Robert Schenkkan provided a brilliant example of political theater with his Tony winning All the Way, which played Broadway in 2014 after premiering at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The epic drama’s trajectory concerned President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s efforts to push the Civil Rights Act through Congress and ended with his election in 1964. Now Schenkkan has followed up that laser-focused work with a sprawling sequel, The Great Society at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, also directed by OSF artistic chief Bill Rauch, and the results are certainly informative and thought-provoking, but not as dramatically effective as its predecessor.
“The Great Society” was the catch-all phrase for LBJ’s myriad social programs to improve the lives of American’s poverty-stricken masses and curb racial discrimination including Medicare, urban renewal, stimulating employment, and aiding economic development. The play recounts Johnson’s herculean efforts and Machiavellian strategies to push his agenda through while activists led by Martin Luther King demonstrate to go further and conservative Republicans push back because he’s gone too far. A skirmish in Vietnam slowly grows into a monstrous war and swallows the president’s well-intended domestic template whole, forcing LBJ to not seek re-election and his vice-president Hubert Humphrey to lose the 1968 election to the regressive Richard Nixon.
Schenkkan plots an enormous canvas with 19 actors playing over 35 roles and Rauch does an admirable job of cleanly and clearly staging a plethora of incidents including MLK’s march on Selma, J. Edgar Hoover’s clandestine surveillance of the administration’s opponents, the student protest movement, the passage of Medicare, riots in Watts and Chicago, and the Democratic primaries. With so much going on, the lens is too broadly drawn to be completely effective despite the invaluable aide of Victoria Sagady’s graphic video images, David Weiner’s stark lighting, and David Korins’s sleek unit set. As a result, the play is closer to a Ken Burns documentary than a moving drama.
All the Way had the benefit of a commanding central performance from Bryan Cranston as Johnson. Brian Cox is to be commended for tackling the mammoth role of LBJ who narrates and comments upon the action with lengthly monologues and is seldom absent from the stage. But the accomplished British star, renowned for playing tough-minded authority figures in everything from Shakespeare to the X-Men franchise and the HBO series “Succession,” appears ill at ease and hesitant in his delivery of Schenkkan’s folksy dialogue. Plus his Texas accent is a might shaky, leading to a hit-and-miss performance. He occasionally scores a direct hit when Johnson successfully manipulates the various political figures into doing his bidding, but not often enough. When he confronts David Garrison’s cartoonish Nixon in the final scene, the impact of LBJ’s condemnation of his shifty successor should be devastating, but instead it fizzles and the play ends on an anti-climactic note.
Even with these flaws, The Great Society has powerful moments, and the versatile cast creates memorable cameos of key historic figures such as Richard Thomas’s dithering Humphrey, Grantham Coleman’s conflicted MLK, Marc Kudisch’s wolfish Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Bryce Pinkham’s opportunistic Bobby Kennedy, Matthew Rauch’s troubled Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and Barbara Garrick’s compassionate Lady Bird Johnson.
