“Here in America”, Orange Tree Theatre

Jeremy Malies in south-west London
27 September 2024

A play is a poem in which “the action is not related but represented” said Dr Johnson. David Edgar mentions the distinction in his book How Plays Work. But Edgar’s new play Here in America remained stubbornly earthbound for me precisely because little was represented and the whole endeavour felt as though it was being related to us as a lecture.

Shaun Evans and Faye Castelow.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

The mainspring in a nonlinear plot is tension between Arthur Miller and his regular director Elia Kazan over Kazan’s testimony in which he gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, which famously Miller refused to do. The opening scene is set during this year in the garden of Kazan’s home in Connecticut. Kazan is broaching what he sees as the need to testify.

My first problem was that, as Miller, Michael Aloni’s accent wandered from Italianate New York “taalking” across many boroughs of the city. There is enough of Miller in interviews that we know exactly how he sounded. I don’t of course expect mimicry from Aloni and voice coach Andrea Fudge, but I had hoped for something consistent. Shaun Evans uses more neutral, less distracting delivery as Kazan who grew up in a Greek district of New York and would have mixed widely.

Simon Kenny’s design is initially understated, with a couple of trapezoid tables and a rising hatch decorated with monochrome stars from the American flag. But he also, unaccountably, covers the stage floor with leaves. I’m capable of imagining leaves and wonder if a mention in the text might have sufficed. The design becomes altogether more powerful when we see Kazan being interrogated from the corner of an upper-tier gantry as he appears before the Committee and lists fellow travellers. Kenny and lighting designer Charles Balfour combine to project the list of names effectively here and conjure up the courtroom frenzy amid popping magnesium flashbulbs.

My biggest disappointment was Faye Castelow (she has impressed in Leopoldstadt) as Kazan’s first wife Molly Day. Know just a little about the background and you might expect her to be the smartest person in the room. It is Molly who demonstrates the clear thinking to berate Miller (on his way to research The Crucible in Salem) on the grounds that while there were no witches in seventeenth-century Massachusetts there are indeed communists in 1950s American civic and artistic life. Castelow does benefit from some true humour in the script when she mocks Miller while talking about “The Salem Ten”.

Kazan quotes Sophocles to the effect that the key to solving today’s problems lies not just in the past but in the future. There are many classical references, but I don’t understand why Castelow should resort to repeated grand cruciform gestures as though she were playing Epidaurus when she is in fact in front of no more than 180 people at an intimate venue. As a student at Vassar College and the Yale Drama School who went on to become a successful dramatist, Molly Day Kazan (she is waiting for a plumber in one of the scenes) deserves better than for Edgar to give her the limp gag: “The pipeman cometh!”

I often wondered why director James Dacre could not have reined in some of the weak humour and perhaps helped Evans and Castelow to be more credible as a couple. Dacre could have usefully taken some advice from the real-life Kazan who said that director and writer should to an extent be co-authors. It may be my radar at fault, but I noted scant collaboration.

One of the best scenes has the Kazans bickering in a rare moment of naturalistic acting over a game of Scrabble which they call “the new intelligent time-killer”. The better exchanges between the men include Kazan chiding Miller for not having fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside his friend Joe Dallet who was killed on the Aragon Front. Aloni succeeds when conveying an element of self-loathing here, but it was a rare gleam of engagement for me.

“I didn’t leave the Left, the Left left me” (recently ascribed to Elon Musk and once used by Ronald Reagan of the Democrats) is one of the better lines. The play has made many wonder if there will be any McCarthyite purges should Trump be the next president. Joseph McCarthy was not involved in this set of hearings and, quite rightly, there is no mention of him in the script but it’s useful shorthand. Trump has just derided Kamala Harris as a Marxist, but he is a non-interventionist and is unlikely to be monitoring what people borrow from public libraries as described here when the characters talk about surveillance.

Marilyn Monroe (both men were involved with her romantically) is a spectral character and is played in a deliberately caricatured way by Jasmine Blackborow who later doubles up skilfully as actress Barbara Loden as we move forward in time and see a rehearsal of the 1964 Miller play After the Fall which (after a patching-up of differences) benefited from direction by Kazan.

Edgar, an Ibsen specialist, has Kazan ponder the gap between “what’s right and what seems best for you”. It’s the issue that confronts Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, a play that coincidentally Miller adapted, labouring over it as he relates in his autobiography Timebends.

I sensed creaking sounds as the complex biographical material (particularly details of the men’s fathers and similar upbringings) was moved into place here. And much of the play struck me as broad brush. I get it that Marilyn is being merely conjured up in the abstract by other characters. But her contemporaries (and notably Miller) would often quote her smart self-deprecating humour. Does Edgar really need to have her (repeatedly) say things like “zip-a-dee-doo-dah!” Dacre might have stepped in, saved Blackborow from such banalities, and given her more to work with. Saved her from the fuzzy end of the lollipop as Marilyn famously said herself in Some Like It Hot.

A similarity that struck me was with James Graham’s Best of Enemies which in its closing moments takes us from the Sixties right up to the present day with a reflective bookend device. I should have been truly interested if Edgar had propelled us to 1999 and the Oscars ceremony during which Kazan’s Life Achievement Award was greeted by stony silence from many and even a few jeers.

I am puzzled since I enjoyed Edgar’s Trying It On and am intrigued by his upcoming The New Real at the RSC. But I found this whole project underwhelming.