Like Neil Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, I am Broadway-bound, with 11 shows lined up to see in nine days. I arrive today and will soon be in a theater, seeing the musical adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s great Dr. Zhivago. (Fill in your own punch line.)
But before New York, I spent a week in my hometown of Washington, D.C. While there, I went to Arena Stage, the venerable not-for-profit theater complex in the southwest corner of the city where I went while in high school, first becoming infected with the theater bug. In recent years, while other theaters in the city were scraping by, Arena built a new eye-popping multimillion-dollar complex and endowment fund, assuring the future of the institution, which earned the first Tony Award for a regional theater.
Anyway, currently playing on the smallest of Arena’s three stages is a new play by John Strand called The Originalist, a very Washington script about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the rabidly right-wing jurist who clings to the philosophy that the Constitution must be interpreted as originally intended by our Founding Fathers, instead of being a living, evolving document. This allows him to live comfortably in the 18th century, long before such issues as gay rights, abortion rights and civil rights.
I had heard that playwright Strand had written a fictional, even-handed portrait of Scalia, which turned out to be the case. By no means was I persuaded by any of his arguments, but the play did humanize the monster, as it set out to do.
Edward Gero, a fine classical actor I had seen and reviewed many times over the years, now eerily resembles Scalia and plays him with humor and dogmatic assurance. The Originalist is far more entertaining and involving than one would expect, though it may be a bit too Inside the Beltway to be produced much elsewhere.
Still, the Washington audience ate it up and, if I interpret their laughter correctly, most were no more enamored of Scalia than I was.