do they do with it and what does it do with them? There’s a very interesting thread here, that people we admire personally aren’t necessarily the leaders we need and that sometimes there needs to be someone vulgar and bull-like to force the future down our throats. But these things aren’t developed enough in lieu of an ending giving us, improbably, hugs and a Wizard of Oz-esque goodbye sequence.
While I can’t recommend this, everything technical is brilliant. The set, acting, and writing on a sentence level I’ve touched on already. Steven Anderson’s direction is taut, it lands hard when it needs to and it knows when to pull back; it gives these performances plenty of space but never too much room. Darin Keesing’s lighting and Keya Myers-Alkire’s sound are perfect, apart and in tandem, subtle when they need to be and over the top when the writing demands it. As well, I feel compelled to say, The Final Table was a crowd-pleaser – huge laughs erupted around me in the sold out audience on opening night when I saw it.
CATCO’s performances of The Final Table play Wednesday through Sunday through April 26 and additional performances have been added Thursday, April 30, Friday, May 1, and Saturday, May 2, at 8 p.m. For tickets and showtimes, visit catco.org.