U.S.A.
U.S.A.
NY Theatre Review
Martin Denton
May 5, 2003
In a time when too much of what's produced in the theatre is a revival of a show either too familiar or too trivial to offer substantial enlightenment, it's a privilege and pleasure to come upon U.S.A. This "dramatic revue" by Paul Shyre and John Dos Passos, adapted from the latter's mammoth trilogy of novels from the 1930s, has barely seen the light of day since its original presentation off-Broadway back in 1959. But see it for yourself: not only is the language both beautiful and gloriously vivid, but the ideas threading through this restlessly non-linear narrative are wondrously resonant and pertinent. In terms of both what they had to say and how they chose to say it, Shyre and Dos Passos prove remarkably prescient. As staged here by The Actors Company Theatre's co-artistic director Scott Alan Evans, U.S.A.?with just eight actors, ten chairs, and a three-member orchestra?is a panoramic epic of America.
Like the books on which it is based, U.S.A. weaves together three separate literary/dramatic structures to paint a picture of our country at the beginning of the 20th Century. These threads are cannily delineated by Evans and his lighting designer, Mary Louise Geiger: There are "newsreels," during which the actors line up across the stage and deliver, overlapping, sound bite headlines that define a particular moment of history. A single spot on a lone performer indicates a biographical sketch of a prominent American?in the course of the evening, we learn about the Wright Brothers, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, and others.
Lights up, with the actors arranged more or less naturalistically, for the main plotline, which concerns the interlocking destinies of a young, ambitious fellow from Wilmington, Delaware named J. Ward Moorehouse; an earnest young woman from Washington, D.C. named Janey Williams who Moorehouse hires as his secretary; and a scion of the upper-crust, Dick Savage, who eventually becomes Moorehouse's right-hand man. Through a combination of unfettered ambition, hard work, and good luck, Moorehouse gets a position at Bessemer Products in Pittsburgh. He also eventually gets the boss's daughter, with whose money he is able to set himself up as a "public relations counselor" in an office on Park Avenue.
That Dos Passos would zoom in on a PR man as the quintessential American at the center of his story gives you an idea of the shrewd understanding that he had of our burgeoning national character. Over and over again as I watched U.S.A. I was struck by how accurately, seventy years ago, he saw where we were heading. One of his characters, Colonel Edgecombe, has this to say about the state of the planet just after World War I: It's funny as a crutch. While we sit here wrangling under Schoolmaster Wilson, John Bull's putting his hands on all the world's future supplies of oil. They've got Persia and now I'll be damned if they don't want Baku.
The account of the legendary funeral of Rudolph Valentino goes like this:
Hundreds of women groggy with headlines got in to view the poor body. Frank E. Campbell's undertakers and pallbearers were on the verge of nervous breakdown. Even the boss had his fill of publicity that time. It was two days before the cops could clear the streets enough to let the flowers from Hollywood be brought in and described in the evening papers.
What do you think??has Dos Passos, by way of Shyre, nailed our national obsessions? There are many such passages throughout U.S.A., all so loaded with foresight and so precisely and sharply written that they just about take the breath away.
Evans' cast is mostly exemplary, with particularly strong work offered by Greg McFadden, who is U.S.A.'s anchor as J. Ward Moorehouse, Nora Chester as stalwart secretary Janey Williams, and Larry Keith as Colonel Edgecombe and several others. Gregory Salata delivers the Valentino bio, which is perhaps the most elegantly written set piece in the play, brilliantly.
I'm so glad that The Actors Company Theatre has given us at least a brief chance to appreciate this extraordinary work. Act One ends with the interment of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery ("Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the brasshats and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn and thought how beautiful, sad, Old Glory, God's country it was to have the bugler play taps...") and Act Two ends with the country on the verge of the Great Depression ("U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a chain of moving picture theatres..."). Is there some wisdom here to guide us through our new American century?